SOME QUEER FOLK.

Wairoa Bell, Volume V, Issue 192, 7 April 1893, Page 6

SOME QUEER FOLK.

Mr O’Sullivan, who has recently been on ft visit to Tierra del Fuogo, the land of fire, says : ‘ The country, the tip of the continent, severed from the main land by the sea is not fit for human habitation. It is a land of glaciers rather than a land of fire; but it got its name because the Fuegans never go anywhere without taking fire with them. They build a fire amidships when they go out in their canoes, in which they pass a great part of their time. Mr O’Sullivan says that he has repeatedly seen women go about quite naked, while the wind was blowing over the glaciers so as to make the well-clothed Europeans’ teeth chatter with cold. Once in Lomas Bay he beheld, he says, a sight as pitiable as it is possible to conceive—a woman, quite nude, paddling a canoe, and endeavouring to protect with her own person from the enow, which was falling in heavy flakes, the nuked body of her baby, while her lord and master, wrapped in a skin cloak, sat warming himaelf over the fire amidships. Amongst the Fuegans, as amongst other savage races, polygamy prevails, and the women are regarded as mere slaves to labour for their excessively lazy masters, Women have to gather shellfish, tend to fires, build the dwellings, and paddle the canoes.