The Lowest Civilization
The South Sea Islanders who scalded their fingers in Captain Cook’s tea-kettle, and to whom pottery and warm water were luxuries also, were certainly low in the scale of civilization, but they were not nearly so low as the Terra del Fuegans at this moment. Mr. Darwin describes the state of these wretched creatures as the extreme of misery, and as affording him the most curious and interesting spectacle he had ever beheld. “I could not have believed,” says he, “how wide was the difference between savage and civilized men.” Their land, we should remember, is a land of rain, sleet, snow, and storms, unsheltered from the cold of the South Pole, and one thick murky mass of forest. The “climate (where gale succeeds gale, with rain, hail, and sleet) seems blacker than anywhere else. In the Straits of Magellan, looking due south from Port Famine, the distant channels between the mountains appear, from their gloominess, to lead beyond the confines of the world.” In this terrestrial limbo live human beings who are clad, for this inclement temperature, in a single otter-skin, which they lace across their breast by strings, and, according as the wind blows, shift from side to side. He pictures the state of these poor creatures at night, some half-a-dozen of them sleeping together naked on the wet ground coiled up like animals. “Whenever it is low water they must rise to pick shellfish from the rocks; and the women, winter and summer, either dive to collect sea-eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and with a baited hair-line jerk out small fish. If a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale is discovered, they are feasts. Such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi.” Mr. Snow, who brings us our latest reports from the Fuegans, visited them in 1855. At present, however, their condition in the scale of humanity is almost as low as it can be; for though they possess the capacity of kindling a fire by the friction of two sticks (an accomplishment of which, by the way, all savages that we know of are capable), and though they can form canoes by hollowing out logs of wood, they cultivate no plant and domesticate no animal, and have, as we see, no other art of civilized life.—Times journal.