To The Student Of The History Of Exploration, However, Port Lincoln Is Interesting Even Beyond The Measure Of Its Beauty;

For there, in 1841, Sir John Franklin, then governor of Tasmania, erected at his own cost a monument to the

Honour of Flinders, his old commander, from whom he imbibed that passion for exploration which was in due time to place his own name imperishably amongst the glorious company of great English seamen.

Peron himself experienced the cross-grained temper of the commander during the visit of the ships to Sharks Bay. This was the scene of Dampier's descent upon the Western Australian coast in 1699, in the rickety little Roebuck. It was here that his men dined off sharks' flesh, and "took care that no waste should be made of it, but thought it, as things stood, good entertainment."* The bay received from Dampier, on account of the feast, the name it has ever since borne. (* Dampier's men were unprejudiced in matters of gastronomy, but their taste in fish was not to their discredit. Shark's flesh, especially when young, is, there is reason to believe, excellent eating. During some weeks in a recent summer, when what we may term "orthodox" fish was scarce, a fashionable Australian sea-side hotel was regularly supplied with young shark - "gummy" - by a fisherman, for whose veracity the author can vouch. Neither proprietor, chef, nor guests knew what it was, and all were well fed and happy.)

Some of the French sailors who had been ashore returned in a wild state of alarm on account of giants whom they professed to have seen - men of extraordinary strength and stature, they reported, with long black beards, armed with enormous spears and shields, who ran at a furious pace, brandishing their weapons and giving utterance to fearful yells. "However extravagant these assertions might appear," said the incredulous naturalist, "it was necessary to collect precise information on the subject." The scientific Ulysses regarded the reputed Cyclops with a calculating scepticism. Had Polyphemus been at hand, Peron would have politely requested him to permit himself to be weighed and measured, and would have written an admirable monograph on his solitary optic.

There were, he considered, some reasons for thinking that a race of men of heroic proportions inhabited this western part of the continent. The Dutch captain, Vlaming, in 1697, had reported finding gigantic human footprints upon the banks of the Swan River, near where the city of Perth now stands; and two of Baudin's officers, whose names were not Munchausen and Sindbad but Heirisson and Moreau, declared that they also had observed the same phenomena at the same place. Peron set down these stories to the exaggerative distortion of lovers of the marvellous, "of whom we counted some amongst us." But when the sailors came scampering back to the ship with the tale that they had actually seen the giants and been pursued by them, the naturalist began to think that there was probably some ground for the belief.

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