. . . . . . . . . .
Being unable to keep his word as to the return of Prince Essomeric, the tradition goes that De Gonneville settled some of his property on him, gave him his name, and married him to a relative, as some compensation. What the relative thought of it does not appear. The grandson of Essomeric by this marriage is said to have been a priest, and, under the name of J. B. Paulmier, was canon of the Cathedral Church of St. Pierre de Lizieux.
The fact of the carven stone head is thus told by Sir George Grey, who discovered it in the north-west, about that part of the coast where De Gonneville was supposed to have landed:—
“I was moving on when we observed the profile of a human face and head cut out in a sandstone rock which fronted the cave. This rock was so hard that to have removed such a large portion of it with no better tools than a knife and hatchet made of stone, such as the Australian natives generally possess, would have been a work of great labour. The whole of the work was good, and far superior to what a savage race could be supposed capable of executing. The only proof of antiquity that it bore about it was that all the edges of the cutting were rounded, and perfectly smooth—much more so than they could have been from any other cause than long exposure to atmospheric influences.”
The two graves in which I have buried Zolca and Azolta were also discovered by Sir George Grey, and thus described by him:—
“April 6. We halted a few hundred yards from two remarkable heaps of stones of the same kind as those I have before mentioned.
“April 7. This morning I started off before dawn, and opened the most southern of the two mounds of stone, which presented the following curious facts. 1st. They were both placed due east and west with great regularity. 2nd. They were both exactly of the same length, but different in breadth and height. 3rd. They were not formed altogether of small stones from the place on which they stood, but many were portions of very distant rocks, which must have been brought by human hands. My own opinion concerning these heaps of stones had been that they were tombs: and this opinion remains unaltered, though we found no bones in the mound, only a great deal of fine mould, having a damp, dank smell. The antiquity of the one we opened appeared to be very great—I should say two or three hundred years.”
Whether these strange discoveries of Grey’s, including the well-known cave paintings, point to the existence once of a colony of semi-civilized people cannot well be determined. The non-existence of ruins of any sort can easily be accounted for by the fact that they built their houses of mud which, after being abandoned to the mercy of successive tropical wet seasons, would soon disappear. The work found differs so entirely from the ordinary rude memorials of the aborigines that there is room for speculation on the subject.
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