Carnivorous Nights (39 page)

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery was located just behind Sul-livan's Cove. Growing in size since it was founded as the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1853, the museum complex incorporates the oldest surviving colonial building in Hobart as well as glassy, modern additions. Every year, the museum fields hundreds of inquiries about the thylacine. It's a
mecca for thylacine seekers like ourselves. Walking into the galleries was like entering a dream museum, a temple dedicated to our long-lost love. There were taxidermies of thylacines inside glass cases draped in blue velvet. A watercolor of a thylacine dated 1833 by the famous limerick writer Edward Lear. A macabre pincushion fashioned from a thylacine's jawbone. In the natural history galleries, a film loop of the Tasmanian tiger played over and over again on a television monitor. The TV was positioned on top of a crate labeled “Beaumaris Zoo/Fragile/Hobart TAS.” Every time the loop replayed, it offered the following information:

The black-and-white footage made the tiger come palpably to life. It showed the tiger pacing about, crouching as if to spring, sniffing the edge of the zoo enclosure, devouring what looked like a chicken, looking at the camera with unnerving deep black eyes. How many extinct, or probably extinct, species had been filmed in this way? Not many. Though designed as a sort of eulogy to the thylacine, the exhibit didn't put the problem of the tiger's extinction to rest. The tantalizingly short film simply raised more questions. How had the tiger behaved in the wild? Was this really the last Tasmanian tiger or simply the last tiger to live in a zoo?

A glass case beside the television monitor held a log of bounties paid by the Tasmanian government to tiger hunters. The log wasn't the original but a reproduction produced by the Calligraphy Society of Tasmania. The pages showed £1 bounties paid from January 12 to June 7, 1898, and the localities where the skins were collected. In all, thirty-four dead Tasmanian tigers were turned in during that period, and the names of several places we had visited popped out: Stanley, Wynyard, St. Helens, Mole Creek.

We went to talk to David Pemberton, the museum's senior curator of vertebrate zoology. In his office, a taxidermy of a Tasmanian devil sat on a file cabinet, its mouth opened in a full-fanged snarl. On a counter a
platypus taxidermy was set up with the front feet splayed out to show the ducklike webbing.

We wondered what David made of all the people who came seeking answers and the never-ending searches. Was looking for the thylacine like trying to get a glimpse of
Architeuthis
in the wild, difficult but still within the realm of possibility? Or was it more like the search for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster? Creatures that have never been proved to be anything more than imaginary. We weren't quite sure how to pose this question. One more blow to our thylacine dream might prove fatal to our expedition. Fortunately, Alexis jumped right in. “Do you ever hope that the thylacine still exists?”

“Well, we can't escape the fact that the tiger did exist, and it existed here well into the 1950s. It's unlikely that the last one to die in captivity was the last wild thylacine. Then sightings like Naarding's arguably put the animals into the 1970s and 1980s. That's not long ago. And that gives hope. You can still have hope.”

David had lived in Tasmania for more than twenty years, first working for the Parks and Wildlife Service and now for the museum. He told us that, like Naarding, he was originally from South Africa.

“Did you know Naarding?”

“Oh yeah, I knew him well. He worked in Tasmania for ten years or more. His sighting is phenomenal. He was either lying or he saw it. There's no way he misidentified it. He counted the stripes and smelled it. I reckon he saw one. That northwest area is phenomenal for tiger sightings. Always has been. Naarding's sighting was just prior to mass forestry activity up there. Where that animal lived is gone now. The habitat is destroyed.”

“Is it possible the thylacine could still be out there? Could it have eluded searchers for so long?”

David thought it was conceivable. “They can't even find foxes. And they're living in paddocks up the road.”

But the fact that he thought it was conceivable didn't mean that he thought it was likely. The thylacine had faced too many guns, too many snares. “Some people will promote the theory that the thylacine was ‘on the way out,’ that it had reached the end of its road in terms of evolution and would have died out anyway. But the thylacine had been living here
with aboriginals for ten thousand years when the white man arrived. It was not on its way out. The settlers blamed the thylacine for stock loss, and then killed it. You could also argue that collectors were one of the nails in the thylacine's coffin. They were frantically trying to get them for zoos and museums. Probably a thousand animals were taken out of the wild for collections. Then in the 1930s and 1940s we know that poisons like strychnine were being used to kill rabbits and devils. That probably killed thylacines off, too.”

Ugh. Human beings
were
dirty, dirty animals.

David said people needed to start thinking of Tasmania's natural world in a more integrated fashion. “The real wilderness starts up in the highlands, goes down through the forests, and goes out to the continental shelf where the giant squid and the sperm whales live. This whole wild wilderness is a continuum.”

We thought about the buttongrass plains up in the Milkshakes flowing down to stain the Hebe, flowing down to the Arthur River and out past Geoff 's place to the sea. David had said it was okay to have hope—and we were basking in it. But Alexis seemed to have other things on his mind. From the look on his face, we could tell that the moment David mentioned the giant squid, he had been struck with thylacine amnesia.

“Are there
Architeuthis
specimens here in the museum?” Alexis asked.

Indeed there were. Although thylacines were still the favorite
land
animal at the museum, giant squid had their fans, David said. When the 550-pound female giant squid washed up on nearby Seven Mile Beach, her body was transported on ice to the Tasmanian Museum and an announcement was made that the world's biggest calamari would be displayed to the public. The giant squid caused a near stampede and the museum packed in more visitors than on any day in its history.

Alexis was champing at the bit to ask if the museum had any
Architeuthis
ink. When he finally did, David said he would be glad to give Alexis some, but they didn't have any on hand. The museum, he believed, had given its giant squid ink to the Tasmanian calligraphy society. We could see the wheels turning in Alexis's brain. “Calligraphy!??!!
Calligraphy?
They gave their rare giant squid ink to the winners of a perfect penmanship contest?” Alexis looked crestfallen, but he quickly recovered. “What about sperm whales? Do you have anything I could use for that?”

“Blubber is really good,” David said. “Sperm whale blubber is incredibly
tough. But then it runs like a fluid when it gets warm. It's amazing stuff.”

Alexis made an appointment to meet with the museum's art history department, and the next day walked out triumphantly with a tiny bottle of translucent amber liquid. A white waxy lump lay at the bottom. The bottle was marked, “Spermaceti from Stranded Sperm Whales, Strahan, Tasmania, 1998.”

“What have you got there, Captain Ahab?”

Alexis explained that this was the next best thing to squid ink. Spermaceti was the oil found in the forehead of the sperm whale—and it was the most lucrative product of the old whaling industry. The most massive of all toothed cetaceans, sperm whales have huge heads like battering rams, and when whalers cut a captured whale's head open it was filled with barrels of a rose-tinted oil called spermaceti. Before electricity was harnessed for lighting and wax substitutes such as paraffin were devised, spermaceti was used to make the world's finest, most clean-burning candles. It was also used in cosmetics, including lubricants and lotions. (Why was it called
sperm
aceti? For some reason, it was once thought the oil, which congeals into white lumps on contact with air, was actually involved with the whale's reproductive system and that the lumps were the whale's sperm. Whale scientists are still not sure what the oil filling the whale's head is for, but it might help these deep-diving whales—they plunge to three thousand feet in the dark abyss where no light penetrates and giant squid are believed to live—maintain enough buoyancy to return to the surface.)

We gazed at Alexis's spermaceti. This was the stuff that once anointed the heads of kings. It may even have been used as an aphrodisiac.

Spermaceti's fine qualities were memorialized in a very curious chapter of
Moby-Dick
in which Ishmael, along with several other seamen, takes on the job of squeezing the lumps out of spermaceti and has a peak experience:

The way Ishmael described it, squeezing spermaceti with your friends and co-workers was like being at a party where everyone's on X. We looked at the waxy lump that had formed in the vial of oil. We thought about having a group squeeze, but then settled for unscrewing the lid and tentatively sniffing the bottle. It smelled like a combination of canned sardines and wet Labrador. Maybe it was the packaging, but the white lump of spermaceti reminded us of a kidney stone.

“Have you ever thought of giving up your pot for spermaceti?”

Alexis shook his head. He had other plans for his new stash. He held up the vial to the light and calculated. “The sperm whale feeds on the giant squid, right? That means there's got to be
Architeuthis
in here someplace.”

We went down to a seafood restaurant on the waterfront and ordered fried calamari. Later, Alexis drew a sperm whale with the tentacle of a giant squid hanging out of its mouth.

O
ne thing that made pursuing the seemingly unattainable goal of seeing a tiger easier was achieving a series of smaller goals. Observing a Tasmanian devil. Check. Watching a wombat jiggle its butt. Done. Swimming with platypuses. Sort of. Now that we were in Hobart, another one of these challenges was immediately in front of us: Mount Wellington. Often shrouded in mist, Mount Wellington is a flattopped, dolerite knob that rises from the sea and climbs swiftly up to 4,166 feet. During much of the year, its peak is covered in snow, and even at the height of summer, the temperature on the summit can drop below freezing. For Hobart's residents, Mount Wellington is an almost mystical presence. And from the earliest moments of exploration, its peak has called people to ascend it.