LIFE WITH CANNIBALS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIX, 30 January 1936, Page 3

LIFE WITH CANNIBALS

■ SCOTSWOMAN’S EXPERIENCE The strange tale of a woman shipwrecked off New Guinea nearly 90 years ago is related in a diary of Thomas Henry Huxley, the scientist, written when he was in the early “’twenties” and was assistant surgeon on boat'd H.M.S. Rattlesnake. A notebook containing the diary of the Australian voyage was found last year. In the manuscript appears an account of Huxley’s meeting with “Mrs Thompson” off New Guinea in 1849. She was with a party of natives —“a white woman disfigured by dirt and the effect of the sun oil her almost uncovered body ; her face was nevertheless clean enough, - and before the men had time to recover from their, astonishment, she advanced towards them and in hesitating, broken language cried: ‘I am a Christian—l am ashamed.’ ” She was taken on board, and she told her story, half in Scottish, half in native dialect, for- she had been so long among these people “as nearly to forget her mother tongue.” According to her talc, she was horn in Aberdeen, emigrating to Australia with her father, a tinsmith, when she was eight. Owing to his habits his business declined and she left secretly when she- was 15 or 16, made her way to Moreton Bay with' her lover, a- sailor, and there married him. After 18 months,, however, the pair set out- with three men on an expedition to an island in Torres Straits, and were wrecked upon a reef when near their destination. The men were drowned, but a native swam out and saved Mrs Thompson, who became a member of the tribe. “One of the old chiefs,” writes Huxley, "who had lately lost a daughter, persisted, according to their common belief that white people were the ghosts of black, -that she was this very daughter

! ‘jump alive again,’ and she seems to ! have been regularly adopted.” As tlje i years passed she took the native langur ’ iige, and when Huxley inet her was ac- ; tually thinking in it. When talking slur ■ had to translate her native thoughts into ; plain English,’ and her manners “pror i scnted a most ludicrous graft of the | ‘gin’ upon the white woman.” She lost; ! all count of time* and'would have 'for-; : gotten her own .language had she not' been accustomed to sing to herself at ! night all the old fragments of songs and ; ballads she could remember. Year by, : year she saw the’English ships sail by on their way to China, but never had, ! any opportunity of communicating with' s them, and sometimes she says she was : vei'v sorrowful’ and despairing. . . . So Mar as we can judge, she has been, i live : years-among these people'-.’”.• A ,’■> Mrs Thompson liad some startling' ex-' periences—one of them a groat '{pbrob-, bory,” when her native friends,' ..who had killed four people from, an enemy , tribe,""placed the severed heads in a rude oven and ate the eyes and pieces of the cheek “to make 1 them brave.” The women were excluded from all share in “this recherche repast.”