This account comes to us from as far back as 1619, when the first missionaries visited them,[538] and these traits cannot therefore be attributed to intermixture with Europeans. They are not peculiar in these respects. Similar traits are reported of the Boroas, a tribe in one of the valleys of central Chili;[539] and I have already referred to the red hair of the boys among the Matacos of the Gran Chaco. Perhaps it was not unusual among these nations, as I can in no other way explain the strange idea of the poet Ercilla the Homer of the Araucanian Conquest, that these people were descendants of the Frisians of North Holland![540] The language of the Chonos is said to be quite different from that of the Araucanians. Pöppig believed it to be a distant dialect of the same stock. Some recent travelers assert that they are now extinct, but Dr. C. Martin informs us that the original inhabitants of the Chonos Islands, who were the “Huaihuenes” Indians, were transported in 1765 to the island of Chaulañec, where their posterity still survive.[541] _3. The Patagonians and Fuegians._ The Patagonians call themselves Chonek or Tzoneca, or Inaken (men, people), and by their Pampean neighbors are referred to as Tehuel-Che, southerners. They do not, however, belong to the Aucanian stock, nor do they resemble the Pampeans physically. They are celebrated for their stature, many of them reaching from six to six feet four inches in height, and built in proportion.[542] In color they are a reddish brown, and have aquiline noses and good foreheads. They care little for a sedentary life, and roam the coast as far north as the Rio Negro. They are not without some religious rites, and are accustomed to salute the new moon, and at the beginning of any solemn undertaking to puff the smoke of their pipes to the four cardinal points, just as did the Algonquins and Iroquois.[543] Their language differs wholly from the Araucanian, though it has borrowed many words from it. An interesting fact illustrating its stability in spite of their roving life has been brought out by Ramon Lista. He has compared its present form with the vocabulary of it given by Pigafetta in his voyage in 1520, and shows that in the intervening generations it has undergone scarcely any change.[544] Von Martius believed that a connection between the Patagonian and the Tapuya stocks could be shown, and gives a tabular comparison of the two.[545] I have extended this by means of Ramon Lista’s vocabulary of the former and Dr. Ehrenreich’s corrected forms of the Tapuya, and conclude that the resemblances are illusory, depending on incorrect orthography of the sounds. About the beginning of the last century the tribes known as Poyas (_Pey-yuy_) and Reyes (_Rey-yuy_) were collected at a Mission established on Lake Nahuelhuapi, about south latitude 42°. Hervas reports them as speaking a language radically different from the Araucanian, and probably they should be classed with the Tzonecas.[546]