Dean Funes, the historian of Buenos Ayres, writing on this subject, cannot suppress his indignation at the apathy of his countrymen, though he attempts, at the same time, to find an excuse for it in an observation of Humboldt's with a simplicity quite worth quoting. He says--"Who doubts that the Spaniards of South America might have carried on these fisheries at infinitely less cost than the English and North Americans, when their own coasts of Patagonia and round Cape Horn are known to abound in whales, even in the harbours, by all accounts? But it was not the cost, neither was it the want of hands, which caused this important object to remain neglected. It was the natural indolence of the people and indifference of the Government. How, indeed, was it possible," he adds, "to find men to follow the hard profession of the sea, amongst a people who prefer a hunch of beef to all the comforts of life? 'The hope of gain,' Baron Humboldt observes, 'is too weak a stimulus in a climate where bounteous nature offers man a thousand ways of obtaining a comfortable subsistence without the necessity of leaving his native home to go to fight with the monsters of the deep.'" The Dean was a wise old man, who knew the character of his countrymen thoroughly. Nor are his observations confined to the Spaniards of South America. Speaking of the ill-success of a company in Spain to which the king, in 1790, had conceded extraordinary privileges, as an encouragement to carry on these fisheries, he says--"Its continual losses, up to the period of its final failure, lead us to the conclusion, that projects depending upon intelligence, economy, and activity, are not made for a people notoriously behindhand in information, and habitually extravagant and lazy." Whilst Don Antonio was occupied at San Julian's, his brother, Don Francisco, was with no less zeal laying the foundations of the settlement upon the Rio Negro, the only one, as it appeared, of these new establishments which was destined to be maintained. It certainly possessed many advantages over the more southern parts of the coast which had been explored. It was not, like San Julian's, a thousand miles distant from the governing authorities. Succours in case of need could be sent to it by land as well as by sea from Buenos Ayres; and this consideration alone obviated the strongest objections made by the poorer classes to settling themselves permanently on other parts of the coast. The river itself was not only a safeguard against the Indians, but fertilized the adjoining lands, and insured to the colonists a never-failing supply of fresh water, the want of which had caused perhaps the greatest part of their sufferings at the other places. There were also other motives which operated more powerfully than these in determining the Spanish Government to maintain a settlement upon the River Negro.