Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/22

14 never more known to visit the house of the settler, or the hut of the stock-keeper except as enemies.

Many of the tribes were united by relationship or other ties, and Colonel Arthur was soon made to understand that the example of these executions had quite the opposite effect to what he expected, for the aggressiveness of the enemy increased ten-fold from the time when they took place.

I have spoken before of the conduct of a few persons called sealers, as ministering to the bad feeling that so long prevailed amongst the natives towards the other race, and I will here say something about them.

These men dwelt on some of the islands in Bass's Straits, and the very worst accounts are given of them by the official protector of the blacks, Mr. G. A. Robinson; and though his statements are very generally confirmed by the prior evidence of some of the witnesses of the Aboriginal Committee, they are not quite so in every particular. Two of these gentlemen, who knew the sealers quite as well as he did, though they loudly denounced the brutality of some of them, accompany their testimony, as to their original possession of the native women, with some slightly palliative circumstances, which he, in his hatred of these men, either overlooked, or was ignorant of.

From the earliest times of the occupation of the country, a horde of reprobates lived on these islands, quite beyond the range of human observation, and equally beyond the controlling power of the Government. They consisted mostly of a mixed class of runaway convicts, of bad character and disposition, and of runaway sailors as profligate as themselves. They lived by collecting the beautiful skins of the seal, which formerly frequented the off-lying rocks of these islands in vast numbers, and are still to be found there, but so greatly thinned are they, and so shy that they are no longer sought after, or not much. These persons often resorted to the coasts of the main land to obtain kangaroo skins, in which they also traded; and if all that Robinson says of them is quite true, they never failed attacking the native tribes who frequented these parts, whenever and wherever they met them, carrying off their women and female children into slavery of the worst description, and shooting the men if they dared to interpose; and he gives such instances of their after cruelties to their captives as can hardly be read with patience. That there was great truth in what he said on this subject is indisputable, for he was quite fortified by the previous evidence of Captains Kelly and Hobbs, who had had accidentally, so to speak, much intercourse with these men in their own various coasting enterprises of discovery, survey, or whaling. But the protector