46 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, iv 



York also, a white woman was rescued who had been made 

 prisoner by the blacks from a wreck, and had lived among 

 them for several years. Here, too, Huxley and MacGilli- 

 vray made a trip inland, and were welcomed by a native 

 chief, who saw in the former the returning spirit of his 

 dead brother. 



Throughout the voyage Huxley was busy with his 

 pencil, and many lithographs from his drawings illustrate 

 the account of the voyage afterwards published. As to 

 his scientific work, he was accumulating a large stock of 

 observations, but felt rather sore about the papers which he 

 had already sent home, for no word had reached him as to 

 their fate, not even that they had been received or looked 

 over by Forbes, to whom they had been consigned. As a 

 matter of fact, they had not been neglected, as he was to 

 find out on his return ; but meanwhile the state of affairs 

 was not reassuring to a man whose dearest hopes were 

 bound up in the reception he could win for these and similar 

 researches. Altogether, it was with no little joy that he 

 turned his back on the sweltering heat of Torres Straits, 

 on the great mountains of New Guinea, the Owen Stanley 

 range, which had remained hidden from D'Urville in the 

 Astrolabe to be discovered by the explorers on the Rattle- 

 snake, and the far stretching archipelago of the Louisiades, 

 one tiny island in which still bears the name of Huxley, 

 after the assistant-surgeon of the Rattlesnake. 



A few extracts from letters of the time will give a more 

 vivid idea of what the voyage was like. The first is from 

 a letter to his mother, dated February i, 1849: — 



... I suppose you have wondered at the long intervals of 

 my letters, but my silence has been forced. I wrote from Rock- 

 ingham Bay in May, and from Cape York in October. After 

 leaving the latter place we have had no communication with, any 

 one but the folks at Port Essington, which is a mere military 

 post, without any certain means of communication with Eng- 

 land. We were ten weeks on our passage from Port Essino-ton 

 to Sydney and touched nowhere, so that you may imagine we 

 were pretty well tired of the sea by the time we reached Port 

 Jackson. 



