Carnivorous Nights (40 page)

The only problem was Alexis didn't want to go. He wanted to do some painting, maybe go back to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery to photograph a taxidermy of a male thylacine. It was a rare specimen, he
said, because it displayed the tiger's testicles. Maybe he would go to the bookstore. Bookstore? Had he forgotten that Charles Darwin, the great evolutionist, had climbed Mount Wellington? That at the end of his fiveyear worldwide journey on the
Beagle
, just a few months after visiting the Galápagos, Darwin had visited Hobart and been unable to resist the call of the mountain?

In the past Alexis had made pilgrimages to three sites associated with Darwin: Darwin's home in London, South Africa's Cape of Good Hope, which the evolutionist had written about in his
Origin of Species
, and the rain forests of Brazil. “Darwin was here in Hobart at this exact same time of year,” we coaxed. “Today could be the anniversary of his climb.” This was not technically a fib. The precise date of Darwin's ascent was unknown.

We could see Alexis turning the parallels over in his mind. Darwin and Rockman. Rockman and Darwin. “I guess we could go to the museum later,” he agreed.

We consulted our copy of
The Voyage of the Beagle.
Although Darwin wrote that the
Beagle
had arrived in “Hobart Town” on February 5, 1836, and remained in port for ten days, the date of his assault on the mountain remained vague:

This was not Darwin at his best. The great evolutionist must have been feeling uncharacteristically crabby that day. Not wanting to suffer as Darwin felt he had or to be labeled stupid fellows, we decided to make life easy on ourselves. Since Mount Wellington was an urban mountain, we thought it would be appropriate to take a taxi partway up to Fern Tree, a small suburb about one thousand feet in elevation, where several trails led to the top. After paying the driver, we bought three bottles of water at a gas station, then found a trailhead on the side of the road and began the hike to the summit.

As soon as we plunged into the forest, we knew we were walking in Darwin's footsteps. In his log, he described the lower section of Mount Wellington this way:

The ferns were still there and they were still huge, their spongy trunks twisting up and their fronds drooping like curtains, brushing against our faces. We would never get used to walking in the shade of these prehistoric giants. “I'm always expecting to see a triceratops pop out from behind one,” said Alexis.

We walked along winding trails through a fern gully dotted with eucalyptuses for some time. We could have been in any Tasmanian forest. There were no views, no sense of elevation. But then the trail broke free of the trees and began to ascend Mount Wellington's eastern face. Two thousand feet below, we could see the blue Tasman Sea stretching out to the horizon.

As the trail climbed the side of the mountain, the forest thinned and the vegetation became bristly and stunted. Instead of towering, luxuriant ferns, we saw crouching, miserly shrubs. We had entered the subalpine zone, the realm of the Tasmanian snow gum (
Eucalyptus coccifera
). These hardy but cautious trees adapted themselves to circumstances, growing slowly and sometimes attaining only the height of a small bush. Tasmanian snow gums are among the only broad-leaved trees in the world that can survive long freezes without losing their leaves. They held on to their long blue-green foliage through sleet, snow, hail, whatever the mountain dished out.

For a long stretch, the trail was unvaryingly mild, not steep or taxing, just a slow, steady slog up the side of the mountain. Then we reached the Zig Zag Track. It switchbacked dizzyingly toward the summit and seemed to suck our breath away. Though the air was cooler due to the higher elevation, we began pouring sweat. As we climbed up the steep
slope, the vegetation continued to shrink. Rather than growing into trees or even shrubs, tiny plants clung desperately to the sheltered crevices between rocks. These alpine plants had adapted to freezing temperatures and high winds on the mountaintop by growing close to the ground. Surrounding us was a boulder field, and the rocks outnumbered the small, spiky plants by ten to one.

We continued to climb, boulder after boulder, and congratulated ourselves on being fit enough to tackle the mountain. Then a Lycra-clad gentleman raced by, kicking up tiny, sharp stones and leaving us in a haze of dolerite dust. He was
running
up. Immediately, we thought,
We should be running, too.
We attempted a couple of jogging steps and then doubled over, gasping for air. Maybe it was time for a rest. We leaned back against a boulder and wheezed.

While looking at the ocean below, we observed that next to us was an impressive rock formation. Titanic, 300-foot-high shafts of gray rock were lined up in rectangular pillars. They were called the Organ Pipes, and it's said that at certain times the wind whistled through the rocks and they moaned like a calliope. We imagined the Organ Pipes playing a symphony based on our hike, a jolly reel followed by a grinding dirge. Then we thought more about Darwin's log.

Perhaps Darwin had been fatigued from his long travels by the time he reached Hobart. Or maybe he was just excited to be in an Englishspeaking colony under the rule of the British crown. Whatever it was, he failed to notice how unusual Tasmania was. In his short description of his visit, he didn't write about seeing a single native animal and hardly observed anything about the island's singular flora and fauna. He never saw or looked for the thylacine or the devil. He never even mentioned them. But he must have known they were there. Both creatures had been written about in European scientific journals and it is unlikely that the existence of such odd creatures would have escaped his notice.

Our thoughts turned to a British explorer far less well-known than Darwin: George Prideaux Harris, one of the first settlers in Tasmania— and the first person to scientifically describe the Tasmanian tiger and devil.

Harris had been a lawyer in Plymouth, England, who, at the age of twenty-eight, had left his career and home to become part of the expedition
to found Australia's second settlement. The expedition was headed by David Collins, who had participated in the founding of Sydney in 1788 (and was the man who first described a living platypus to the European public). Why Harris gave up his law practice is unknown. And why he signed on with the Collins expedition, or what even qualified him for it, is also mysterious. Just weeks before the Collins party departed with two ships bearing nearly three hundred convicts, a garrison of forty-six Royal Marines, and more than fifty free settlers, Harris was named Deputy Surveyor-General of New South Wales (as the entire Australian colony was then called). Though he lacked training as a surveyor, he was a skilled amateur when it came to painting, sketching, drafting, and architectural drawing. He also knew the art of taxidermy. In truth, his real ambition was to make his mark as a naturalist. Since Captain Cook's first voyage to the South Seas, the discovery of new animals—the naming and ordering of the natural world—had become a passion among the British educated classes. To name a species was an achievement of the highest order—and Harris hoped to name many.

As his ship was drawing toward Van Diemen's Land, Harris wrote that there was talk of a large predator living on the island:

When the Collins party landed, it sought out an existing military encampment. A ragtag group of marines and settlers had been sent to Van Diemen's Land the year before to prevent the French, who had also been exploring the region, from establishing their own colony there. The marines had set up their small garrison in Risdon about fifteen miles from the mouth of the Derwent River. But when the Collins party arrived, it was apparent how unpromising the Risdon site was. It had poor soil, brackish water, and little game. Collins asked Harris to investigate possible spots further downriver for relocating. In his explorations, Harris and
another officer hit upon the site of what is now Hobart. As they prepared to set up the foundations of the town, Harris wrote to his brother in England that the location of Hobart was “the most beautiful & romantic Country I ever beheld.”

Such enthusiasm was one of the things that set Harris apart. Most settlers looked outward to the sea—for ships from home, for supplies from Sydney, for whaling vessels. Harris had not forgotten England, but he was also eager to look inward, to embrace Van Diemen's Land. For someone bred an English gentleman and who had lived his life in large towns, he was remarkably at ease in wild country, perhaps more at ease than anywhere else. Confronted with a new land, he was inherently alive to the natural abundance around him. Others were not so inspired. In fact, many found the antipodean landscape perverse.

As one early explorer wrote, “This land is cursed …the animals hop, not run, the birds run, not fly, and the swans are black, not white.”

Some settlers just couldn't get over the black swans. The European swan's whiteness supposedly represented purity and elegance. By contrast, Australia's black swans were perceived as devilish, suspicious, and unnatural. But Harris didn't see it that way. In a letter (his first written from Van Diemen's Land), he described “Black Swans in such astonishing numbers.… Mr. Mountgarret (the Surgeon) assured me that towards the head of the River, he had seen fifty thousand Swans in a flock—It is a great thing for us to have such a Supply of fresh meat, for they are excellent food, as white & good as any I ever eat in England.”

He had a similar reaction to Tasmania's trees. While other settlers were bemoaning the uselessness of eucalyptuses (their timber wasn't good for building ships), Harris was enthralled by them:

The tree he described was a
Eucalyptus regnans
, the botanical marvel of the Southern Hemisphere.

Something more of Harris's happy nature can be gleaned from his detailing the members of his “domestic establishment” in an early letter to his mother. His cat, he informed her, was named Sir John Harris. His dogs had been named Lagger, Spanker, Weasel, Sultan, Van Diemen, and Dingo. And when he later wrote of his marriage to a young woman from England who had come over on the same ship, he was ecstatic:

About a year and a half after arriving in Van Diemen's Land, he wrote to his brother that he planned to complete a multivolume work of zoological drawings, but was hampered by a lack of supplies. His desperate need for paper was a constant theme in his letters home. He wrote his brother that he wasn't able to purchase paper for “love or money.” And he repeatedly asked for paper, pens, pencils, watercolors, and pigments. One supply of paper his brother shipped all the way from England was stolen in the middle of the night. At one time Harris wrote that he could only send one brief letter home, because there wasn't another scrap of paper to be had in the colony.

Somehow, though, Harris gathered enough materials to begin the work of making watercolors and sketches of animals. What made this all the more remarkable were the rough conditions he was working under. Hobart was not exactly a civilized town. Hobart and the colony of Van Diemen's Land were under the authority of a military garrison that in turn was in charge of hundreds of convicts. Convict offenses ranged from forgery and petty theft to harder stuff. And the system was that rather than being jailed, most were “assigned” to work in exchange for being housed and clothed. On the one hand, the convict population was often treated brutally and unfairly. Punishments were cruel and the military officers exploited convict women and the wives and daughters of male convicts
who had crossed the sea with them. On the other, some escaped convicts had murdered aboriginal people and free settlers.

Physical living conditions were miserable. Harris and his wife lived in a one-room shack with a dirt floor. He described it as the size of a nutshell. Moreover, 1806 was a famine year. The crops had failed miserably. There was no flour, therefore no bread. The town's residents lived off kangaroo meat or starved.