138 SOUTH AGAIN : NEW ZEALAND AND THE CAPE 
ornament than comfort. The men do Httle or nothing except 
a seal or such Hke comes in their way, whilst the women are 
employed collecting limpets and mussels, which are eaten 
raw or half-cooked and form the largest proportion of their 
food ; to do this the poor things have to go every day often 
up to their middles in water, — snow faUing heavily at times, 
and with a young child slung to their backs. Their manners 
are little above the brutes, filthy and squalid to a degree, 
and they will eat anything but salt meat that we offered 
them. They are all great thieves and excellent imitators 
both of language and action, though they have never im- 
proved themselves permanently from their intercourse with 
Europeans. Their language is a most horrible, guttm'al 
concatenation of sounds and unlike the New Zealanders, 
whose tongue is harmonious and beautiful to the ear, — 
they, as I said before, imitate a sentence of any language 
readily, whilst few of the N. Zealanders can pronounce 
-J of the EngHsh words. 
Our walks were of course confined to the Island, and 
there was not much of general interest to attract attention. 
Beginning a walk was the worst part, as one must tear 
through the dense wood and force a passage up the hills, 
— ^the ridges are generally bare of wood and easily walked 
over to some distance, but whenever the valley comes wood 
is sure to be packed into it. Of Mosses, Lichens, &c., there 
are a profusion, and the collecting them kept me constantly 
at work. Above the wood, however, the rocks are very 
bare, from the frequent heavy snow storms, which often 
overtook us on the hills and made the walk back very un- 
pleasant, the wind clogging it on our persons. Nothing, 
however, but personal weakness, or too sudden a change, 
would have made Sir J. Banks feel their effects so much, 
for we thought nothing of it, and were it necessary, even 
without a fire, a shelter might be made, which with the 
warmth of two or three persons close together, might have 
defied death by cold. 
Writing to Mrs. Boott, November 28, 1842, he insists further 
on this point. 
This part of the world (Fuegia) has always borne the 
character of being eminently rigorous and inhospitable, — 
