From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 100-101, 103-104:
This was probably the first time these particular people had encountered Europeans, or, for that matter, members of any other race. The Palawa, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, had been separated from the mainland of Australia for at least ten thousand years—with the flooding of the Bassian Land Bridge that occurred at the end of the last ice age. And all Indigenous people of Australia, in turn, had been isolated from the rest of the world for at least fifty thousand years, reaching back to the fogs of the Dreamtime and the primordial days of their earliest myths. Yet, judging by the stolid expressions on the faces of these tribesmen, their first encounter with a people so dramatically different from them appeared to be a nonevent. In his published account, Cook adopted a neutral anthropological tone, evenhanded and remarkably devoid of judgment or religiosity, jingoism or national pride:
They approached us from the woods, without betraying any marks of fear, with the greatest confidence imaginable. None of them had weapons except one who held in his hand a stick about 2 feet long and pointed at one end. They were naked and wore no ornaments except some large punctures or ridges raised on different parts of their bodies, some in straight, and others in curved lines. They were of common stature and rather slender. Their skin was black and also their hair. Most of them had their hair and beards smeared with a red ointment and some of their faces were painted with the same composition. They received every present we made without the least appearance of satisfaction. They seemed to set no value on iron or iron tools. When some bread was given, as soon as they understood that it was to be eaten, they either returned it or threw it away without even tasting it. They also refused some fish, both raw and dressed, which we offered them. But upon giving some birds to them they did not return these and easily made us comprehend that they were fond of such foods.
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THE NEXT MORNING, Cook took heart: A group of about twenty inhabitants were seen congregating on the beach, clearly hoping to interact again with the white-skinned visitors. The Natives seemed to have recovered from Mai’s ballistics display the day before. “They were convinced that we intended them no mischief,” thought Cook, “and were desirous of renewing the intercourse.”
Cook promptly went out to meet and mingle again with the Palawa, this time much more freely than the previous day. Though he was outnumbered, he seemed to have no fear and took no precautions; he walked unarmed among them and engaged in the cryptic, often awkward, and sometimes comical effort of trying to understand an utterly unfamiliar people—bartering and gesturing, smiling and pointing, occasionally making grunts and other strange sounds. The cerebral Cook was far from being a gregarious or voluble man, but he had a knack for these sorts of rough-and-tumble interactions.
This forthright curiosity was an admirable trait, one he’d shown during his previous voyages. Many navigators during the Age of Exploration were content to exploit whatever resources they could quickly locate and move on. Far too many first encounters between Europeans and isolated tribes transpired without the feeblest attempt at cultural understanding—and, sadly, they too often ended in bloodshed.
But Cook’s inquisitiveness was genuine. He wanted to know who the Palawa were, what they ate, how they thought and talked and dressed, how they worshipped their gods. One senses that of all the different roles his voyages required him to carry out, Cook derived the most pleasure and satisfaction from playing the part of anthropological observer.
It was strange to Cook how little acquainted the Palawa appeared to be with the sea. Unlike Polynesians, they didn’t seem to like to swim, and Cook noted that he did not see a single “canoe or any vessel in which they could go upon the water.” They ate mussels and other mollusks but showed no interest in other kinds of seafood; they ran away in seeming horror several times when Cook’s men presented fish as a gift. When shown a fishhook, they appeared to have no idea what it was. They seemed curious about, but also fearful of, Cook’s small boats moored beside the beach, and though some of the Englishmen tried to coax the Natives out for a short ride in the bay, the Palawa couldn’t be persuaded to come aboard. “With all our dumb oratory we could not prevail [upon] any of them to accompany us,” wrote Samwell, “though it was easily perceived that one of them was very desirous of going and had a long struggle between his fears and his inclinations.”
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