Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/255

Rh not wonder about the people who first made known these beautiful lands around me as I write? To me, each one of these First Men has a surpassing interest, unconscious as they often are that they are doing or have done anything. Scarcely a spot here have I seen but a white man's blood has dyed the ground; they are forgotten, uncared for, yet each one in losing his life did something, and a great deal, to make it a necessity that those who come after should be in less peril, and so bit by bit the land is won.

[Poor, simple Frau Wolff could never have dreamt that in the annals of New Guinea she is to be an historic character, one of the first white women in the land, and whose life was lost for and by it; or how through her fate men said sternly to one another, “It must never be again; we are to be masters here,and the lives of our women sacred.” For one white woman hundreds of black men die in reality; for it is never forgotten in such communities, and is in the minds of men when they wreak vengeance on their enemies, and it steels their hands and hearts against mercy.]

In the colony of Victoria I have known the original black inhabitants of the land; seen and where are they now? Vanished, as if they had never been! Surely a strange and terrible thing—the work, was it, of wicked, ruthless, greedy men, or simply the ordained will of God? It is a troublous thought. Here too it is to be the same; undoubtedly in no far distant time these Papuans will cease to exist. Are such races the so degenerated descendants of some mighty race of the past that the Creator will have no more of them and decrees their extinction? It is all perplexing. As to the converting of them to Christianity—by methods entirely opposed to the teaching of Christ—the “civilising” of them, we all know it is a