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Updated: May 7, 2025
Among his best pictures are 'The Floating Feather, a feather given with singular lightness drifting in a pool, with different birds on the water and the shore a pelican prominent in Amsterdam Museum, and 'A Hen defending her Chickens against the attacks of a Pea-hen, with a Peacock, a Pigeon, a Cassowary, and a Crane, also in Amsterdam. Jan Weenix, born in 1644, died in 1719.
Another large and extraordinary bird is the Cassowary, which inhabits the island of Ceram only. It is a stout and strong bird, standing five or six feet high, and covered with long coarse black hair-like feathers. The head is ornamented with a large horny calque or helmet, and the bare skin of the neck is conspicuous with bright blue and red colours.
"Once a writer named Macaulay said he could make a rhyme for any word in the English language, and a man replied, 'You can't rhyme Timbuctoo. But he answered without a pause: "If I were a Cassowary On the plains of Timbuctoo, I'd eat up a missionary, Bible, bones, and hymn-book, too." Ted laughed, but Kalitan said, grimly: "Not good to eat Boston missionary, he all skin and bone!"
We all then went on together, and late in the afternoon we landed at a spot near the mouth of the Musa River. We spent the evening shooting, and had splendid sport, our bag consisting of ducks of various species, pigeon, spur-winged plover, curlew, sandpipers, etc. We also saw wallaby, and numerous tracks of cassowary and wild pig.
Imagine the ostrich-hunting on its borders; picture the natives riding their unequalled breed of horses, the wind-drinkers, which carry their masters a hundred miles a day, and which, ridden after the birds up-wind, gradually tire them down, until they can be knocked on the head with a bludgeon; the Arabs too, themselves, with the unforgettable manners possessed by such as Abraham, and handed down from time immemorial; last of all, Timbuctoo, the Queen of the Desert, the fabled home of the voracious cassowary, does not the picture imperiously summon the traveller "over the hills and far away"? Very far away; for Timbuctoo is twelve hundred miles from Mogador, and a journey there would mean at least forty days across the Sahara, through a country belonging to peoples in no way friendly towards "infidels," where oases are few and far between.
A casoar, or cassowary, would, of course, be called an ostrich, and here we have for the first time in history a picturesque description of that Australasian bird. Galvano's translator says: "There is heere a bird as bigge as a crane, and bigger; he flieth not, nor hath any wings wherewith to flee; he runneth on the ground like a deere. Of their small feathers they do make haire for their idols."
Oh! why did I not say a Columbian cassowary, or a Peruvian penguin, or a Chilian condor, or a Guatemalan goose, or a Mexican mastard; anything but Brazilian. Oh! unfortunate Vivian Grey!"
Among numerous ornaments the most common is a large round concave portion of melon shell, sometimes beautifully inlaid with filagree work of tortoise-shell, worn on the breast. Fillets of cassowary feathers, fur of the spotted bare-tailed opossum, or woven stuff studded with shells, were often seen.
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