Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/100

92 landed on one of the beaches near Cape Portland, on land now the property of Mr. John Foster, of Hobart Town, and formed their camp under the shelter of one of the low hummocks that lie along the shore-line of this quarter.

Duncan, who had been frequently engaged in feuds against the blacks, and hitherto successfully, led the fray; Tucker remaining in charge of the boat and encampment, and Duncan's son was left in his care.

The leader was a very fool-hardy fellow, and some previous successes had inspired him with such a contempt of the blacks, that it was his boast to say he was a match for any number of them. Taking his woman to act as negotiator with them, he started along with his mates in search of the Cape Portland tribe. Tucker entreated him again and again to arm his party, but could not prevail on his unreasonable mate to hear of such a thing. What, he asked, did he want with arms against mere naked black-fellows? any number of whom he could beat single-handed, whether armed or not; and accompanied as he was now by two such men as his Sydney companions, there was nothing to fear from a hundred of them, and at parting, jeeringly told his more prudent counsellor to have no fears of him, and that he would be back before night, bringing a dozen girls with him for him to choose from.

Instances of rashness like Duncan's were not uncommon on the frontier grounds of the colony during the thirty years fight between black and white. Thus Simmonds' Bay (a nook of Barnes' Bay, North Bruny) is called after a lime-burner, who sacrificed his life to a senseless feeling of contempt for the courage of the black men. This beautiful cove was great a place of great resort of the Bruny tribe, and their intrusions, as Simmonds thought them, were resented by him, as though they, and not he, were the trespassers on the ground he occupied, and they were ordered off whenever they came. Mistaking his commands for requests, they were at first complied with. But finding them so frequently repeated, they got tired of them at last. On these occasions, it was his custom to take a stick with him to beat them off if necessary. The last notice that Simmonds gave them to quit was late in November of 1822; but they began to understand him by this time, and laughed in his face for his impertinence, whereon he struck the one nearest him. But this was the last act of his life, for the offended black turned on him like a tiger, drove his spear through hun, and he was a dead man the next moment.

Duncan's woman soon got traces of the tribe they were in pursuit of, and came on their huts it is believed in the afternoon, or even earlier. The Cape Portland natives hated the sealers,