o use, boys! The gig's
got a hole in its bottom, and is going down. Look!"

They do look, and they see that the boat is doomed. Only for an instant
are their eyes upon it, before it is seen no more, having "bilged" and
gone under, leaving but bubbles to mark the place of its disappearance.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

A CHANGE OF QUARTERS DETERMINED ON.

No greater calamity than the loss of their boat could have overtaken the
castaways, save losing life itself. It has made them castaways in the
fullest sense of the word, as much as if left boatless on a desert isle
in mid-ocean. Their situation is desperate, indeed, though for a time
they scarce realise it. How can they, in so lovely a spot, teeming with
animal life, and Nature, as it were, smiling around them? But the old
sealer knows all that will soon be changed, experience reminding him
that the brief bright summer will ere long be succeeded by dark dreary
winter, with rain, sleet, and snow almost continuously. Then no food
will be procurable, and to stay where they are would be to starve.
Captain Gancy also recalls the attempts at colonising Tierra del Fuego,
notably that made by Sarmiento at Port Famine in the Magellan Straits,
where his whole colony, men, women, and children--nearly three hundred
souls--miserably perished by starvation; and where, too, the lamented
missionary, Gardner, with all his companions, succumbed to a similar
fate. [Note 1.] The Captain remembers reading, too, that these
colonists had at the start ample store of provisions, with arms and
ammunition to defend themselves, and renew their stores. If _they_
could not maintain life in Tierra del Fuego, what chance is there for a
party of castaways, without weapons, and otherwise unfitted for
prolonged sojourn in a savage land? Even the natives, supplied with
perfect implements for fishery and the chase, and skilled in their use,
have often a hard, and at times an unsuccessful struggle for existence.
Darwin thus speaks of it:

"The inhabitants, living chiefly upon shell-fish, are obliged constantly
to change their place of residence, but return at intervals to the same
spot.--At night five or six of them, unprotected from the wind and rain
of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground, coiled up like
animals. Whenever it is low-water, they must rise to pick shell-fish
from the rocks, and the women, winter and summer, either dive to collect
sea-eggs, or sit patiently in their