GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 



fisherman impales his finny trophies. This ingenious raft, in a yet more primitive 

 form, composed of two or three poles only, upon which the native sits and paddles 

 with his hands, is mentioned in Capt. King's " Survey of the Coasts of Australia," 

 Vol. 1, p. 43, 1826. At page 38 of the same work the author refers to the yet 

 simpler boat consisting of a single log, one such craft with its seated navigator 

 being figured on the title page of the work. 



Captain King's figure and descriptions relate to observations made by him in 

 the vicinity of Dampier's Archipelago, several degrees south of King's Sound, where 

 the more complex, and what might be designated "fully-rigged" raft is employed. 

 As shown in characteristic photographs of this more advanced type of naval architecture, 

 reproduced in Plate I., Fig. 1, taken by the author at Cygnet Bay, King's Sound, 

 the occupant usually occupies an erect position, paddling the craft with his fishing 

 spear. In this particular instance, a rude paddle, fashioned out of a split rail, . is 

 substituted for the customary spear. Seen from a little distance, and more especially 

 when, as often happens, there are no supplementary vertical attachments and the 

 raft is more or less completely submerged, the natives, propelling these frail structures, 

 present to a remarkable extent the appearance that they are walking on the surface 

 of the water, and when thus migrating in social companies from one to another of 

 the King's Sound Island groups, constitute a singular spectacle. The precise form 

 and construction of this King's Sound raft is clearly shown in Fig. 2 of the same 

 plate, which represents the native who propelled the raft in the preceding figure, 

 occupied with a comrade in transporting it to the water. 



The foregoing photographic reproductions, together with those selected for a 

 head-piece to this Chapter, constitute characteristic illustrations of the general physique 

 and ordinary apparel and armature of the natives in the immediate neighbourhood of 

 King's Sound. In the first relationship, the figure and build of many of these dusky 

 warriors, excepting for the slenderness of their limbs, is of a shapely, almost classic 

 mould, and in marked contrast to that of the aboriginal tribes further south. This 

 very perceptible fact is, in a large measure, due to the circumstance that the natives 

 here represented have suffered little or no deterioration from contact with the colonizing 

 Europeans and are as yet strangers to those diseases and vices, without the counter- 

 balancing virtues, which to their slow, but certain destruction, are so readily acquired 

 wherever the white man and the primaeval savage are brought into intimate intercourse. 

 As a matter of fact, several of the individuals deployed in open line upon the 



sand ridge, in the heading to this Chapter, had only within the previous day or 

 B 



