On Mr Pickersgill's landing he was courteously received by several of the natives, who were clothed in guanicoe and seal skins, and had on their arms bracelets, made of silver wire, and wrought not unlike the hilt of a sword, being no doubt the manufacture of some Europeans. They were the same kind of people we had seen in Christmas Sound, and, like them, repeated the word pechera on every occasion. One man spoke much to Mr Pickersgill, pointing first to the ship and then to the bay, as if he wanted her to come in. Mr Pickersgill said the bay was full of whales and seals; and we had observed the same in the strait, especially on the Terra del Fuego side, where the whales, in particular, are exceedingly numerous.[2]
[Footnote 2: "Not less than thirty large whales, and some hundreds of seals, played in the water about us. The whales went chiefly in couples, from whence we supposed this to be the season when the sexes meet. Whenever they spouted up the water, or, as the sailors term it, were seen blowing to windward, the whole ship was infested with a most detestable, rank, and poisonous stench, which went off in the space of two or three minutes. Sometimes these huge animals lay on their backs, and with their long pectoral fins beat the surface of the sea, which always caused a great noise, equal to the explosion of a swivel. This kind of play has doubtless given rise to the mariner's story of a fight between the thrasher and the whale, of which the former is said to leap out of the water in order to fall heavily on the latter. Here we had an opportunity of observing the same exercise many times repeated, and discovered that all the belly and under side of the fins and tail are of a white colour, whereas the rest are black. As we happened to be only sixty yards from one of these animals, we perceived a number of longitudinal furrows, or wrinkles, on its belly, from whence we concluded it was the species by Linnaeus named _balaena boops_. Besides flapping their fins in the water, these unwieldy animals, of forty feet in length, and not less than ten feet in diameter, sometimes fairly leaped into the air, and dropped down again with a heavy fall, which made the water foam all round them. The prodigious quantity of power required to raise such a vast creature out of the water is astonishing; and their peculiar economy cannot but give room to many reflections."--G.F.]