Carnivorous Nights (41 page)

Yet 1806 was also the year Harris managed to find enough paper and ink to send his descriptions of the Tasmanian tiger and Tasmanian devil to Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society and the leading patron of British science. Having accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage to Tahiti, Australia, and the South Seas and brought back thirty thousand specimens in 1770, Banks had become an instant celebrity and gone on to become one of the most influential men in England.

In writing to Banks, Harris exhibited a deeply respectful style:

Harris gave the tiger the scientific name
Didelphis cynocephala
(dogheaded possum) and called the devil
Didelphis ursina
(bear possum),
Didelphis
being a catchall name at that time for marsupial quadrupeds. He sent Banks sketches of each. Though Harris had personally kept a pair of devils in a barrel to observe their behavior, his devil sketch was rather poor. The devil's legs were portrayed as spindly rather than muscular, the head and facial features dainty rather than hulking. His tiger drawing though flawed was better, even though it was based on a dying animal. According to Harris, “That from which this description and the drawing accompanying it were taken, was caught in a trap baited with kangaroo flesh. It remained alive but a few hours, having received some internal hurt in securing it.”

The tiger's deep black eyes were emphasized, as was the long, wicket
mouth and the big, doggy head. The front legs rippled with power. Strangely, when it came to the stripes, Harris presented them as thin and wispy.

Along with the tiger sketch, Harris sent a detailed description. The specimen he captured was five feet ten inches from nose to the end of the tail. The head, he noted, was very large, “bearing a near resemblance to the wolf or hyena.” In the colony, Harris noted, the animal was called a zebra wolf or zebra opossum. And when he dissected the animal following its death, he found the half-digested remains of a “porcupine anteater” (an echidna) in its stomach. As far as the tiger's behavior in the wild, he could only conjecture:

In contrast with the elusive and mysterious zebra opossum, the devil was easily found and studied. Harris elaborated on its habits with relish:

Harris must have sent these scientific descriptions by the fastest ship available, because in less than eight months, they were being read by Sir Joseph Banks before the Linnean Society in London. Unfortunately, it's not known whether Harris ever got word of this honor. Today, it's hard to imagine how cut off Harris was from home. It had taken nearly three years for the first packet of letters to reach him from his family back in England.

After musing for several minutes about Harris and the thylacine, we decided it was time to get going. We marshaled our energy for the last leg of the hike and reached the summit, our lungs aching. “We conquer this mountain in the name of George Prideaux Harris,” we huffed.

“And Darwin,” Alexis added.

We sat on top of some big boulders and looked down on Hobart and the harbor. The sky was clear and we could see for fifty miles. On the lower slopes, eucalyptuses grew on the mountain, beyond that there were white strands of beaches and intricately carved coastline. Below the city stretched out—white homes and buildings hugging the shores of the brilliantly blue Derwent River and Storm Bay beyond. Down in the city, we could make out the indent of Sullivan's Cove and its dollhouse piers along with tiny sailboats plying the water.

It was stunning: a compact, tidy city nestled between mountain, peninsula, and sea. Using a map we identified some of the landforms down below. Eaglehawk Neck. D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Port Arthur. Each place had a story to tell. This little settlement had been through a lot. But on the summit, there was one story that preoccupied us.

By the reckonings of history, Harris was not a winner in life. In 1808— the same year that his descriptions of the Tasmanian tiger and devil were published in the
Transactions
of the Linnean Society of London—he protested the flogging of a convict woman on the public parade in Hobart. We could see the site of the old parade from where we were sitting atop Mount Wellington, just behind Sullivan's Cove near what is now Ho-bart's Town Hall. Harris, who had never seen or heard of a woman being subjected to flogging, ran to see what the commotion was and found the woman in a fainting fit. Outraged, he asked Edward Lord—a lieutenant of the Royal Marines who was acting as the head of the settlement in the temporary absence of David Collins—under what authority he had ordered the punishment. Lord told Harris to shut his mouth, and when Harris persisted, Lord had Harris arrested at gunpoint by the marines. Harris was subsequently placed under house arrest and accused of insubordinate conduct. He remained under house arrest for about six months. Although the charges were finally dropped and the matter resolved, the stress and long confinement took a severe physical and psychological toll. In 1810, in failing health, Harris died after a short illness at the age of thirty-six.

Harris never had a chance to finish his work on the zoology of Van Diemen's Land, and the scientific name he ascribed to the tiger didn't stick for long. The year he died, it was decided by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the famous French biologist, that
Didelphis
didn't really describe the genus properly, and the name
Dasyurus cynocephalus
was applied,
Dasyurus
being the new descriptor for carnivorous marsupials. In 1824, the Dutch naturalist Conrad Jacob Temminck proposed a new scientific name for the tiger that would have honored Harris:
Thylacinus harrisii.
But while
Thylacinus
stuck, the
harrisii
part was rejected. (The scientific name of the devil was altered, too. But in this case, Harris's contributions to natural history weren't forgotten. In 1837, the Tasmanian devil's scientific name was changed to
Sarcophilis harrisii
, Harris's Lover of Dead Flesh.)

Edward Lord, incidentally, went on to live a long and prosperous life. He became one of, if not the, largest stockholders in Van Diemen's Land. In 1817, a Tasmanian tiger measuring six feet four inches was killed on Lord's property, purportedly after killing some of his sheep. This incident was the first published report of a tiger attacking livestock—and it was the beginning of the end for Harris's tiger.

At the top of Mount Wellington, there was an informational sign. It stated that great tracts of the original eucalyptus forest on the lower slopes had been cut down by 1870. The “immense” trees, the “stately” trees, the trees “of incredible size” that Harris had written about were long gone.

We wondered if Harris had more paper, would he have finished his work on Tasmanian zoology? Would he have become a famous man? There was something ironic about the fact that the eucalyptus trees he loved so much were now being clear-cut for manufacturing paper.

Alexis glowered down the mountainside toward Hobart. “If that fucker Edward Lord was still alive, I'd hurl his ass off this mountain.” Then he said, “I can't wait to get back and do some work.”

How
were
we going to get back? We briefly considered walking down the Zig Zag Track. Then we looked at one another and stuck out our thumbs. A winding road snaked all the way down the mountain, and we hitched a ride in the back of a van. It dropped us off in Battery Point, and from there we walked back to our motel. We had found what was literally the last room in the entire city, everything being booked up due to a popular
annual boat festival. It was conveniently located above Hobart's only twenty-four-hour liquor store.

Back in our room, Alexis took out his case of art supplies. Clearly the urge to create had possessed him. He removed the paint cup containing the leech that had sucked his blood on the Weldborough Pass. “Well, well … what do we have here?” he said. It was payback time.

“So I want to turn this leech into pigment,” he told us.

We agreed to help mash it up. Using the butt of a Bic pen as a pestle, we began grinding the nasty little animal to bits.

“Die,
you…
”

“I think it's already dead,” Alexis informed us.

He looked down at the little black flecks of leech muck at the bottom of the paint cup. There didn't seem to be any blood in there. The leech must have digested it. “I don't think that's enough material to make pigment with,” he said. “Maybe I should add some more of my own blood. Do we have anything sharp?”

We didn't question whether adding human blood to the pigment was
really necessary. In fact, we had read that ancient aboriginal artists had used blood as a binder for making their rock art pigments.
And
we had read that Michael Howe, a Van Diemen's Land convict-turned-bush-ranger who headed up a band of outlaws that raided farms and rustled sheep from 1814 to 1818, had been so desperate to record his nightmares that he made parchment out of kangaroo skin and wrote his dreams down in blood.
That
was keeping it real. We began searching the room and found a set of needles in our first-aid kit.

“How about this?” We showed him a big needle and then sterilized it with his mini-blowtorch.

Alexis jabbed his index finger with the tip of the needle. “Ow! This is duller than a two-by-four.”

“We'll do it. Just turn your head away.”

“No! Please, I need my hands. Haven't we got anything sharper?”

We pulled out a thinner, sharper needle from the first-aid kit.

“Why didn't you use that one in the first place?” he complained.

“Hold it, we've got to sterilize this—and your hand, too.” We flamed the needle with the blowtorch and wiped his fingers with an alcohol swab.

Alexis took the needle and slowly pierced the tip of his finger about a quarter-inch deep. “Fuck,” he muttered.

He turned his hand upside down over the container that held the mashed-up leech and began milking his injured finger like a cow's udder. Nothing came out.

“Am I dead? Where's all my blood?”

“Maybe you're a vampire.”

“All right …let me do this again.” He shoved the needle into his fingertip and emitted a kamikaze scream. A drop of bright red liquid emerged and he quickly squeezed it into the paint cup. Altogether he squeezed out three or four small drops.

“That's going to have to be enough,” he said. He stirred the mixture, creating a brownish paste, and then added a splash of acrylic medium from a small bottle. “If I need more, I'll just add some instant coffee.”

Then he took out brushes and paper and swirled the invertebrate slime, blood, and coffee into a twisting, gaping-mouthed leech—about one hundred times its actual size.

T
he next morning, we were still a bit groggy from the one-two punch of climbing Mount Wellington and bloodletting Alexis. And we were late for an appointment, one that had been difficult to arrange. We struggled to find something decent to wear in our packs, and managed to dig out a few unrumpled clothes. To our chagrin, we discovered we only had hiking boots with us—not that the lack of formal wear should have come as any surprise. We smoothed down our hair as
best we could, then raced down to Hobart's waterfront and a cluster of small office buildings.