Patagonia Bookshelf

(Note: Text dealing with natives is displayed with a contrasting background colour.)

THE LAND OF FIRE.

One of the most interesting of the travel papers in the magazines is Mr O'Sullivan's account of his visit to Tierra del Fuego in the January Fortnightly. He says :

"Surely on this wide earth there are no people so cruelly circumstanced and so utterly devoid even of the meanest pleasures of existence as these miserable inhabitants of the Land of Fire."

Fortunately there are so few of them, the total number of the Fuegians is said to be about 4000 in all, and if Mr O'Sullivan's account is not exaggerated, there is reason to expect that some day a scientific philanthropist will embark from the mainland and feel himself justified in extinguishing painlessly the lives of the whole of then. Their country, the tip of a continent, severed from the mainland by the sea, is not fit for human habitation. The Fuegians are horrible, ugly, stunted, pot-bellied dwarfs. The men do not exceed 5ft 2in in height, their limbs are short, but their stomachs are abnormally large. Even the children are born pot-bellied. They stoop universally, owing to the habit of crouching over their fires, and the same habit makes them blear-eyed. The struggle for food is very intense, and every now and then, when the food fails, they take the oldest woman of the tribe, suffocate her in the smoke of fires made of green wood, and divide her carcass between her murderers. It is a land of glaciers rather than a land of fire ; but it got its name because the Fuegians never go anywhere without taking fire with them. They build a fire amidships when they go out in their canoes, in which they pass a great part of their time, sitting so much that their legs are dwindling away. Their bodies are becoming sheathed in fat, which does for them the same service as the blubber does the whale. Although they are devoted to fire they wear few clothes. They have a small mantle of otter skin secured across the breast, and only reaching half-way down the back. Even this scanty clothing is monopolised by the men. Mr O'Sullivan says that he has repeatedly seen women going about quite naked, while the wind was blowing over the glacier so as to make the well-clothed Europeans' teeth chatter with cold.

"Once, in Lomas Bay, I beheld a sight as pitiable as it is possible to conceive — a woman, quite nude, paddling a canoe, and endeavoring to protect with her own person, from the snow which was falling in heavy flakes, the naked body of her baby, while her lord and master, wrapped in a skin cloak, sat warming himself over a fire amidships. Amongst the Fuegians, an amongst other savage races, polygamy prevails, and the women are regarded as mere slaves, to labor for their excessively lazy masters. The women have to gather shell-fish, tend the fires, build the dwellings, and paddle the canoes."

The only thing about the Fuegians which seems to be deserving of the slightest attention is their language Our alphabet is inadequate to represent its various sounds. When we learn that it requires twenty more vowels than we use, this is another reason for rejoicing in the prospect of the speedy extermination of the race.