382 PRINCIPAL SIR W. TURNER ON 



Webber, artist to the expedition, of a man, and of a woman with the head shaved, 

 illustrated Cook's description. 



The island was visited in 1788 by Captain Bligh, who saw a few natives, moderate 

 in stature, and with the skin a dull black and marked with scars. In 1792, and again in 

 1793, Admiral d'Entrecasteaux stayed some time on the coast. In 1798 the wide 

 strait which separates Tasmania from Australia was discovered by the naval surgeon 

 George Bass, and he and Captain Flinders surveyed the coasts in that and the years 

 immediately following.* They met a man and two women at the mouth of the Derwent 

 whose hair, either close-cropped or naturally short, did not, they said, appear to be woolly. 

 Their skin was marked with cicatrices, and the face was blackened. Colonel Collins in his 

 account of New South Wales t includes in it, extracted apparently from Bass's Journal, 

 a chapter on Tasmania in which is a similar description of the natives ; but in a footnote 

 he stated that hair undoubtedly woolly had been cut from the head of a native seen by 

 Mr Raven at Adventure Bay. In 1802 Captain Baudin spent some time on the island. 

 In 1803 Tasmania was added to the British Empire, and in the following year a convict 

 establishment was settled at Hobart. 



D'Entrecasteaux was accompanied by the naturalist La Billardiere, who described \ 

 the natives as tall and muscular, with curled hair and long beards ; he also figured two 

 men, a boy, and a woman carrying a child on her head, as well as groups pursuing their 

 avocations. The woolly, frizzled hair and the general aspect of the features were 

 depicted. The skin, he said, was not a very deep black, but the colour was deepened 

 by rubbing it with charcoal, and it was marked with cicatrices. 



M. Peron, the naturalist on Captain Baudin's ship, enjoyed good opportunities of 

 observing the external characters, muscular power, habits and manners of the natives. 

 The women greased the skin with the fat of seals and daubed it with charcoal, its natural 

 colour was more brown than in the Australians and it was marked with scars. They 

 were naked, though some wore a kangaroo skin on the back. The hair was short, 

 frizzled, black, and in some reddened with ochre. § Peron published an Atlas with 

 several portraits in which the characters of the hair and features were represented ; the 

 mammae were pendulous, the limbs feeble, the belly large. 



Captain Dumont d'Urville, in his first voyage in L Astrolabe, 1826-29, and in 

 the second voyage with L 'Astrolabe and La Zelee, 1837-40, spent some time on the 

 south coast of Tasmania. The naturalists to the first voyage, MM. Quoy and Gaimard, 

 said the natives || had short, woolly hair, though the women frequently shaved the 

 head ; the skin was black, but the nose was not so flattened and the lips were not so 

 thick and projecting as in the African negro. In the Atlas, a man and woman are 

 figured with characteristic hair and with slender limbs. The black skin, the frizzled 



* Flinders, Voyage, vol. i. p. 186. 



t Account of the English Colony, vol. ii. p. 187, London, 1802. 



X Voyage in Search of La Perouse, pp. 127, 295 et seq. 



§ Voyage de De'couvertes, etc., vol. i. pp. 221, 226, 448 ; Atlas, plates viii. to xii. 



|| Dumont d'Urville, " Voyage de l'Astrolabe," Zoologie, vol. i. p. 45, Paris, 1830. 



