Peron Found Plenty To
Interest Him In The Fauna Of This Strange Land, And Above All In The
Aboriginals With Whom He Was Able To Come In Contact.
His chapters on the
three months' stay in southern and eastern Tasmania are full of pleasant
passages, for the naturalist had a pretty talent for descriptive writing,
was pleased with the novel things he saw, and communicated his pleasure
to his pages.
Though he lacked the large grasp, the fertile
suggestiveness, of great scientific travellers like Humboldt, Darwin, and
Alfred Russel Wallace, he was curious, well informed, industrious, and
sympathetic; and as he was the first trained anthropologist to enter into
personal relations with the Tasmanian blacks - a race now become extinct
under the shrivelling touch of European civilisation - his writings
concerning them have great value, quite apart from the pleasure with
which they may be read. A couple of pages describing Peron's first
meeting with the aboriginals when out looking for water, and the
amazement of the savages on encountering the whites - an incident given
with delightful humour, and at the same time showing close and careful
observation - will be likely to be welcomed by the reader.
"In pursuing our route we came to a little cove, at the bottom of which
appeared a pretty valley, which seemed to offer the prospect of finding
sweet water. That consideration decided M. H. Freycinet to land there. We
had scarcely put foot upon the shore, when two natives made their
appearance upon the peak of a neighbouring hill. In response to the signs
of friendship that we made to them, one of them leapt, rather than
climbed, from the height of the rock, and was in the midst of us in the
twinkling of an eye. He was a young man of from twenty-two to twenty-four
years of age, of generally strong build, having no other physical fault
than the extreme slenderness of legs and arms that is characteristic of
his race. His face had nothing ferocious or forbidding about its
expression; his eyes were lively and intelligent, and his manner
expressed at once good feeling and surprise. M. Freycinet having embraced
him, I did the same; but from the air of indifference with which he
received this evidence of our interest, it was easy to perceive that this
kind of reception had no signification for him. What appeared to affect
him more, was the whiteness of our skin. Wishing to assure himself,
doubtless, if our bodies were the same colour all over, he lifted up
successively our waistcoats and our shirts; and his astonishment
manifested itself in loud cries of surprise, and above all in an
extremely rapid stamping of the feet.
"But our boat appeared to interest him even more than our persons; and
after he had examined us for some minutes, he sprang into it. There,
without troubling himself at all about the sailors whom he found in it,
he appeared as if absorbed in his examination of the novelty.
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