Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/23

Rh shirks the question of this traffic in women, which the others, who hated these men quite as much as him, impute chiefly to the native men, who first bartered their women for the carcass of the seal or for hunting dogs. These unfortunate women became so useful to their masters, that when they could not get enough of them by purchase they kidnapped them, but made no active war on the blacks until the latter rose against them in a body and killed four of them, "since which time," says Robinson, "the sealers have shot the natives whenever they have met with them." (Appendix, Report 24th Oct., 1830,. [sic]) These kidnappings contributed largely to the decay of two or three tribes less by their onslaughts on the men than the seizure of the women; and the protector, in one of his many reports on the condition of the natives, gives the names (mostly unpronouncable ones) of every individual then remaining of two of the tribes, who lived within reach of these fellows, viz.., [sic] 74, of whom only three were females; and two of these three did not belong properly to either tribe, being only visitors.

"This vast disproportion of the sexes," he says, in his report, 20th Nov., 1830, "has been occasioned principally by the sealers, who have stolen their women and transported them to the different islands." And in a marginal note against this passage, he says, "there are at the present time not less than 50 aboriginal females kept in slavery on the different islands in Banks' and Bass's Straits. (Banks' Strait separates the islands he refers to from the main land of Tasmania). But many of these women were, no doubt, obtained by purchase in former years, a practice which in those days was not confined to them, but was universal. But this is a matter that Robinson does not touch on.

To recapture these women and take them under his own protection was always a pet scheme of his, and the means by which he effected it were not always very straightforward or always approved by the Government he served, who made him restore some of them, who, if they were slaves, as he constantly represents them, were the mothers of the sealers' children. No doubt the conduct of these men, like that of other slave-dealers, was very bad, but he seems to have painted it as disadvantageously as he could. Captain Kelly—no friend of the sealer—states that many of the women preferred living on the islands rather than return to their own people, by whom it is well known they were often very badly treated. "The women," Kelly says, in his evidence, "were not always unwilling to go, and after a time preferred stopping on the islands of the straits." He then gives such a fearful account of the torments some of them endured, especially from one miscreant named Harrington, that if they