Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [25]
In 1642 the citadel's walls were breached when the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was commissioned to map Terra Australis Incognita (the Unknown Southland) and came across Tasmania instead. After landing, he and his crew reported seeing smoke from the fires of the aboriginals, enormous towering trees, and animal tracks on the ground “not unlike the paws of a tiger.” Tasman christened the island Van Diemen's Land after his patron, Anthony van Diemen, the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company—and Van Diemen's Land was the name in use until 1856 when the island was renamed for Tasman himself.
After Tasman's departure, Van Diemen's Land was not called on again for more than a hundred years. But in the 1770s there were a rash of short visits. Captain Marion du Fresne stopped in on behalf of France in 1772, Commander Tobias Furneaux investigated for England in 1773 (as part of the expedition of Captain James Cook), and Captain Cook himself dropped by in 1777.
In 1770 Cook had claimed the Australian mainland for England, and this visit ultimately resulted in the Sydney area's being settled as a prison colony for British convicts in 1788. A few years later, when French explorers and scientists aboard the ships Géographe and Naturaliste began surveying the area around Van Diemen's Land, the British decided it was time to stake another claim. In 1803 they set up a second convict settlement on the southeast coast of Van Diemen's Land. From 1803 to 1853, about seventy thousand prisoners were transported from England and Ireland, and the island quickly earned a reputation as a cruel “convict hell.” If the condemned weren't doing hard labor under threat of the lash in prisons such as Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour, they were “assigned” to work for private landowners. As one convict ballad from the early nineteenth century warned:
The first day that we landed upon that fatal shore,
The planters they came round us full twenty score or more,
They rank'd us up like horses, and sold us out of hand,
They yok'd us unto ploughs, my boys, to plough Van Dieman's land.
The cottages that we live in were built of clod and clay,
And rotten straw for bedding, & we dare not say nay,
Our cots were fenc'd with fire, we slumber when we can,
To drive away wolves and tigers upon Van Dieman's land.
Wolves and tigers? The confusion was understandable. Van Diemen's Land was a strange place—unknown, unfamiliar, and filled with bewildering plants and animals. When the colonists spotted their first thylacine, they weren't sure if it was a wolf, a tiger, or what it was. In 1805 William Paterson, one of the island's first lieutenant governors, reported that an “animal of a truly singular and nouvel description” and “of the carnivorous and voracious tribe” was killed by dogs on the is-land's north coast. At the outset, the colonists couldn't agree what name to give this unfamiliar beast. Paterson thought it looked like a hyena or a “low wolf dog,” and for many years it was variously dubbed hyena, hyena opossum, zebra opossum, dog-headed opossum, zebra wolf, panther, tyger, tiger wolf, striped wolf, and Tasmanian dingo. Sightings were rare in the colony's first years, and in 1810 the explorer John Oxley wrote that the tiger “flies at the approach of Man, and has not been known to do any Mischief.” This status as a benign new animal didn't last long, however. The first reported killing of a sheep by a thylacine was in 1817. From that moment on, thylacines had a price on their heads.
We headed back down the metal stairs, experiencing an increasing sense of vertigo. The ship was designed to focus passengers inward. The size of a cruise ship, it had once plied the Adriatic Sea. Its built-in stabilizers and size insulated it from the roughness of the strait. And when we were inside—out of the wind—we barely noticed