Narrative of the surveying voyages of his majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle (vol.2): between the years 1826 and 1836 : describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagles's circumnavigation of the globe

158 METHODS OF BUUIAL. their ordinary habitations; and they place, all around, the bodies of their dead horses, raised upon their feet and supported with sticks. " The Tehuelhet, or more southern Patagonians, differ in some respects from the other Indians. After having dried the bones of their dead, they carry them to a great distance from their habitations, into the desert by the sea-coast ; and after placing them in their proper form, and adorning them in the manner before described, they set them in order above ground, under a hut or tent erected for that purpose, with the skeletons of their dead horses placed around them. " In the expedition of the year 1746, some Spanish soldiers, with one of the missionaries, travelling about thirty leagues within land, to the west of Port San Julian, found one of these Indian sepulchres, containing three skeletons, and having as many dead horses propped up around it." In the expeditions of the Adventure and Beagle, between 1826 and 1834, a few burial places of another kind were exa- mined. These were piles of stones, upon the summits of the highest hills, on the eastern sea-coast. Some had been thrown down and ransacked ; probably by the crews of sealing vessels: others there was no opportunity of visiting : only one untouched pile was found : and that one was examined by Lieutenant Wickham. It was on a height, near Cape Dos Bahias, in latitude forty-five south. Only bones were found, in a much decayed state, under a pile of stones about four feet high ; and from the remains of the bones Mr. Bynoe ascertained that they had belonged to a woman of the ordinary stature. A pile of stones on a neighbouring height had been pulled down by the crew of a sealing vessel : under it were fragments of decayed bones, which were thought too much injured by time and weather to be worth removing; indeed they crumbled to the touch. Under similar heaps of stones the ' gigantic skeletons' which some voyagers have described, were said to have been found. Doubtless these several methods of disposing of the dead are not those of one horde only, but of various tribes. But I prefer mentioning all that is yet known of the subject, as