Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/19

Rh their own arms in both fight and chase—namely, the spear and waddy.

Of firearms they had learned the use from both men and women of their own race, who, having been taken in early infancy by the settlers, were brought up in their own families, mostly as their own children; but they invariably left them when they grew up, and rejoined their own people, just like wood-pigeons, whose natural instincts can never be repressed. To these flights the youths were generally induced by the girls of their own race, with whom alone they could intermarry, and who had, therefore, no difficulty in enticing them into the woods. The natural propensity of the domesticated black females to be with their own people, operated similarly on them, and they became the instructors, in mischief at least, of the wild natives, and strangely enough, were foremost in every aggression on the whites, by whom, with hardly an exception, they had been treated with unvarying kindness, but they were probably thrust to the front by the others; and, possessed, as the whole race was, of most excellent memories, they never lost the language of our country.

Women, too, who had been either forcibly removed from their tribes, or purchased of their husbands or fathers, by a lawless handful of ruffians called sealers, sometimes escaped from their merciless masters, and after years of separation, rejoined their tribes, and became the most hostile of the enemies of all who belonged to the race of their persecutors; and notwithstanding the ancient custom of the blacks, not to permit the women to take any part in active war, these individuals could not be restrained from joining in, and sometimes leading the attack. One of these persons, called the Amazon by her captor Robinson, (a woman of one of the East Coast tribes whose real name was Walyer or Taierenore) planned and executed nearly every outrage that was committed in the districts bordering on the North and North-western coast. In the days of their decay, she collected the poor remnants of several tribes into one hostile band, of whom she was the leader and chieftainess; and true to the natural instincts of the savage, avenged the many indignities she had suffered at the hands of a sealer, on every one she fell in with who bore his complexion, telling Robinson that she would kill the whole race "as soon as she would crush a black snake."

But in their attacks on the widely separated dwellings of the stock-keepers, they were not always successful; and several instances are recorded of their defeat, and once by the intrepidity of a woman, who held her little fortress for six hours against