Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/64

 One bean-soup day a canoe came alongside, full of natives, and I handed them my tin pan half full of soup, through one of the port-holes. It was so hot that they dipped it in the sea, and it was then so salt they could  not eat it. They poured it overboard and kept the pan, and no signs or threats would induce them to return it;  so I was a quarter out, besides my regular beans. If any one on board had advanced the idea that some day they would become civilized, he would have been thrown  overboard for a Jonah. It was here that Father Coyne first began his missionary labors. Finding his efforts useless, he went to the Sandwich Islands. The Terra del Fuegians seem but little above the brute creation, and  are the lowest in the scale of humanity. Well might we ask ourselves, "Who are these so haggard, and so wild  in their attire, who look not like the inhabitants of earth,  and still dwell on it?"

Having made preparations for an Antarctic cruise, we weighed anchor on the 25th and put out to sea. For several days it had been blowing furiously, with a high  sea running. This was a good time to measure the height

DIAGRAM OF WAVE.

of the wave, for seldom will the sea be observed to run higher than off Cape Horn, where two oceans meet. To get the height of the wave, we sighted the schooner while  in the trough of the sea, and cut the mast to the horizon