CONDUCT OF MIAGO.
Their speech was shrill and quick, perfectly unintelligible to our friend Miago, who seemed greatly in fear of them: they seemed astonished to find one apparently of their own clime, complexion, and degree in company with the white strangers, who must have seemed to them a different race of beings; nor was their wonder at all abated when Miago threw open his shirt, and showed them his breast curiously scarred after their fashion--for this custom of cutting stripes upon the body, as other savages tattoo it, by way of ornament, seems universally to prevail throughout Australia--as a convincing evidence that he, though now the associate of the white man, belonged to the same country as themselves. When Miago had, in some degree, recovered from his alarm--and their want of all weapons no doubt tended to reassure him more than anything else, he very sagaciously addressed them in English; shaking hands and saying, "How do you do?" and then began to imitate their various actions, and mimic their language, and so perfectly did he succeed that one of our party could not be persuaded but that he really understood them; though for this suspicion I am convinced there was in truth no foundation. In general appearance this tribe differed but little from those we had previously seen. They wore their hair straight, and tied behind in a rude semblance of the modern queue; their beards were long, and two or three among them were daubed with a kind of black ochre. All of them had lost one of the front teeth, and several one finger joint;* in this particular they differed from the natives seen in Roebuck Bay, amongst whom the practice of this mutilation did not prevail. They were, I think, travelling to the southward, at the time they fell in with us, for they had no females among the party, by whom they are usually at other times accompanied. The circumstance of their being unarmed may seem to militate against the supposition that they were travelling, but it is to be borne in mind that these people universally consider the absence of offensive weapons as the surest test of peaceful intentions, and would therefore, if they desired to maintain a friendly footing with the newcomers, most probably deposit their arms in some place of concealment before they made themselves visible.
(*Footnote. A similar custom was noticed by Captain Cook at the Sandwich Islands, where it was regarded as a propitiatory sacrifice to the Eatooa, to avert his anger; and not to express, as the same mutilation does in the Friendly Islands, grief for the loss of a friend.)
NATIVE SMOKES.
The coast seems pretty thickly populated between Roebuck and Beagle Bays; as the smoke from native fires was constantly to be seen, but in all cases these signs of human existence were confined to the neighbourhood of the sea. The fishing proved unsuccessful, so we were fain to content ourselves without the promised addition to our evening meal. We found the tide rise here 18 feet.
In the afternoon we reached another anchorage, some ten miles further to the North-East. The coast along which we sailed within the distance of two miles, was chiefly remarkable for its tall, dark-looking cliffs, with here and there a small sandy bay intervening. We anchored under Point Emeriau, so named by Captain Baudin, by whom it was mistaken for an island; its tall, white cliffs, springing from and guarded by a base and ledges of black rock, and tinged with red towards their summits, render it a point not easily to be mistaken or forgotten by any who have once seen it. Beyond this the coast curved away to the eastward, forming a bight about eleven miles in length.
January 26.
Leaving our anchorage at daylight, we passed the north point of the bight just mentioned soon after noon; it is a low black rugged cliffy point, called Borda by the French, having a much more weather-beaten appearance than would have been anticipated in this latitude. Behind it the country rose obliquely, the horizon terminating in an inconsiderable, undulatory, and well-wooded elevation.
CAPE LEVEQUE.
We passed another bight in the afternoon, the shores of which were low and rocky, with a mangrove creek in its depth: from this bight the coast becomes almost straight, the line being hardly broken by rocky points and shallow sandy bays, to Cape Leveque, on the North-East side of which we found an indifferent anchorage just before sunset. Cape Leveque is a red cliffy point some sixty feet in height, with an islet of the same character lying close off it. The latter bore from our anchorage in 5 fathoms, South 56 degrees West 2 miles, and 4 1/2 West 20 degrees South from the entrance point of the inviting opening, we were now about to explore, with an interest rather stimulated than decreased by the want of success that attended our examination of Roebuck Bay.