What
The "Bad Wild Men" Were, Has Always Appeared To Me Most
Mysterious:
From what York said, when we found the place
like the form of a hare, where a single man
Had slept the
night before, I should have thought that they were thieves
who had been driven from their tribes; but other obscure
speeches made me doubt this; I have sometimes imagined
that the most probable explanation was that they were
insane.
The different tribes have no government or chief; yet
each is surrounded by other hostile tribes, speaking different
dialects, and separated from each other only by a deserted
border or neutral territory: the cause of their warfare appears
to be the means of subsistence. Their country is a
broken mass of wild rocks, lofty hills, and useless forests:
and these are viewed through mists and endless storms. The
habitable land is reduced to the stones on the beach; in
search of food they are compelled unceasingly to wander
from spot to spot, and so steep is the coast, that they can
only move about in their wretched canoes. They cannot
know the feeling of having a home, and still less that of
domestic affection; for the husband is to the wife a brutal
master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrid deed ever
perpetrated, than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron,
who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding dying
infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the
stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs!
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