after coasting round as far as Valdivia, he found that the Spaniards were too strong and returned to England. Reference has already been made to the famous voyage of Anson. In his adventurous circumnavigation he spent but a comparatively short time on the Patagonian coast, and he gives little information about the natives, but his account of the country exactly tallies with that of other explorers. It was described as being entirely treeless. "But though this country be so destitute of wood, it abounds with pasture. For the land appears in general to me, made up of downs of a light dry gravelly soil, and produces great quantities of long coarse grass, which grows in tufts interspersed with large barren spots of gravel between them. This grass, in many places, feeds immense herds of cattle; for the Spaniards at Buenos Ayres, having brought over a few black cattle from Europe at their first settlement, they have thriven prodigiously by the plenty of herbage which they have found here, and now increased to that degree, and are extended so far into the country, that they are not considered as private property; but many thousands at a time are slaughtered every year by the hunters, only for their hides and tallow."[127] In 1764 Byron visited the coast of Patagonia and made friends with the inhabitants, whose vast size greatly impressed him. His scribe calls the chief a "frightful Colossus," and thus describes the surprise which the giants created[128]: "Mr. Cumming came up with the tobacco, and I could not but smile at the astonishment which I saw expressed in his countenance upon perceiving himself, though six feet two inches high, become at once a pigmy among giants; for these people may indeed more properly be called giants than tall men; of the few among us who are six feet high, scarcely any are broad and muscular in proportion to their stature, but look rather like men of the common bulk, run up accidentally to an unusual height; and a man who should measure only six feet two inches, and equally exceed a stout well-set man of the common stature in breadth and muscle, would strike us rather as being of gigantic race, than as an individual accidentally anomalous; our sensations therefore, upon seeing five hundred people, the shortest of whom were at least four inches taller, and bulky in proportion, may be easily imagined." This is a point upon which testimony varies. Sir John Narborough's mate, Mr. Wood, declared that he saw no native who was taller than himself.