Here I made the acquaintance of the master of a sealing schooner, an intelligent man named John Stole—a Norwegian by birth—from whom we obtained much interesting information about the natives of Tierra del Fuego. At the time of our visit he was laid up with a bad leg, on account of which he had had to relinquish the command of his vessel the Rescue for this season's cruise. His favourite sealing ground was among the rocky islets about the S.W. parts of Tierra del Fuego; but in the course of his wanderings he had visited most of the islets and coasts extending from the mouth of the river Plate on the eastern coast to the Gulf of Peñas in the westward. During his last cruise, he had the misfortune to be attacked by a party of natives in the Beagle Channel, at a place not far from the missionary station of Ushuwia. He gave us a most graphic description of the affair. His schooner had been lying quietly at anchor in a rather desolate part of the channel, having at the time only five men, including himself, on board, when a canoe containing ten Fuegians—eight men and two women—came alongside. Not suspecting any treachery, he went below to have his tea, leaving one man on the forecastle to look after the vessel. Presently hearing a scuffle on deck, he put up his head through the small hatch of his cabin, when a native standing above made a blow at him with a canoe paddle. The blow failed to take effect, as he had just time to duck his head under the boom of the mainsail which was secured amidships over the hatchway. He now retreated to his cabin, snatched up a revolver which was lying ready loaded, and returning to the hatch quietly shot the native who was waiting to strike another blow at his head. Two others now followed up the attack, armed with heavy stones, but they were shot in quick succession, one of them falling overboard and capsizing the canoe. As Stole now raised himself through the hatch, a fourth native attacked him from behind, but he turned half round, rested the barrel of the revolver on his left arm, and fired into his assailant's eye, the entire charge passing through the wretched creature's head. In the meantime the crew were successful in expelling the four natives who had attacked the fore part of the vessel, and all of whom were killed. The two women in the boat had been passing up stones as ammunition for their male companions, and when the canoe capsized one of them was drowned. When the fight was over, the deck presented a ghastly sight, being sloppy all over with blood in which were lying the bodies of the dead and dying savages, as well as quantities of stones which before the attack began had been passed up from the canoe to be expended in storming the hold of the vessel. Of the ten natives, eight men had been killed, and one woman drowned, the surviving woman being taken prisoner. The sealers now got under way, and proceeded to the mission of Ushuwia, where they reported the matter to Mr. Bridges, the manager of the station. He investigated the case, and on finding that the account given by the sealers was corroborated by the evidence of the surviving woman, exonerated the former of any misconduct in the energetic measures which they had taken to defend their lives, and to defeat the object of the natives, which of course was to obtain the possession of the schooner.
The first of the small sealing fleet to arrive at Sandy Point this season was the Felis, of Stanley, a small rakish schooner, commanded by an Irishman named Buckley. He had a cargo of 500 sealskins, which he sold to a German dealer on shore, at the rate of 30s. a skin, this being considered a good price for Sandy Point, and generally only given for the first arrivals in port; cargoes arriving late in the season not realizing more than 25s. a skin. In the present state of the home market, furs being in request, these skins, on being landed in England, whither they are conveyed by the mail-steamers, are bought by the furriers for about £4 apiece; so that the dealers at Sandy Point make a large profit by their share in the trade. Sealers fitting out at Sandy Point also usually get their stores and provisions on credit, and at an exorbitant valuation, from the same dealer to whom they subsequently sell their skins. The produce of the skins, moreover, as they are sold to the dealers at Sandy Point, is divided into three equal lots, of which one is divided among the crew, while the remaining two go to the owner, out of which he has to pay for the provisions and stores consumed on the cruise. It is calculated that the outlay on the stores swallows up about one-third of the entire sum, so that eventually about one-third of the value of the skins remains as the profit of the owner. In a very good season, the master and owner of a sealing schooner of thirty tons will make a clear profit of as much as £2,000, while each man of the crew (usually twelve in number) would get a share amounting to £80, on which to spend the blank eleven months of the off-season in idleness and debauchery.
The Magellan sealing season extends over the months of December and January. In or about the last week of November, the fur seal (Arctocephalus falklandicus) and the sea lion (Otaria jubata) "haul up" on the rocks of the outer coasts, and bring forth their young. The breeding places, or "rookeries," which they usually select, are small, low-lying, rocky islets, which are exposed to the swell of the great ocean, and over which, in heavy weather, the sea makes a more or less clean sweep. Situated as these rocks are, it is often a very difficult and dangerous matter to effect a landing, so that, to make sure of it, a sealing master usually arranges his cruise so that he may reach the vicinity of the rookery about a month before the breeding time. He then takes advantage of the first fine day to land a party of men on the rock with fuel, camping arrangements, and a large supply of provisions. The latter is essential, for it may be two or three months after the season is over before he can get a favourable day for embarking the men and the stock of skins. Cases have occurred where men have been weather-bound on the rocks for months, and reduced to the brink of starvation, although making use of seal-flesh and shell-fish as long as they could get them. The different sealing captains are, of course, very careful to conceal from each other the position of the "rookeries" of which they know; and they have got so much into the habit of deceiving each other in this respect, that it may be laid down as a safe rule, that if a sealing master says he has landed his men on some rocks to the northward, it is more than probable that the real locality is somewhere in a southerly direction. After the camping parties have been established at the "rookeries," the sealing vessel with the crew, now reduced to a very small number, is employed for the next month or two in cruising in search of new hunting-grounds. In this pursuit they sometimes wander for hundreds of miles from the place where the men have been landed, traversing unsurveyed channels and islets, trusting confidently that at night time they can always find some sheltered place where they can either anchor close in shore, or, if the water be too deep, as it generally is, make fast to a tree. When cruising in this way, they kill numbers of the Magellan sea-otter (Lutra felina), an animal which they include in their line of business, although not at all to the same extent as the fur seal. The fur of the otter when dressed is of great beauty; but as it is not now in fashion in Europe, it commands a very small price in the market, the salted skins, on delivery in England, only realizing about 2s. apiece. When the long brown hairs which form the animal's apparent coat have been removed, the underlying fur is seen to be of a beautiful golden-yellow colour. The otters are obtained by sealers in a great measure by bartering with native canoes (the Fuegians catching them with dogs), and also by shooting them, as they swim through the kelp close to the beach. Both the otter and sealskin are salted dry,—that is to say, each skin is spread out flat, salt is sprinkled plentifully over the inside, and the skin is then rolled up with the hair outside, and tied up into a round bundle. The old fur seals are killed just as they are met with, and without any regard to the preservation of the stock. The sealers commonly call the females "claphatches," and the males "wigs;" the skin of the former is much the more valuable of the two. The sea lions (another species of seal) are seldom meddled with; but occasionally a sealer, in default of the regular article, will kill them for the sake of the oil, and take some of the hides, for which there is a certain demand for making "machine belting."
Buckley, the master of the Felis, told us that he had observed that in the case of the fur seal there was an interval of only one or two weeks between the date of parturition and that of coupling, and that, in the case of the "hair seal," coupling took place almost immediately after the young were brought forth. If this be true, the period of gestation cannot be less than eleven months.
Buckley presented the captain with a young fur seal—a male, six weeks old—which had been caught on the rocks, and nursed carefully by one of his crew, an Italian seaman, who had been "bottle-feeding" it with milk, and had taught it to answer to the call of a whistle. It trotted about our decks in a most lively manner, its hind feet, when trotting or walking, being turned forwards and outwards in the manner peculiar to seals of its genus. On whistling to it, it uttered a strange cry—half wail, half bark—and came to the call like a dog. When taken up in the arms and petted like a child, it lay quite still, closed its eyes and seemed to go off into a gentle sleep. It, unfortunately, died on the following day—perhaps through fretting for its Italian nurse—and its body then came into my hands as a zoological specimen.
Dr. Fenton, whose acquaintance we had made on our first visit just a year previously, was still residing at Sandy Point as medical officer of the settlement, and, with great good nature, put his house and horses at our disposal. He told me of an experiment he had been trying on the flying powers of a condor, which had been caught alive. He perforated the quills of the wing and tail feathers, so as to allow the ingress and egress of air, and on then throwing the bird up in the air found that it could neither fly nor soar. The inference is that the bird derives its buoyancy in a great measure from the formation of a vacuum in the quills of these feathers, and consequently, on air being admitted, the flapping of the wings, unaided by the buoyancy derived from the rarefied air, was insufficient either to raise or support the bird's weight. If this theory be correct, it is probable that the mechanism by which this vacuum is produced is actuated by the wing muscles, which thus discharge a two-fold office.
From the 13th of January to the 25th of March, after leaving Sandy Point, we proceeded to the western part of Magellan Straits, where we were for about nine weeks, occupied in making additions to the old surveys, principally in the narrow and tortuous part of the Strait which is called the "Crooked Reach." The scenery here is remarkably fine, and on a dry clear day—an event, however, of rare occurrence—one can fully realize the truth of old Pigafetta's remark, that "there is not in the world a more beautiful country, or better strait, than this one."
We made several stays, each of a day's duration, at Tilly Bay, a small land-locked anchorage on the north shore of Santa Ines Island, and immediately opposite to the mouth of the Jerome Channel, which leads into the Otway Water. At the head of the bay a stretch of open moorland, dotted here and there with clumps of cedar trees, led by a gentle ascent to a sort of upland plateau, formed of moss-covered undulating land with sheets of still water occupying the hollows. Not a trace of a bird was to be seen, and I was never more struck with the extreme paucity of animal life in the interior of these islands than when standing on the shore of one of these desolate lakes in Santa Ines Island.
We frequently noticed, in the deep spongy moss over which we walked, the nests of a Trap-door Spider. They appeared externally as round apertures in the surface of the moss, about an inch and a half in diameter, which were covered over with a closely woven disc of web. On removing the cover from one of them, and clearing away the surrounding moss, I found that the burrow descended vertically for a distance of about eight inches, and was lined throughout with a silky network of spider web, so that the entire web structure, i.e., the tube and lid combined, resembled in general shape some of the commoner forms of Aspergillum. At the bottom of the hole lay a great spider, embracing with its legs a spherical cocoon, three-eighths of an inch in diameter, which it seemed resolved on defending to the last extremity. I examined other nests with similar results.
While we were at Tilly Bay, a small party of Fuegians came in and took up their quarters in an old camping place close to the ship. They were a comparatively friendly lot, and had no hesitation about coming on board, especially about our meal hours, which they very soon got to understand. The party consisted of one adult man, a boy aged about seventeen, a woman about nineteen, with four small children, and two or three dogs of the usual kind. The canoe was made of planks, and was of the same build as those which we had seen about the Trinidad Channel. Lying in the bottom of the canoe were the putrid remains of two seals, a sea lion, and a fur-seal, whose heads I obtained. We got on such intimate terms with this family, that little by little we induced them to show us all their properties, even to the much-cherished materials for producing fire. These were kept in a wooden box somewhat of the shape of a small band-box, and made of Winter's bark sewn together roughly with strips of hide. The tinder, which seemed to consist of dried moss, was stowed away carefully in little bags formed of dried seal's intestines tied up at the ends.