MEMOIR 
45 
life, and little need be added here to the story unfolded by 
the Journals themselves. It might seem rash that a man of 
sixty-nine should brave the rigours of the Horn; but, as 
Novalis says, character is destiny, and Spencer had the 
Viking temper that despises a ‘straw-death’. Apparently it 
had been a dream of his early years to follow in the footsteps 
of the Naturalist of the ‘Beagle’; and Darwin’s Fuegians, 
standing derelict at one of the dead ends of the globe, were 
in a sufficiently like situation to the Australian natives in 
their secluded retreat to offer analogies that, as a loyal up¬ 
holder of the Comparative Method, Spencer must all his life 
have longed to examine at first hand. He left England in 
February, having signed on as one of the crew of a small 
cargo-boat that was to bring him as near as possible to his 
objective. A little later he writes from Magallanes—I repro¬ 
duce the passage from an article by Mr. Frank Rinder in 
the Glasgow Herald — 
‘Every one seems to think that I have come too late to get hold of any 
Indians, most of whom have disappeared. But I am going to have 
a hard try, and on Monday next start off in a little schooner for a place 
called Ushuaia, on the Beagle Channel, right at the south of Tierra 
del Fuego. Winter is coming on, and once I get there, where I believe 
there are two or three old Indians left, I may be marooned for two or 
three months. Anyhow I shall be amongst the snow mountains, and 
shall have plenty to look at if it ever stops raining and snowing. . . . 
London and other places seem a long way off.’ 
The end came on July 14, of a sudden heart attack, in a 
small snow-bound hut on Hoste Island. Hither he had re¬ 
paired from more comfortable quarters at Rio Douglas on 
Navarin Island in order to hunt up an old \ aghan woman 
who was reported to have some English. With her help he 
hoped to tackle a reputed ‘witch’ at Rio Douglas; thus to 
the last pursuing his well-tried method of acquiring the 
tribal lore directly from the lips of its repository, the Oknirra- 
