Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/172

162 advanced or declined very considerably when Cook visited the country?

The other statement lies in the citing of a remark of Darwin's about the Fuegians, which runs thus: —"Their skill in some respects may be compared to the instinct of animals; for it is not improved by experience: the canoe, their most ingenious work, poor as it is, has remained the same, for the last two hundred and fifty years." But it must be noticed, that neither is the wretched hand-to-mouth life of the Fuegians favourable to progress, nor can a bark canoe ten feet long, holding four or five grown persons, beside children, dogs, implements, and weapons, and in which a fire can be kept burning on a hearth in the rough sea of Tierra del Fuego, be without tolerable sea-going qualities. As to workmanship, the modern Fuegian bark canoes are much above the very rude ones of the Australian coast, though probably below the highly finished ones of the Algonquins of North America. Sir Francis Drake speaks of those he saw in the sixteenth century, as "most artificiall," and of "most fine proportion," and later seamen's remarks, though they do not enable us to say that the modern ones are better or worse made than they used to be, leave no doubt as to their always having been high-class craft of their kind, so long as we know anything about them. But the most remarkable thing in the whole matter, is the fact that the Fuegians should have had canoes at all, while coast-tribes across the straits made shift with rafts. This was of course a fact familiar to Mr. Darwin, and in the very next sentence after that quoted above, he actually goes on to ascribe to the Fuegian race the invention of their art of boat-building. "Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have they come? What could have tempted, or what change compelled a tribe of men to leave the fine regions of the north, to travel down the Cordillera or backbone of America, to invent and build canoes, and then to enter on one of the most inhospitable countries within the limits of the