Everyone Has His Part
William Dampier describes the hand-to-mouth existence of the aborigines of northwest Australia, and reveals a people far advanced in charity.
1688
James II 1685-1688
William Dampier describes the hand-to-mouth existence of the aborigines of northwest Australia, and reveals a people far advanced in charity.
1688
James II 1685-1688
From January 5th to March 12th 1688, Englishman William Dampier, on the first of his record-breaking three circumnavigations of the globe, explored the northwest coast of Australia (or as he knew it, New Holland) aboard the ‘Cygnet’. He declared the natives ‘the miserablest people in the world’, but testified to their remarkable unselfishness.
original spelling
THEY have no Houses, but lie in the open Air, without any covering; the Earth being their Bed, and the Heaven their Canopy. Whether they cohabit one Man to one Woman, or promiscuously, I know not: but they do live in Companies, 20 or 30 Men, Women, and Children together.
Their only Food is a small sort of Fish, which they get by making Wares* of Stone across little Coves or Branches of the Sea; every Tide bringing in the small Fish, and there leaving them for a Prey to these People, who constantly attend there to search for them at Low-water. This small Fry I take to be the top of their Fishery: They have no Instruments to catch great Fish, should they come; and such seldom stay to be left behind at Low-water: Nor could we catch any Fish with our Hooks and Lines all the while we lay there.*
In other Places at Low-water they seek for Cockles, Muscles,* and Periwincles:* Of these Shell-fish there are fewer still: so that their chiefest dependance* is upon what the Sea leaves in their Wares; which, be it much or little they gather up, and march to the Places of their abode.
* ‘Wares’ means vessels (cf. earthenware). In this case it would seem they were troughs sculpted out of stone and laid down across narrow inlets.
* The mussel, a word used for a variety of molluscs. It comes from the same Latin root (musculus, meaning ‘little mouse’) as muscle, and in Old English it was spelt mus(c)le. The spelling ‘mussel’, originally Middle Low German, today distinguishes the molluscs.
* The natives’ rudimentary fishing recalls the lamentable condition of the South Saxons in the seventh century, until St Wilfrid came from Northumbria: see St Wilfrid and the Fishers of Men. Dampier’s crew do not seem to have had Wilfrid’s touch.
* The common periwinkle (Littorina littorea).
* Dependence.