His first port of call was King George Sound near present-day Albany. Dumont d’Urville led an extraordinary life. In 1810 he purchased the Venus de Milo from a Greek peasant—it had arms then, but these were broken off in a tussle for the priceless object between the French and Turkish soldiers. He later explored in Australia, the subantarctic and elsewhere. He died in a train crash in Versailles in 1842. In King George Sound in October 1826, the expedition scientists Jean René Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard wrote detailed notes on the Aborigines they encountered there which formed part of Dumont d’Urville’s original expedition report. The natives of King George Sound are generally below average height; however, there were some quite tall ones among the twenty-five to thirty of them that we were able to see. At first sight one is struck by their thinness and the diminutiveness of their lower limbs, but this tendency does not appear to be peculiar to these people; it is due to the miserable state in which they live and lack of sufficient nourishment to develop those parts.
