Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [131]
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:
The history of this new and singular quadruped is at present but little known. Only two specimens (both males) have yet been taken. It inhabits amongst caverns and rocks in the deep and almost impenetrable glens in the neighborhood of the highest mountainous parts of Van Diemen's Land, where it probably preys on the brush Kangaroo and various small animals that abound in those places.
In contrast with the elusive and mysterious zebra opossum, the devil was easily found and studied. Harris elaborated on its habits with relish:
These animals were very common on our first settling at Hobart Town, and were particularly destructive to poultry, & They, however, furnished the convicts with a fresh meal, and the taste was said to be not unlike veal.… A male and female, which I kept for a couple of months chainedtogether in an empty cask, were continually fighting; their quarrels began as soon as it was dark (as they slept all day), and continued throughout the night almost without intermission.… The female generally conquered.
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