Yes, when the Moment comes, the Man appears—even
if he is a thousand miles away, and has to be discovered
by a practical joke.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended;
yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects
himself.
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
Necessarily, the human interest is the first interest
in the log-book of any country. The annals of
Tasmania, in whose shadow we were sailing, are lurid
with that feature. Tasmania was a convict-dump,
in old times; this has been indicated in the account
of the Conciliator, where reference is made to vain
attempts of desperate convicts to win to permanent
freedom, after escaping from Macquarrie Harbor and
the “Gates of Hell.” In the early
days Tasmania had a great population of convicts,
of both sexes and all ages, and a bitter hard life
they had. In one spot there was a settlement
of juvenile convicts—children—who
had been sent thither from their home and their friends
on the other side of the globe to expiate their “crimes.”
In due course our ship entered the estuary called
the Derwent, at whose head stands Hobart, the capital
of Tasmania. The Derwent’s shores furnish
scenery of an interesting sort. The historian
Laurie, whose book, “The Story of Australasia,”
is just out, invoices its features with considerable
truth and intemperance: “The marvelous picturesqueness
of every point of view, combined with the clear balmy
atmosphere and the transparency of the ocean depths,
must have delighted and deeply impressed” the
early explorers. “If the rock-bound coasts,
sullen, defiant, and lowering, seemed uninviting,
these were occasionally broken into charmingly alluring
coves floored with golden sand, clad with evergreen
shrubbery, and adorned with every variety of indigenous
wattle, she-oak, wild flower, and fern, from the delicately
graceful ‘maiden-hair’ to the palm-like
‘old man’; while the majestic gum-tree,
clean and smooth as the mast of ‘some tall admiral’
pierces the clear air to the height of 230 feet or
more.”
It looked so to me. “Coasting along Tasman’s
Peninsula, what a shock of pleasant wonder must have
struck the early mariner on suddenly sighting Cape
Pillar, with its cluster of black-ribbed basaltic columns
rising to a height of 900 feet, the hydra head wreathed
in a turban of fleecy cloud, the base lashed by jealous
waves spouting angry fountains of foam.”
That is well enough, but I did not suppose those snags
were 900 feet high. Still they were a very fine
show. They stood boldly out by themselves, and
made a fascinatingly odd spectacle. But there
was nothing about their appearance to suggest the
heads of a hydra. They looked like a row of
lofty slabs with their upper ends tapered to the shape
of a carving-knife point; in fact, the early voyager,
ignorant of their great height, might have mistaken
them for a rusty old rank of piles that had sagged
this way and that out of the perpendicular.
