Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/242

232 to cook fish caught in the night, hut then it must not be taken to their houses, only to the cooking-house; and second, a light is allowed at night in a house where there happens to he a confinement." It is likely that Wilkes may have misinterpreted the surprise of the natives at seeing cigars smoked, and fire produced from the flint and steel, as well as the eating of raw fish and the absence of signs of cooking in the dwellings. If the similar story of the islanders of Los Jardines really came from an eye-witness, it may have arisen in much the same way. In Kotzebue's time, the people of the Radack group (which may be perhaps the very Jardines in question) were just as much astonished at the smith's forge, though fire was a wellknown thing to them.

The circumstances of Magalhaens' discovery of the Ladrones or Marian Islands, and the Philippines, in 1521, are known to us from the narrative of his companion Antonio Pigafetta, who describes the manners and customs of the natives, but without a hint that fire was anything strange to them. This preposterous addition must be sought in later authors. In 1652, Horn, not content with quoting Galvano's stories of the Canaries and Los Jardines, adds the natives of the Philippines as a race destitute of fire. But the story of the Ladrone Islanders is even more remarkable than this.

The arts of these people are described by Pigafetta with some detail. He mentions the slight clothing of bark worn by the women, the mats and baskets, the wooden houses, the canoes with outriggers, and he notices that the natives had no weapons but lances pointed with fish bones, and had no notion of what arrows were. They stole everything they could lay hands on, and at last Magalhaens went on shore with forty men, burnt forty or fifty of their houses, and killed seven of the people. A hundred and eighty years afterwards the Jesuit Father Le Gobien brought out a new feature in the story. "What is most