Though excessively rainy, the climate is not unhealthy; but no people on earth ever had more cause to believe that the ground was cursed to bring forth thorns and thistles, and that man is condemned to eat bread with the sweat of his brow, as there are none who labour so hard and procure so little.  They are so poor as to have no iron, or so very little that a family which has an axe guards it like a treasure.  Their substitute for a plough has been already described as made of two crooked branches of a tree, with a sharp point at one end and a round ball at the other, which they force into the ground by means of their breast, protected by a sheeps skin during this rude operation of tillage.  Laborious as this mode must be even in a free soil, it is rendered still more so in Chiloe by the myrtle roots which everywhere infest their cultivated land.  The little corn they raise can never be left to ripen in the field, on account of the heavy and frequent rains.  It must be cut before it ripens, and its sheaves hung up to dry in the sun-shine, if the sun happens then to shine; and otherwise it has to be dried within doors[117].  Bread is consequently a luxury which is reserved for great occasions; and the want of which is supplied by means of excellent potatoes, far better than any that are produced in Peru or Chili.

[Footnote 117:  In many parts of Norway, the peasants have to win, or dry, their corn sheaves spitted on wooden spars set upon stakes in the open air; and a nobleman in the western Scots Highlands, has shades in which to dry his corn and hay, where the sheaves are hung upon pegs like herrings in a curing house.  Yet bad as is the climate of Chiloe, Iceland and Kamtshatka can grow no corn at all.—­E.]

Apples and strawberries are their only fruit, both of which are good and plentiful.  The woods produce a plant called quilineja, much resembling the esparto or broom of Spain, from which they manufacture their cables; and they make smaller ropes from several leafless parasitical plants which twine round the larger trees like vines or bindwood.  A species of wild cane or reed serves to roof their houses, and its leaves serve as hay or fodder for the few horses which are kept in this inhospitable country.  In that part of the continent which belongs to this province, there is a tree, called alerse by the Spaniards and lahual by the Indians, which supplies the principal part of their exports, as from 50,000 to 60,000 planks of its wood are sent yearly to Lima.  It grows to a large size, and has so even and regular a grain as to admit of being cleft by wedges into boards or planks of any desired thickness, even smoother than could be done by a saw.  Neither Agueros nor Falkner had ever seen the tree; but the latter supposed it of the fir tribe from description, and supposes it might thrive in England if its seeds could be brought over, as the country in which it grows is as cold as Britain, and it is reckoned the most