Fuegia

The outline of South America may be compared to a paper kite; and, like a kite, there is attached to its apex a jointed tail, of which Fuegia and the South Shetlands are the only fragments seen above water. In other words, the mighty wall of the Andes is broken through by the sea, and the inundated valley forms the Straifc of Magellan; and, after a feeble re-appearance in the Fuegian archipelago, the cordillera is lost in the ocean.

As seen on a school-room map, this Tierra del Fuego is a dim islet, deriving its chief importance from its famous headland, Cape Horn. On a nearer inspection, however, this nebulous patch resolves into a cluster of islands, — one very large, with a crowd of smaller attendants to the west and south; and, far from the mainland, stands the kerbstone of the New World, — Cape Horn with his surf-beaten pyramid.

Though only the fag-end of America — a mere caudal vertebra of the Andes — if we had it in

Europe, Tierra del Fuego would be a country of some consideration. Its second-rate islands are larger than the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Man, and the surface of its mainland is equal to the Low lands of Scotland. Its climate, however, renders it one of the most dreary and inhospitable regions on the face of the globe. In a latitude corresponding to Edinburgh, the sky seldom clears, and the rainy squalls of the summer are the only relief from the sleet and snow of the winter. A calm sunshine is a great rarity. If we imagined the mountains of the Hebrides rising to a height of six or seven thousand feet, with glaciers coming down to the sea, and a warm tide constantly flowing at their base; and if, moreover, we could bring the north polar ice into as low a latitude as the Antarctic ice descends — our own Western Isles would be the counterpart of Fuegia. The warm vapor of the ocean would then be perpetually condensing on the frost of the hills, and clouds and showers would blot out from Mull and Skye their occasional days of clear weather. Even then, however, our Western Isles would be halcyon nests compared with this stormy archipelago. Nothing save a rampart of mountains, a mile or two in height, extending from the Cape Verdes to Campbelton, damming up the winds, and forcing them to rush through a few funnels on the Sound of Jura, could give our Northern Hemisphere a fac-simile of a Fuegian williwaw. This ferocious wind is capable of overturning almost any obstacle; and, like grass in a swathe, not only branches but whole trees will sometimes be found piled up at the mouth of a gully where its rough sickle has passed.

Notwithstanding its boisterous summers and its perpetual storms, the average temperature of Fuegia is as high as Quebec or Montreal; and perhaps we have in London days as cold as any which occur in Hoste or Navarin Islands. The range between the extremes of heat and cold is small, and this comparative equability, along with the abundant moisture, is favorable to certain forms of vegetable life. In most districts of Britain the Fuchsia is a conservatory plant; but in Devonshire and in the Isle of Bute it grows luxuriantly in the open air, and in winter wants no shelter. Fuegia is one of its native lands, and there, along with its equally delicate companion, Veronica decussata, it becomes a tree with a trunk half a foot in diameter. The potato is indigenous on the adjacent mainland, although we do not know that it has been found in these islands, where celery, a species of currant, the berry of an arbutus, and a fungus, are the only esculents. The characteristic vegetation is two sorts of beech-tree. One of these (Fagus betuloides) is an evergreen; the other (Fagus Antarctica) is deciduous. The latter species is more hardy, and can scale the mountain sides to a higher platform than its glossy-green companion; so that in winter a zone of leafless trees is seen at a lofty elevation, succeeding to the verdure of the forest, Except where discouraged by the thin granitic soil, these beeches occur every where; and, except when stunted by the winds, they attain a goodly size; and one trunk is mentioned seven feet in diameter. But any tourist who expects a repetition of our own Buckinghamshire in the forests of Fuegia will be wofully disappointed. Our woodland scenery owes all its charm to its park -like variety, where clumps of many kinds occur; and where, from the sylvan labyrinth, you easily emerge on smooth pastures and smoking hamlets. But it is a very different thing to land from a boat direct in the thicket, and after struggling to the top of a Mount Tarn or a Mount Buckland, to look down on an expanse of silent greenery, only broken by shipless arms of the sea; and any one who has spent many weeks among the pines of the Black Forest or the Arbor Vita3 swamps of the Mississippi, will understand what an incubus on the spirits a monotonous vegetation becomes. In Tierra del Fuego the only varie gating incident is “the bursting of the leaf and flower-buds of the deciduous beech from their resinous gummy scales; when a delightfully fragrant odour pervades the woods;” * and the explorer may be occasionally rewarded by coming on a Winter’s Bark or some less usual tree.

* Hooker’s Flora Antarctica, p. 348.

Land animals are few* Even insects are rare; and such flies and beetles as occur, are inconspicuous and uninteresting creatures. Like Ireland, Fuegia is exempt from serpents, and even frogs have been expelled by its St Patrick. “The gloomy woods are inhabited by few birds; occasionally the plaintive notes of a tyrant fly-catcher may be heard; and more rarely the loud strange cry of a black woodpecker. A little duskycoloured wren hops in a skulking manner among the entangled mass of the fallen and decaying trunks. But the creeper (Oxyurus Tupinieri) is the commonest bird of the country. Throughout the beech forests, high up and low down, in the most gloomy, wet, and impenetrable ravines, it may be met with. This little bird no doubt appears more numerous than it really is, from its habit of following, with seeming curiosity, any person who enters these silent woods; continually uttering its harsh twitter, it flutters from tree to tree, within a few feet of the intruder’s face. In the more open parts, three or four species of finches, &c., and several hawks and owls, occur.” * Most curious of all is the existence of a humming bird (Mellisuga Kingii) on«the shores of this wintry realm; and which, even amidst the showers of snow, has been observed flitting about in search of the insects, equally hardy, that lurk in the blossoms of

* Darwin’s Voyage round the World, chap. xi. — one of the most charming and instructive journals ever published.

the Veronica and Fuchsia. The most important quadruped is the guanaco or llama, that useful compromise between the sheep and the camel, so characteristic of the South American mountains. It is found on Navarin Island, and on the main island, or, Tierra del Fuego proper. In summer shy and vigilant, the want of pasture drives it in the winter down to the valleys, where its slender legs slump into the snow, and make it an easy capture. Two species of fox occur, and these, with a few small rodents of the mouse and bat families, complete the inland zoology of this inhospitable region.

But the waters largely compensate for the lifelessness of the land. With its colossal sea-weeds, Fuegia might well be the paradise of fishes. To say nothing of many beautiful varieties which are dredged up from the rocks or washed ashore by the tides, these coasts are the head-quarters of the Lessonia and Macrocystis, the two giants of the ocean Flora. The former is an arborescent sea weed, with a trunk of concentric layers so timberlike, that Dr Hooker mentions a captain who employed a boat’s crew two days collecting the incombustible stems for fuel. The Macrocystis, instead of a trunk as thick as an ordinary cherry-tree, is moored to the rock by a tough but slender cable, which, rising to the surface, breaks into leaves, and then streams along a luxuriant tangle for several hundred feet. The Victoria water-lily requires a tank and hot-house for its special accommodation; but a prime Macrocystis would need a tank a hundred feet deep, and as long as Westminster Abbey. In general, however, its cable is only a few fathoms long, and as its streamers wave over every inundated rock, it is at once the buoy and the breakwater of these dangerous channels. The “moored kelp” warns the mariner of a sunken rock, and if in stormy weather his little vessel can only get to leeward of its floating acres, he may set the wildest sea at defiance.* In this way has Providence not only supplied the means of safety in the very midst of danger, but, by the same arrangement, he has prepared a source of subsistence for this land of famine. These gigantic sea weeds are the home and the pasture -field of countless mollusks and crustaceans. The leaves are crowded with shell-fish. The stems are so encrusted with corallines, as to be of a white colour. And “on shaking the great entangled roots, a pile of small fish, shells, cuttle-fish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, star-fish, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms, all fall out together.” f To such a well-stored larder it is not wonderful that shoals of fishes should resort, forsaking for it brighter but less bountiful waters; and in the wake of these fishes come armies of seals and

* For beautiful figures and many interesting particulars regarding these and the other Algse of Fuegia, the reader is referred to Dr Hooker’s magnificent work, the “Flora Antarctica.”

t Darwin.

clouds of sea-fowl. Among the latter are shags, petrels, ducks, red-bills, sea-pigeons, geese, steamerclucks, and penguins. Of these many species have their breeding-places on the cliffs of the desolate islands. With their black coats and yellow waist coats, the substantial and yeoman-like penguins take up their abode on the grassy flats; and in the month of January, that is to say, at their mid-summer, a braying quack may constantly be heard from morning to evening, inviting to dainty morsels their fat and solemn fledglings, — a dinner-bell which is never silent in the populous “penguinery.” JSTot improbably with sinister designs on the infant penguins, the sea-lion is fond of a walk among the tufts of tussac, and, along with the sea-otter and the porpoise, this tyrant of the Southern Ocean is the great terror of the larger fishes. Predaceous as are the habits of so many of these creatures, it is interesting to contemplate the skill and profusion with which a sea so unpromising is peopled. All are ultimately dependent on a seemingly worthless sea-weed. That fucus cherishes the worms and polypes, the crabs and corallines, which feed the fishes; and these, in their turn, sustain legions of cormorants and penguins, of seals and porpoises, as well as the less dexterous human fishers on the shore; so that Mr Darwin is probably correct in his surmise, that the felling of a tropical forest would not be so fatal to animal existence as the destruction of this gigantic “kelp.” “0 Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good.”

The inhabitants of the Fuegian Archipelago have sometimes been called Pesherais, from a word which some of them are constantly using. In tfie classification of the Human Families they have been named “the Ichthyophagi,” or Fish-eaters of Tierra del Fuego.* Of course they are South American Indians, and they belong to the Araucanian division of the great Andian race. They are not only the nearest neighbours, but are undoubtedly of the closest kindred, to the Patagonian inhabitants of the adjacent continent; but they are intellectually and physically inferior to these stately specimens of mankind. Many of them have trunks proportionate to a six-foot stature: but their indolent squatting existence has dwarfed their extremities. Their colour is something between dark copper and brown. Captain FitzRoy compares it to “very old mahogany.” f But owing to the wood-smoke with which they are

* See Prichard’s Natural History of Man, Second Edition, p. 450; and Prichard’s History of Mankind, vol. v.

t Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, vol. ii. p. 137.

saturated, the oil and blubber with which they are smeared, and the earths, white, red, and black, with which they are painted, it is difficult to ascertain exactly a Fuegian complexion. Like their bodies, their heads are large. These heads are oblate spheroids, with long jet hair hanging straight down on either side, but cropped away over the brow. The forehead is very low, but, like the face, it is broad. The black eyes are oval, drawn towards the temples, and have usually an expression of simple good-humour. The nose is not handsome: flat and thick, with large nostrils, it is concave in profile; and it is well supported by a mouth of great width, which closes in a straight line, and opens in an ample ellipse. The beaux of the antipodes do not fancy long beards, and what little hair shews itself on the chin or the eye-brows is usually extracted with tweezers made of two mussel- shells. As already mentioned, from constantly crouching in their huts and canoes, their legs are crooked and stunted; but still, they are by no means deficient in agility, and, in trials of strength, some of them were more than a match for an English sailor.*

Their clothing is scanty. By the same providential arrangement which coats the whale in frozen seas with oil, the Fuegian is fortified

* For a minute description see a paper by Mr Wilson in the appendix to the 2d vol. of the “Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle.” Portraits of Fuegians may be seen there, and in the folio atlas of plates to Cook’s Last Voyage.

FUEGIA. Ill

against his inclement sky by an abundant development of the adipose tissue; and though his sea-otter or guanaco cloak is sometimes scanty, in admiring his hardihood, we must not forget that inside his skin he wears a thick under-clothing of non-conducting fat. Hence these islanders some times exhibit feats, the recital of which is enough to make us shiver. In the coldest mid-winter they may be seen diving for sea-eggs; and it was on a dark night, when the thermometer was at 28°, that some of them swam from the shore, and, from its moorings alongside, cut away the ship’s boat of the Adelaide.

Nothing can be more wretched than their habitations. When a family lands from its canoe, the first care of the women, who are the only workers, is to build a house. For this purpose they cut down twenty or thirty trees, and arranging them in a circle, with the narrow ends resting on each other, like the sheaves in a shock of corn, they tie them together at the top, putting a little thatch or a few skins on the windward side, and leaving one entrance toward the sea and another toward the forest. There they kindle a fire, and there they huddle together night and day in stormy weather; and there they tarry till they have devoured all the food of the district, and it is time to seek an other settlement.

They are not without a taste for ornament, nor are they entirely devoid of ingenuity. They usually adorn their hair with a fillet of sinewy threads, elaborately and not inelegantly plaited; and on great occasions this fillet is pranked out with birds’ feathers or bits of red cloth obtained from the sailors. They are fond of bracelets and necklaces. These they make from shells or the small bones of animals; or, failing beads and buttons, from little chips of crockery. When shells are used, they are drilled so neatly that the process must require both skill and care. The Spanish voyager Cordova speaks with admiration of a sort of jar or basket which he found amongst them, entirely formed of bark, and with the bottom so accurately sewed in, that it could carry water without leaking.* But, crazy as they are, their canoes are perhaps a still more wonderful specimen of needle-work. These also are composed of the bark of trees. The main bulk may be the bark of one single beech; but in order to complete it, a great many patches and a large amount of stitch ing are requisite. With grass for oakum, and clay for pitch, and with thongs instead of nails, the builder soon finishes a boat which, after its own fashion, is a triumph of naval architecture. As long as it can carry paddlers as well as pumpers, it is considered sea- worthy; but as soon as it requires all hands to bail it, they think it time to abandon it, and a new one is built or stolen.

Although their comforts are so few, they are

* Cordova’s Voyage to the Straits of Magellan.

well provided with offensive weapons. They have spears, and bows and arrows, and slings which they use with such precision as nearly to equal in effect an ordinary musket. Besides, many of them are furnished with the Patagonian bolas — a chain-shot of formidable character. It consists of two round stones, covered with leather, and fastened to the two ends of a string about eight feet long. One stone is held in the hand whilst the other is whirled round the head till it has acquired sufficient velocity; and then both are hurled at the object. Should it strike the legs of an ostrich or guanaco, it instantly twists tightly around them and holds the creature in fetters till the huntsman comes up.

Yet, with all his weapons, it is a scanty subsistence which the Fuegian secures. The sea around him is teeming with food, but he has neither net nor angle; and it is only when he is lucky enough to spear a rock-salmon, or when he can get a sufficiency of a little simpleton fish which allows itself to be spirited out of the water by a baited but bookless line, that this Ichthyophagous Indian deserves his name. But if he is not a clever fisherman, he is a cunning bird-catcher. In his fowling excursions he is attended by a knowing little dog, half fox, half terrier; and, if it is a moonlit night, the sportsman may be descried on the beach near the roosts of the sea-birds, and waiting till his four-footed accomplice returns with a dead duck in his jaws, which he instantly deposits at his master’s feet, and then scampers off in search of another. This well-trained retriever, though an assiduous barker at home, has the sense to carry on this sport in the deepest silence; and the sleeping spoon-bill is jerked from his perch without ever dreaming of danger. They have also a plan of their own for catching petrels. Having first secured one with a string to his leg, they lower him into any crevice where petrels are known to breed. The old birds are indignant at the stranger’s intrusion, and fall on him with such blind fury that they allow themselves to be drawn out of the hole, when they are instantly transferred to the fowler’s basket. But birds are not always to be procured, and even sea-eggs are not attainable in stormy weather. For a great period of every year these poor islanders are entirely dependent on mussels, limpets, and similar shell-fish; and, every time that the tide retires, the whole population is spread over the shore, rummaging for this sorry subsistence. Low-water is the meal-time of the dogs, as well as their masters; and it is amusing to notice the adroitness with which these sharp-witted creatures detach the unwary limpet from his moorings. As soon as this pasture is eaten up, these nomads of the beach launch their canoes, and paddle off in quest of new supplies. Sometimes they are so lucky as to discover a stranded whale or a dead sea-lion; and, however “high” such venison may be, it is always welcome, and imparts a sudden plumpness to the fortunate finders. Of course, such prizes are rare; and, like most savages, the life of a Fuegian is an alternation of occasional feasts with long intervals of famine. In the desperation of hunger it is fearful to think of the expedients to which he is occasionally driven. There can be no doubt, however, that these Indians are cannibals, and that when other subsistence fails, “they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs.” Those who fall in battle are in like manner devoured by the victors.

The intellectual capacity of these savages is, probably, small; but their powers of mimicry are amazing. A long English sentence deliberately uttered they will repeat with the utmost precision; and grotesque attitudes or grimaces many of them can reproduce with a comic gravity worthy of Liston or Matthews. Shameless greed and systematic thieving are universal vices. As soon as a canoe comes within hail of a ship, the well-known cry, “Yammer schooner” (Give me), is set up, and at everything given them they clutch and stow it into their basket without one look or utterance of gratitude. Nothing escapes their little glancing predaceous eyes; and, but for the utmost vigilance, nothing would escape their active fingers. Once and again they proved too cunning for the watch of a man-of-war, and succeeded in abstracting valuable boats belonging to the surveying expedition of the British Admiralty; and when a native gentleman had been p’aying a visit on board, before he returned to his barge, it was thought no breach of etiquette to examine his cloak for tea-kettles and other trinkets. As Mungo Park experienced in Africa, traces of gentleness and tenderness may be found among the women; but the mercies of the men are cruel. On the slightest provocation, the roguish simper can be exchanged for a scowl of fiendish ferocity; and when exasperated, or brought to bay, they fight with more fury than wild beasts. The men are surly tyrants; the women are laborious slaves. The softening influence of the domestic charities is scarcely known; and an incident related by Commodore Byron shews the fearful moroseness to which depraved humanity sometimes subsides.*

Of the religious belief of these savages little is known. Their divinity appears to be a great black man, who frequents the dim trackless woods

* “Our cacique and his wife had gone off in their canoe, when she dived for sea-eggs; but, not meeting with great success, they returned a good deal out of humour. A little boy of theirs, about three years old, whom they appeared to be doatingly fond of, watching for his father and mother’s return, ran into the surf to meet them: the father handed a basket of sea-eggs to the child, which being too heavy for him to carry, he let it fall; upon which the father jumped out of the canoe, and catching the boy up in his arms, dashed him with the utmost violence against the stones. The poor little creature lay motionless and bleeding, and in that condition was taken up by the mother; but died soon after. She appeared inconsolable for some time; but the brute, his father, shewed little concern about it.” — Narrative of the Hon. John Byron, 1768, page of the interior; who is very malignant and powerful; and who knows everything that is done or spoken. They are very superstitious. They have great faith in dreams. They will not for any consideration allow a stranger to cut off a lock of their hair; and they think it extremely unlucky to kill the young sea-birds. “Oh, Mr Bynoe, very bad to shoot little duck — come wind — come rain — blow — very much blow,” was the solemn remonstrance of one of them to a gentleman who had killed some very young ducklings as zoological specimens. They never speak of the dead. When a boy, hereafter to be mentioned, was questioned about his dead father, he was very unhappy, and refused to answer: “No good talk; my country never talk of dead man.”

Embruted as are these savages, they are not sunk beyond recovery. Through the mercy of our God, there is at this moment on the earth a power well able to cure the worst woes of Fuegia. True, they are not an inviting race; but they are none the less a fac-simile of our British forefathers. Sir James Mackintosh was born in a northern latitude exactly corresponding to Cape Horn in the south, and his ancestors lived in a hut without window or chimney, with a fire in the centre of the floor, with a pile of mussel-shells at the threshold, and with smoked fish and deer’s flesh hanging from the rafters; and when they wished to cross an arm of the sea, they waited for a day of calm weather which would not endanger their wicker coracle. The ancestors of Davy and Newton lived in forests almost as sombre as the beech-woods of Narborough’s Land. They wore cloaks of bull or badger’s skin, like the otter or guanaco robes of Navarin Island; and they anointed their persons, and pipeclayed their faces, in a truly Fuegian fashion. The ancestors of Wesley and Wilberforce worshipped a devil, and were glad to propitiate his wrath by flinging their infants into the fire. But Christianity has wrought for Britain the best of miracles. If it has not brightened the skies and converted these islands into new Hesperides; it has shed a balm into the moral atmosphere, and it has transformed the population. It has made us, as a people, honest, hard-working, and humane. It has made a future existence a familiar idea, and it has made the Most High a not unfamiliar presence. It has given us tastes, aspirations, and affections, which a nation of atheists or pagans can never know. And whilst all this has been effected with only a small per-centage of practical religionists in our population, and, we may add, with only a small per-centage of Bible Christianity in our practical religion, it has done enough to teach us that the only thing needed to make any land “a delight some land,” is the gospel in ascendancy.

In the year 1831 there were three Fuegians in England. They were brought to this country by Captain FitzRoy, R.N., and the hope was entertained that they might learn our language, and acquire the habits of civilisation, so as to introduce them, on their return, among their own compatriots. One of them was a full-grown man, York Minster, a gruff and surly fellow, who could never be induced to learn anything. Jemmy Button was a good-natured boy of no great capacity; and Fuegia Basket was a rather pleasing and very intelligent girl. Considerable interest was felt in these visitors from the antipodes, and even the king and queen expressed a desire to see them. They were accordingly taken to the palace, and were received with all the gentle kindness so characteristic of Queen Adelaide. Captain FitzRoy consigned them to the care of a schoolmaster at Walthamstow; and after a few months, accompanied by Mr Matthews, a missionary, he carried them back to their native isles. It may be questioned whether their residence in England was sufficiently long; and it is likely that, had a selection been practicable, more promising pupils might have been found than York Minster and Jemmy Button. At all events, the experiment was very unproductive. On landing in their own country, York Minster married Fuegia Basket, and being a powerful, resolute man, it is pos sible that he may have been able to preserve from his rapacious neighbours the implements and manufactured articles with which he was freely supplied. But poor Jemmy was soon victimised. His goods were stolen, and his little garden was trodden down; justifying his verdict, “My people very bad; no sabe nothing; my people very great fool.” And as the violence of the people forced Mr Matthews to return on board, there is too much reason to fear that, left to themselves, his scholars would soon relapse into the surrounding barbarism.