A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People — page 94: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A QUEER RACE. 91 Fane and he went down as they had come up. ‘The strength and activity displayed by the younger man were really marvelous. Without apparent effort, he swung himself over the bulwark by one hand, seized a rope with the other, and dropped into the boat as lightly as a monkey. He was about the finest, perhaps the very finest, specimen of the geuus homo I had yet seen. Though I stand six feet in my stockings, he overtopped me by three inches; his chest aevelopment was quite phenomenal, and his long arms were as muscular as a horse’s leg. His features, too, were good, and but for the queerness of his complexion I should have considered him handsome; afterward, when piebald skins ceased to be a novelty, I did consider him handsome. He had a broad, though rather low forehead, short black hair, large dark eyes, the whites being singularly clear, an aquiline nose, small mouth, and square, resolute jaws. His head, albeit hardly large enough for his broad shoulders and lofty stature, was shapely, and °‘ well set on;” he carried himself magnificently, and his move- ments were as lithe, as graceful, and as unconstrained as those of any of the great feline. The contrast between him and the crew of the boat was both startling and painful. Thesix rowers were the most hideous creatures | had even seen, ever 1n a nightmare. Their predominating color was deep black, dabbed with red and yellow patches in a singularly arbitrary and irreg- ular fashion. Thus, one man had a red nose in the mid- dle of an otherwise jet-black face. Another had a red mouth; another, again—and I think he was the most hor- rible-looking of the lot—had red eyelids and a red upper lip, all the rest of his visor being of the deepest ebony. Add that the pupils of their eyes were indistinguishable from the iris, and the whites large and streaked with blood, their noses huge and flat, their mouths wide, with blubber, negro-like lips, their foreheads narrow and tat- tooed, and that they wore bone rings in pendulous ears, and you may form some idea of the appearance of these Calibans (the name, as I afterward heard, actually be- stowed on them by the islanders). In stature they were rather short, yet less so than might seem, owing to the great width of their shoulders and the muscularity of their frames. Every man of them was a squat Hercules; Gomicboo “S (EO)