being accustomed to danger, not from skill in avoiding it.  Their main source of food is from the sea, which is general most bountiful in those parts of the world where the earth is least so.  Their mode of fishing is singular and ingenious.  At low water, they inclose a large extent of the flat shore with stakes interwoven with boughs of trees, forming a kind of basket-work; which pens or corrales are covered by every flood and left dry by the ebb tide, at which time they generally find abundance of fish.  They likewise employ as food a species of sea-weed, called luche, which they form into a kind of loaves or cakes which are greatly esteemed even by the wealthy inhabitants of Lima.  Seals are more numerous in the archipelagos of Guaitecas and Guayneco, still farther to the south, where they are eaten by the natives, who are said to acquire so rank an odour from the use of this food that it is necessary to keep them to leeward.  Whales sometimes run aground among these islands but are greatly more numerous farther to the south.  They have probably retired from this part of the coast in consequence of being persecuted, as ambergris was formerly found in great abundance on these shores, but is now very rare.

All the islands are very mountainous and craggy, so that only a few vallies among the hills and the flat grounds near the shore are susceptible of cultivation.  On this scanty cultivable ground, there are forty-one settlements, called pueblas or townships, in the isla grande, or large island of Chiloe.  There is one road indeed across the mountains, but the whole interior of the island is uninhabited.  The isle of Quinchau has six pueblas; Lemui and Llaicha each four, Calbuco three, all the other inhabited islands only one each, and there are three on the continent, in all eighty-one.  In these pueblas or townships, the houses are much scattered, each being placed upon its attached property.  The church stands near the beach, having a few huts erected in the neighbourhood, which serve to accommodate the parishioners when they come to church on Sundays or any festival to attend mass.  In the whole archipelago there are but four places where the houses are placed so near together as to assume the appearance of a town or village.  These are the city of Castro as it is called, Chacao, Calbuco, and the port of San Carlos.  This last is the largest and most flourishing.  In 1774 it contained sixty houses, with 462 inhabitants.  In 1791, it had increased to two hundred houses and eleven hundred inhabitants; but its prosperity arose on the ruin of Chacao, which was the only port in the whole archipelago till 1768.  The harbour of Chacao is rendered very dangerous by reason of many rocks and shoals, and is much exposed to winds from the north and north-east; on which account Don Carlos de Berenger, when governor, recommended that a town should be built at Gacui del Ingles, or English harbour, which was accordingly ordered by