They often suffer from famine: I heard Mr. Low, a sealing-master
intimately acquainted with the natives of this country, give a curious
account of the state of a party of one hundred and fifty natives on the
west coast, who were very thin and in great distress. A succession of
gales prevented the women from getting shell-fish on the rocks, and
they could not go out in their canoes to catch seal. A small party of
these men one morning set out, and the other Indians explained to him,
that they were going a four days' journey for food: on their return,
Low went to meet them, and he found them excessively tired, each man
carrying a great square piece of putrid whale's-blubber with a hole in
the middle, through which they put their heads, like the Gauchos do
through their ponchos or cloaks. As soon as the blubber was brought
into a wigwam, an old man cut off thin slices, and muttering over them,
broiled them for a minute, and distributed them to the famished party,
who during this time preserved a profound silence. Mr. Low believes
that whenever a whale is cast on shore, the natives bury large pieces
of it in the sand, as a resource in time of famine; and a native boy,
whom he had on board, once found a stock thus buried. The different
tribes when at war are cannibals. From the concurrent, but quite
independent evidence of the boy taken by Mr. Low, and of Jemmy Button,
it is certainly true, that when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill
and devour their old women before they kill their dogs: the boy, being
asked by Mr. Low why they did this, answered, "Doggies catch otters,
old women no." This boy described the manner in which they are killed
by being held over smoke and thus choked; he imitated their screams as
a joke, and described the parts of their bodies which are considered
best to eat. Horrid as such a death by the hands of their friends and
relatives must be, the fears of the old women, when hunger begins to
press, are more painful to think of; we are told that they then often
run away into the mountains, but that they are pursued by the men and
brought back to the slaughter-house at their own firesides!
Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any
distinct belief in a future life. They sometimes bury their dead in
caves, and sometimes in the mountain forests; we do not know what
ceremonies they perform. Jemmy Button would not eat land-birds, because
"eat dead men": they are unwilling even to mention their dead friends.
We have no reason to believe that they perform any sort of religious
worship; though perhaps the muttering of the old man before he
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