Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/647

 AT BOTANY BAY. 523 endeavour by every possible means to acquire and cultivate the 1788 friendship of the natives of such places as he might discover or visit, and to avoid exercising any act of hostility upon them. There is nothing here to justify the statement that the natives had been " wantonly fired upon," even if it might be inferred that some of them were killed. As to the small-pox, the evidence against spreading the French has been collected by Kusden, vol. i, p. 134n. It con- sists substantially of two assertions : (1) That " the early settlers, when able to converse with the natives, came to the conclusion that small-pox had been introduced by the French " ; and (2) that " the natives (in the far interior) concurred in declaring that only at that epoch were its ravages heard of amongst the tribes, and none but the aged bore traces of it in 1835." The testimony of the early settlers and the natives, thus alleged, amounts to nothing more than ti-adition, and is not entitled to any weight unless it can be connected with ascertained facts. The facts here are altogether against the tradition. Among " the early settlers," the best witnesses are the men who made it their business to ascertain oontom- and record in their journals every fact of interest or importance SStnSses. that came within the range of their observation. Both Collins (p. 65, 597) and Hunter (p. 134) record the outbreak of the small-pox in April, 1789 ; but neither of them makes any reference to the French in connection with it Had there been any reason to suppose that it had been introduced by them, it is not likely that either of those chroniclers would have omitted to say so. Their silence on that point may be easily accounted for. The simple fact that the disease did not make its appearance until April, 1789, more than twelve months after the French ships had Kosiirns sailed, is enough to show that there could not have been any reason twelve' for connecting the two things together. Had the germs of the ™°"*^*- disease been introduced by the French, it could not have failed to make itself known very soon after thfeir departure ; and if any of the Frenchmen had been suffering from it while in Botany Bay, the fact could not have escaped the notice of the English officers, who frequently exchanged visits with the sti'angers. The only foundation for the supposition seems to lie in an allusion contained in one of Phillip's despatches, in which he said : — Phillip's "Whether the small-pox, which has proved fatal to great ^^ numbers of the natives, is a disorder to which they were subject before any Europeans visited the country, or whether it was Digitized by Google