Late in 1798, Flinders and Bass in the 25-ton colonial sloop Norfolk, with a volunteer crew of eight, sailed through Bass Strait and around Van Diemen’s Land, thereby proving it to be an island. They saw signs of human presence at several points but interacted with only one local inhabitant. At Port Dalrymple — the Tamar estuary — they saw three or four people “at a great distance”, who according to Flinders walked away, “most probably at our approach”, whereas Bass said that they “ran off into the woods” and made the incident emblematic of the “extreme shyness” of the inhabitants which “prevented any communication”.^[34] But in the upper Derwent they came face to face with two women and a man. The women “scampered off” (said Bass) “screaming” (said Flinders) but the man showed no “signs of fear or distrust” and accepted a dead swan “with rapture”. Apparently “ignorant of muskets”, his only interest was the swan and the Englishmen’s red neckerchiefs. He did not know their smattering of Port Jackson and Tahitian words but seemed to understand their signs and agreed to show them his habitation. However, his “devious route and frequent stoppages” convinced them that he sought only “to amuse [himself] and tire them out” — Bass read caution in this strategy and “jealousy” about “his women” — but they parted “in great friendship”.^[35]

Exegesis: This fleeting individual contact — so typical of the serendipitous, almost spectral quality of early voyagers’ reports of meetings with the elusive and enigmatic inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land — was loaded with considerable interpretive weight by Bass and Flinders, as indeed it is by this historian given the relatively few such meetings reported. In a classic slippage, they made a single human specimen stand for an entire group: the man’s “frank and open deportment” produced a “favourable opinion of the disposition” of the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land.^[36] Their reportage is a prime sample of a rhetorical trajectory I have previously identified in voyage texts:^[37] from relief at approved conduct by indigenous people to positive depictions of their essential character or appearance and explicit distancing from a standard compendium of supposedly Negro traits. Such representations are oblique reflexes of actual indigenous behaviour, processed by European travellers in the light of the profound insecurity of sailing in unfamiliar waters and their usual distaste for Negro physiognomy. Consider these sequences in Flinders’s two extant reports of the meeting at the Derwent. In 1801: the man “seemed to be devoid of fear”; “his countenance was more expressive of benignity and intelligence, than of ferocity or stupidity”; “his features were less negro-like than is usual in New South Wales”. And in 1814: “the quickness with which he comprehended our signs spoke in favour of his intelligence”; his hair “had not the appearance of being woolly” — code for “Negro”.^[38] It is difficult to say much about the actual encounter except that the local man was evidently alert, wary and sought to control and profit from the meeting on his own terms while the women avoided it, possibly through fear of the strangers, or the man, or all three.

Flinders’s reference to New South Wales exemplifies a persistent sub-text in all these accounts: a comparative — what would now be called ethnological — agenda which sought empirical evidence of the relative “condition” of different groups, always pivoting on the authors’ claim to expert knowledge of Port Jackson. Thus, the young men in a party encountered at Twofold Bay en route to Van Diemen’s Land were “better made, and cleaner in their person than the natives of Port Jackson usually are”. Even the invisible people of Port Dalrymple were deduced to be “much inferior in some essential points of convenience to…the despised inhabitants of the continent”, a judgement based on only three elements of material culture: the leakiness of their habitations, their apparent lack of canoes and the “roughness” of the marks they left on trees, suggesting a less “sharp-edged tool” than that used on the mainland. “But”, added Bass, yoking pragmatic relativism to a tacit developmentalist philosophy, “happiness…exists only by comparison with the stage above and the stage below our own”.^[39]