It was there that I became personally acquainted with many whose names have since become famous in French history, having for several years sat on the same form with A. Dumas (fils), Clavel, Leon Say, Phillipeaux Brénier; and, at the annual examinations, the sons of our monarch, Louis Philippe—the Ducs d’Aumale and Montpensier—schoolmates whom I had the good fortune to meet again in Paris in 1878, after many years of a rambling life in the Southern Hemisphere.
My eldest brother took it into his head to start for Australia in 1837. I was much engrossed by the fuss all our friends made with him when he left for what was then considered the confines of the world; his letters describing the voyage, his landing, and the prospects of this new world so preyed on my mind that I at once decided to follow in his tracks.
Communications, however, were not quite as frequent in those days as they are now. Instead of a thirty-five days’ passage on board a floating palace, a trip to Australia meant close imprisonment for eleven or twelve months in a wooden tub of three or four hundred tons, with hard biscuit and salt junk, and perhaps an occasional meal of tinned beef and preserved potatoes, washed down with a draught of putrid water, often doled out in very minute portions. All these were thoroughly put before me to cool down my travelling proclivities. But, on the other hand, most of the visitors at home were old shipmates of my father’s—Dumont-Durville, Laplace, Berard—all eminent French navigators, who had followed Cook and Lapeyrouse’s ships in the Pacific—so that, whilst one ear listened to the words of caution and “Home, Sweet Home,” sung to me by the female portion of the household, the other, like gentle Desdemona’s, heard our visitors tell
Of moving accidents by flood and field;
Of hair-breadth 'scapes in the imminent, deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery. . . .
And of the cannibals that each other eat—
The Anthropophagi— . . .
In faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange.