Viewing Such Men, One Can Hardly Make One's
Self Believe That They Are Fellow-Creatures, And Inhabitants
Of The Same World.
It is a common subject of conjecture
what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy:
how much more reasonably the same question may be asked
with respect to these barbarians!
At night, five or six
human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind
and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet
ground coiled up like animals. Whenever it is low water,
winter or summer, night or day, they must rise to pick shell-fish
from the rocks; and the women either dive to collect
sea-eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and with a baited
hair-line without any hook, jerk out little fish. If a seal is
killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale is discovered,
it is a feast; and such miserable food is assisted by a few
tasteless berries and fungi.
They often suffer from famine: I heard Mr. Low, a sealing-master
intimately acquainted with the natives of this
country, give a curious account of the state of a party of
one hundred and fifty natives on the west coast, who were
very thin and in great distress. A succession of gales prevented
the women from getting shell-fish on the rocks, and
they could not go out in their canoes to catch seal. A small
party of these men one morning set out, and the other
Indians explained to him, that they were going a four days'
journey for food: on their return, Low went to meet them,
and he found them excessively tired, each man carrying
a great square piece of putrid whale's-blubber with a hole
in the middle, through which they put their heads, like the
Gauchos do through their ponchos or cloaks. As soon as
the blubber was brought into a wigwam, an old man cut off
thin slices, and muttering over them, broiled them for a
minute, and distributed them to the famished party, who
during this time preserved a profound silence. Mr. Low
believes that whenever a whale is cast on shore, the natives
bury large pieces of it in the sand, as a resource in time of
famine; and a native boy, whom he had on board, once
found a stock thus buried. The different tribes when at
war are cannibals. From the concurrent, but quite independent
evidence of the boy taken by Mr. Low, and of
Jemmy Button, it is certainly true, that when pressed in
winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women
before they kill their dogs: the boy, being asked by Mr.
Low why they did this, answered, "Doggies catch otters,
old women no." This boy described the manner in which
they are killed by being held over smoke and thus choked;
he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts
of their bodies which are considered best to eat.
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