Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [130]
My dearest mother I have to beg pardon of you for doing something without your leave, but for the life of me I could not help it … married? Yes, my dearest Mother & what is more enjoy the most perfect happiness. My sweet little Girl is one of the most ameanable Disposition I ever met with— and her affectionate attachment to me is such as must render my life devoted to her happiness in return.
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.
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:
I take the liberty of transmitting to you drawings & descriptions from the life of two animals of the Genus Didelphus, natives of this Country, which I believe are in every respect new, at least I have [not] seen any descriptions of either.
As I believe it is not uncommon for accounts of newly discovered animals to be communicated to the Royal & Linnean Societies if you Sir, judge those sent worthy that Honor I shall be amply repaid for my labours.
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