Baudin's ships rounded South-East Cape on January 13 (1802), and sailed up Dentrecasteaux Channel into Port Cygnet. Peron found plenty to interest him in the fauna of this strange land, and above all in the aboriginals with whom he was able to come in contact. His chapters on the three months' stay in southern and eastern Tasmania are full of pleasant passages, for the naturalist had a pretty talent for descriptive writing, was pleased with the novel things he saw, and communicated his pleasure to his pages. Though he lacked the large grasp, the fertile suggestiveness, of great scientific travellers like Humboldt, Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace, he was curious, well informed, industrious, and sympathetic; and as he was the first trained anthropologist to enter into personal relations with the Tasmanian blacks--a race now become extinct under the shrivelling touch of European civilisation--his writings concerning them have great value, quite apart from the pleasure with which they may be read. A couple of pages describing Peron's first meeting with the aboriginals when out looking for water, and the amazement of the savages on encountering the whites--an incident given with delightful humour, and at the same time showing close and careful observation--will be likely to be welcomed by the reader. "In pursuing our route we came to a little cove, at the bottom of which appeared a pretty valley, which seemed to offer the prospect of finding sweet water. That consideration decided M. H. Freycinet to land there. We had scarcely put foot upon the shore, when two natives made their appearance upon the peak of a neighbouring hill. In response to the signs of friendship that we made to them, one of them leapt, rather than climbed, from the height of the rock, and was in the midst of us in the twinkling of an eye. He was a young man of from twenty-two to twenty-four years of age, of generally strong build, having no other physical fault than the extreme slenderness of legs and arms that is characteristic of his race. His face had nothing ferocious or forbidding about its expression; his eyes were lively and intelligent, and his manner expressed at once good feeling and surprise. M. Freycinet having embraced him, I did the same; but from the air of indifference with which he received this evidence of our interest, it was easy to perceive that this kind of reception had no signification for him. What appeared to affect him more, was the whiteness of our skin. Wishing to assure himself, doubtless, if our bodies were the same colour all over, he lifted up successively our waistcoats and our shirts; and his astonishment manifested itself in loud cries of surprise, and above all in an extremely rapid stamping of the feet.