Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/16

8 ceeded next day to the field of slaughter, along with one of the heroes of the fight, a corporal of the 40th Regiment; but, on reaching the ravine, the only victims of their fury were found to be three dead dogs. The soldier then said—"To tell you the truth, we did not kill any of them; we had been out a long time, and had done nothing, and said it in bravado."—(Evidence, 4th March, 1830.) These two examples of a hundred such battles will probably be enough.

That many hostile collisions occurred between the two races during the 30 years that succeeded the first colonisation of the country is true enough; but I know of no trustworthy record of more than one, two, three, or at most four persons being killed in any one encounter. The warfare, though pretty continuous, was rather a petty affair, with grossly exaggerated details—something like the story of the hundred dead men, reduced, on inquiry, to three dead dogs.

The gradual decrease and final extinction of the ancient inhabitants of Tasmania, which is now so very nearly accomplished, is assignable to very different causes than the hostility of the whites, to which it has been so much the fashion to ascribe it; for, up to the time of their voluntary surrender to the local Government, they not only maintained their ground everywhere (the towns excepted), but had by far the best of the fight. Tribal dissensions, causing mutual destruction (for such were their jealousies and hatreds, that they fought one another all the time they were thrashing the whites), contributed to their decrease in some degree, and the justly provoked hostility of the settlers aided the progress of their decay, but only in minor manner; for, beyond all doubt, they were no match for the blacks in bush fighting, either in defensive or offensive operations. The settler and his homestead were generally, but not always successfully, surprised by his subtle enemy; and in pursuit (if the savages were beaten off), the less active European, stood about the same chance of coming up with him, as the slow hound would have in a deer chase; and as far as I can learn from a pretty attentive perusal of the massive correspondence on the subject of the long quarrel between the two races, that is deposited in the office of the Colonial Secretary, filling nineteen awful volumes of manuscript papers, aggressiveness was almost always on the side of the blacks; and in this unequal contest the musket of the Englishman was far less deadly than the spear of the savage, at least five of the former dying for one of the latter. Thus, in the first and largest volume of the series above spoken of, which treats solely of these encounters, we learn that in the five years preceding the close of 1831, 99 inquests were held on such of the white