52 SPENCER'S JOURNAL 
to the Captain, and had a most pleasant voyage, spending most of the 
time in the vain attempt to master a little of the Spanish tongue, the 
prevalent one in these parts. 
We called nowhere, in fact saw neither sun or land, as it was, you 
may remember, rather a cold winter, until we went in to Cape St. 
Vincent to signal; and then on, slantwise across the Atlantic and past 
Fernando Noronha, a wonderfully picturesque little tropic island that 
you may have seen, till we saw the Brazil coast in the distance, and 
finally called in at Deseado, a god-forsaken out-of-the-way little settle¬ 
ment on the southern Argentine coast. 
While the steamer was loading frozen mutton, which in England 
you probably buy and appreciate under the designation of ‘Best 
Canterbury’, there was a chance of working over an old kitchen 
midden of the Teuelche (or Tehuelche) Indians of what was once 
known as Patagonia, a name now discarded. During recent years the 
municipal authorities have selected the same site for the general town¬ 
ship for refuse, which makes rather a mix-up of old and new. However, 
there were yet, though the ‘middens’ had already been often searched 
over by an enthusiast who lives here, a few things to be found, and they 
yielded three little arrow-heads, two scrapers, and lots of rough chipped 
flints. The same enthusiast kindly presented me with a few more 
arrow-heads. I did not like to take many when he showed me his things 
in an old cigar box, and regret deeply that my natural diffidence pre¬ 
vented me from taking more, as I easily could have done, because the 
stewards aboard took some afterwards. Mine (fig. 2) vary in size from 
1 to 5> the latter being a specially good one of a size, so the people here 
say, that was used only by ‘chiefs’. No. 6 puzzles me. I have about 
a dozen of these given to me at a port further south, Santa Cruz. They 
are all made of a very dark, almost black stone, and roughly chipped. 
It is quite evident that they are not simply unfinished ones, and as yet 
I cannot find out exactly what they are. They were given to me as 
unfinished arrow-heads that had been thrown away, but I doubt if this 
be true, and were found on the surface of the ground. However, I am 
only at the beginning of my work, and am just groping my way along. 
There seem to be two types of throwing-stones (boleras, fig. 3). The 
first (1) is about double the size of the sketch, quite spherical, with a 
shallow groove round the equator. For their lassos with which to catch 
guanacos (I saw plenty of these on the pampas behind Santa Cruz) 
