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 One of my informants, a settler of 1804, said that the officer, Lieutenant Moore, saw double that morning from an over-dose of rations' rum. Several have assured me of the good feeling between the two races before that event. The reputation which the soldiers of the New South Wales corps, afterwards the 102d Regiment, earned for drinking propensities, and their officers for spirit-dealing, in the primitive times, led some to think that the whole was the effect of a half-drunken spree, and that the firing arose from a brutal desire to see the Niggers run.

That excellent storyteller. Captain Holman, the Blind Traveller round the world, who made such capital use of the eyes of other people, has left us a statement he learned in 1831, when on a visit to Mr. Gregson, the veteran Tasmanian Reformer. The Blind Traveller heard the story on the identical spot of the massacre (for Mr. Gregson's house was at Risdon), and thus narrates it:—

"It is said to have originated in the following manner. A small stone house had been erected for a gardener, and he was commencing the cultivation of the ground immediately around it. In the midst of his work one day, he was surprised at the appearance of some Natives advancing towards him, and ran off much frightened to the camp to give the alarm. Lieutenant Moore, who commanded a party of the 102d, drew up his men to resist the expected attack; and, on the approach of the Natives, the soldiers were ordered to fire upon them. The execution this volley did among them, and their ignorance of the nature of fire-arms, terrified them to such a degree that they fled, without attempting the slightest defence. From this moment a deep-rooted hatred for the strangers sprang up among them, and all endeavours to subdue it had hitherto proved ineffectual."

When I was in Sydney last year, exploring dusty receptacles of officialdom, and examining the early literature of New South Wales, for facts connected with colonial history, I met with some remarkable paragraphs in the Sydney Gazette, the parent of the Australian Press, which commenced its being in 1803. The first, occurring in the paper of March 18, 1804, is particularly interesting, as giving us the first notice of the state and feeling of the Tasmanians at the landing of the Derwent party from Sydney, and before the terrible day of slaughter. The Lady Nelson had conveyed Lieutenant Bowen and his company to