Narrative of the surveying voyages of his majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle (vol.1): between the years 1826 and 1836 : describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagles's circumnavigation of the globe

160 PUMA HUMMING-BIRDS WOOD. April 18S8. but the trial might have been more profitable at another season, judging from the number of seals we saw on the rocks off the Port, which live principally upon fish. Muscles, limpets, and sea-eggs abound here, and are good and wholesome of their kind. Birds are few in number, and of the species most common in these regions. No quadruped of any kind was seen ; but the purser told me that he had observed, near the sandy beach, traces of a four-footed animal, resembling those of a tiger : he followed them to a cavern, and thence to the jungle. He also said that he had seen several humming-birds. " With the exception of wild celery and the arbutus berry, I know not of any useful vegetable production that this place affords, unless the ' Winter's-bark tree"* may be mentioned. Some coarse grass, fit perhaps for animals, may be there pro- cured. The only signs of inhabitants were some wigwams on the western point, which seemed to have been long forsaken : in their construction they were precisely similar to those erected by the migratory tribes in the Straits of Magalhaens: and the shells of muscles, limpets, and sea-eggs, within and about them, showed that the former tenants of these hovels drew, like the Magalhaenic tribes, a principal part of their subsistence from shell-fish. " Around the harbour are granite mountains, perfectly bare at their summits and north-western sides, but the lower parts are thickly covered in sheltered places and ravines, partly with trees, and partly with brushwood : among the trees growing here we observed, as usual, two kinds of beech, a tree like the cypress, but of small size, and the Winter's-bark. The under- wood is composed of all the various shrubs we had met with in the Straits of Magalhaens ; and this brushwood is so thickly spread over the lower parts of the shores of the harbour, that it is only by crawling over it that the distance of a few yards from the rocks can be gained ; and being generally of insuffi' cient strength to support a man''s weight, it frequently gives way beneath him, and he is so completely buried, as to make it difficult for him to extricate himself. " Scarcely any of the trees attain a size to render them fit