Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/769

Rh not to like the so-called giants, they were so thoroughly good-humored and unsuspecting; they asked us to come again. They seem to like to have Europeans to live with them; and old Maria, an important woman in the tribe, once begged Mr. Low to leave any one of his sailors with them. They spend the greater part of the year here; but in summer they hunt along the foot of the Cordillera; sometimes they travel as far as the Rio Negro, seven hundred and fifty miles to the north. They are well stocked with horses, each man having, according to Mr. Low, six or seven, and all the



women, and even children, their one own horse. In the time of Sarmiento (1580) these Indians had bows and arrows, now long since disused; they then also possessed some horses. This is a very curious fact, showing the extraordinarily rapid multiplication of horses in South America. The horse was first landed at Buenos Ayres in 1537, and the colony being then for a time deserted, the horse ran wild; in 1580, only forty-three years afterward, we hear of them at the Strait of Magellan! Mr. Low informs me that a neighboring tribe of foot-Indians is now changing into horse-Indians; the tribe at Gregory Bay giving them their worn-out horses, and sending in winter a few of their best skilled men to hunt for them.

June 1st. We anchored in the fine bay of Port Famine. It was now the beginning of winter, and I never saw a more cheerless prospect; the dusky woods, piebald with snow, could be only seen indistinctly through a drizzling, hazy atmosphere. We were, however, lucky in getting two fine days. On one of these, Mount Sarmiento, a distant mountain six thousand eight hundred feet high, presented a very notable spectacle. I was frequently surprised, in the scenery of Tierra del Fuego, at the little apparent elevation of mountains really lofty. I suspect it is owing to a cause which would not at first be imagined, namely, that the