JUNGLE ADVENTURER

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 102, 24 January 1933, Page 7

JUNGLE ADVENTURER

In Heavy Matted Growth

ON TIERRA DEL FUEGO (Reuter.—Special to “Dominion.”) Heavy, sub-Antarctic rain burst from the sky aud fell with a sodden splash in. the bogs below. It transformed Tierra del Fuego, (hat island at the southern tip of South America, into a fantastic under-sea land where giant growths seemed to shoot up from the sea bottom into , endless water above,.

It dripped through the matted, glutinous jungle and fell on a lone white man. He was Colonel Wellington Furlong,'who was riding a strange coun-try-bred horse whose hooves, for adaptation to the soft ground, had grown to an amazing length and curled up at the ends like old-fashioned skates. Before him were the big wolf-like men of the Ona tribe, who carried axes aud cut a way through the" lavish undergrowth.

They were a people without chiefs, gods, tobacco, intoxicating drinks, or auy word in their language for "pray.” Colonel Furlong, an American explorer, described to the Royal Geographical Society in London the stormy regions of Cape Horn and his expedition, the first scientific one, into the interior of the island of Tierra dei Fuego—an island that belongs to 1 both Chile and Argentina and is two-thirds the size of Scotland., He told of the men that Darwin at one time considered the lowest order of humanity. These people of the Yahgan tribe, the southernmost inhabitants of the world,- have successfully fought the terrors of the jungle—but at the first touch with white men they have died like flies. Sixty years ago, when white men first found them, there were 2500 in the tribe. Now there are 50.

The Yahgans have a vocabulary of 40,000 words, yet they have no numeral above 3.