courteously received by several of
the natives, who were clothed in guanicoe and seal skins, and had on
their arms bracelets, made of silver wire, and wrought not unlike the
hilt of a sword, being no doubt the manufacture of some Europeans. They
were the same kind of people we had seen in Christmas Sound, and, like
them, repeated the word pechera on every occasion. One man spoke much to
Mr Pickersgill, pointing first to the ship and then to the bay, as if he
wanted her to come in. Mr Pickersgill said the bay was full of whales
and seals; and we had observed the same in the strait, especially on the
Terra del Fuego side, where the whales, in particular, are exceedingly
numerous.[2]

[Footnote 2: "Not less than thirty large whales, and some hundreds of
seals, played in the water about us. The whales went chiefly in couples,
from whence we supposed this to be the season when the sexes meet.
Whenever they spouted up the water, or, as the sailors term it, were
seen blowing to windward, the whole ship was infested with a most
detestable, rank, and poisonous stench, which went off in the space of
two or three minutes. Sometimes these huge animals lay on their backs,
and with their long pectoral fins beat the surface of the sea, which
always caused a great noise, equal to the explosion of a swivel. This
kind of play has doubtless given rise to the mariner's story of a fight
between the thrasher and the whale, of which the former is said to leap
out of the water in order to fall heavily on the latter. Here we had an
opportunity of observing the same exercise many times repeated, and
discovered that all the belly and under side of the fins and tail are of
a white colour, whereas the rest are black. As we happened to be only
sixty yards from one of these animals, we perceived a number of
longitudinal furrows, or wrinkles, on its belly, from whence we
concluded it was the species by Linnaeus named _balaena boops_. Besides
flapping their fins in the water, these unwieldy animals, of forty feet
in length, and not less than ten feet in diameter, sometimes fairly
leaped into the air, and dropped down again with a heavy fall, which
made the water foam all round them. The prodigious quantity of power
required to raise such a vast creature out of the water is astonishing;
and their peculiar economy cannot but give room to many
reflections."--G.F.]

As soon as the boat was hoisted in, which, was not till near six
o'clock, we made sail t