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Updated: June 20, 2025
In features they strikingly resemble the more northern Indians whom I saw with Rosas, but they have a wilder and more formidable appearance: their faces were much painted with red and black, and one man was ringed and dotted with white like a Fuegian. Captain Fitz Roy offered to take any three of them on board, and all seemed determined to be of the three.
But though in such children the sensations no longer protest, it does not follow that the system escapes injury, any more than it follows that the Fuegian is undamaged by exposure, because he bears with indifference the melting of the falling snow on his naked body.
Nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and the productions of his miserable country. After having been detained six days in Wigwam Cove by very bad weather, we put to sea on the 30th of December. Captain Fitz Roy wished to get westward to land York and Fuegia in their own country.
Like all savages, the Fuegian is improvident more so, even, than some of the brute creation and rarely lays up store for the future, and hence is often in terrible straits, at the very point of starvation.
The Fucus giganteus of Solander. The stem of this remarkable seaweed, though but the thickness of a man's thumb, is often over one hundred and thirty yards in length, perhaps the longest of any known plant. It grows on every rock in Fuegian waters, from low-water mark to a depth of fifty or sixty fathoms, and among the most violent breakers.
Then it is seen that they are human beings after all Fuegian savages, each having the head thrust through a flitch of whale-blubber that falls, poncho-fashion, over the shoulders, draping down nearly to the knees!
DECEMBER 17th, 1832. Having now finished with Patagonia and the Falkland Islands, I will describe our first arrival in Tierra del Fuego. A little after noon we doubled Cape St. Diego, and entered the famous strait of Le Maire. We kept close to the Fuegian shore, but the outline of the rugged, inhospitable Statenland was visible amidst the clouds.
If any present was designed for one canoe, and it fell near another, it was invariably given to the right owner. The Fuegian boy, whom Mr. Low had on board, showed, by going into the most violent passion, that he quite understood the reproach of being called a liar, which in truth he was.
For the authority of a Fuegian chief if such there be is slight at the best, and made nought of on many occasions. Besides, they could not forget that one fearful moment of horror, to be remembered throughout life. Having passed the night in peaceful slumber, they take their places in the boat as soon as there is light enough to steer by.
The "steamer-duck" is a feature almost peculiar to the inland Fuegian waters, and has always been a bird of note among sailors, like the "Cape pigeons" and "Mother Carey's chickens." There is another and smaller species, called the "flying steamer," as it is able to mount into the air. It is called by naturalists Micropterus Patachonica. "There they are at last! Heaven have mercy on us!"
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