THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
536 
leucopygialis ) was very common, sitting in small flocks in rows on wires stretched for 
drying clothes near one of the houses, just as swallows sit on telegraph wires in England. 
The birds made excursions after flies, flying just like swallows, and returning to their 
perch. All those shot had their feathers at the base of the bill clogged with pollen 
from the flowers, in which no doubt they had been searching for insects ; like some 
humming birds, they must act as fertilizers, carrying pollen from one flower to another. 
Two Bats (Phyllorhina . cervina, Gould, and Taphozous australis, Gould), a Lizard 
(Lialis punctulata) , a Snake ( Acanthophis antarctica), and an immature specimen of Mus 
alexandrinus, Geof., were collected at Cape York. 
“ In all my excursions,” writes Mr. Moseley, “ I was accompanied by blacks. A 
small encampment of natives, composed of the remnants of three tribes, lay about half a 
mile from the shore. There were twenty-one natives in this camp when I visited it early 
one morning in search of a guide, before daybreak, before the blacks were awake. Of 
these twenty-one, about six were adult males, one of whom was employed at the water 
police station during the daytime ; there were four boys of from ten to fourteen years, 
two young girls, two old women, two middle-aged women, and the remainder were young 
women. One of the old women was the mother of Longway, who acted as my guide, 
and who had a son about ten years old. 
“ The blacks were mostly of the Gudang tribe, a vocabulary of whose language is 
given in the Appendix to Macgillivray’s Voyage of the ‘Rattlesnake.’ 1 About 35 miles 
from Somerset is a tribe of fierce and more powerful blacks, of whom the Gudangs are 
in great terror. The natives were in a lower condition than I had expected. Their 
camp consisted of an irregularly oval space concealed in the bushes, at some distance 
from one of the paths through the forest. In the centre were low heaps of wood ashes 
with fire-sticks smouldering on them. All around was a shallow groove or depression, 
caused partly by the constant lying and sitting of the blacks in it, partly by the gradual 
accumulation of ashes inside, and the casting of these and other refuse immediately 
outside it. On the outer side of this groove or form were stuck up at an angle large 
leaves of a Fan Palm here and there so as to form a shelter, and under the shelter of 
these the blacks huddled together at night to sleep (see PI. XXII.). 
“ A camp of this shape with a slight mound inside, and a bank outside, formed 
involuntarily by primitive man, may have given the first idea of the mound, the ditch, 
and rampart. The large amount of wood-ashes accumulated in such a camp, accounts 
for their occurrence in such large quantities in kitchen-middens, where camping must 
have been in the same style. A good many shells brought from the shore lay here and 
there about the camp. There were besides in the neighbourhood remains of shelters of 
the common Australian form, long huts made of bushy branches set at an angle to meet 
1 For a further account of Cape York, see J. Beete Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. “Fly,” 
London, 1847. 
