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

AITENDIX. 109 Chiloe, that he once was visited by some of these people, who were four varas, or about nine or ten feet high ; they came in company with some Chiloe Indians,* with whom they were friends, and who probably found them in some of their excursions." " Those whose height is so extraordinary as to occasion a great disbeUef of the accounts of voyagers, are indisputably an existent people ; they have been seen by Magellan, and six others, in the sixteenth century, and by two, if not three, in the present." Thomas Pennant. Copy of a Paper transmitted from Admiral Byron to Mr. Pennant, through the hands of the Right Reverend John Egerton, late Bishop of Durham, after he had perused the manuscript of the foregoing account. " The people I saw upon the coast of Patagonia were not the same that were seen the second voyage. One or two of the officers that sailed with me, and afterwards with Captain Wallis, declared to me that they had not a single thing I had distributed amongst those I saw. " M. Bougainville remarks, that his officers landed amongst the Indians I had seen, as they had many English knives among them, which were, as he pretends, undoubtedly given by me. Now it happened that I never gave a single knife to any of those Indians, nor did I even carry one ashore with me. " I had often heard from the Spaniards that there were two or three different nations of very tall people, the largest of which in- habit those immense plains at the back of the Andes : the others, somewhere near the river Gallegos. I take it to be the former that I saw, and for this reason : — returning from Port Famine, where I had been to wood and water, I saw those people's fires a long way to the westward of where I had left them, and a great way inland, so, as the winter was approaching, they were certainly returning to a better climate. I remarked that they had not one single thing amongst them that shewed they ever had any commerce Avith Euro- peans. They were certainly of a most amazing size : so much were * Frezier's Voyage, p. 86.