Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/65

Rh Sorell. This man was George Augustus Robinson, to whom Tasmania owed, but very imperfectly paid such a debt, as none but he could have laid it under, in removing from their ancient haunts, every remaining member, excepting four individuals who had escaped his notice, of the sixteen tribes of natives whom he found still in existence, (for several tribes whom he enumerates had wholly died out before) when he undertook the seemingly hopeless task of transplanting them, firstly to Swan, next to Vansittart's or Guncarriage, and finally to Flinder's Islands. They were truly an aggressive race, and the colonists of Tasmania, caluminated as they have been, were never more libelled than by those scribblers, who have described them as uniformly, or even generally, the assailants of the primitive inhabitants of this country.

In the long warfare that ensued between black and white, after their disconnection, as described foregoingly, the aboriginals, with some, but not very many exceptions, began every skirmish, our own race having generally by far the worst of the fight; and if during the historic age of Tasmania, the blacks diminished from several thousands to a very few hundreds, it was owing far more to sickness than strife that they were thus thinned out—sickness, taking the form of fatal catarrhal complaints, that sent them by thousands to the grave.

Forcible measures having quite failed to subdue, or even seriously to damage these people, or to check their unceasing aggressions, Robinson tried other means with them, namely, pacific overtures and conciliation; and what could not be effected by the combined action of several thousand armed men, he and they who acted under him achieved, without using violence of any kind: and in about five or five and a half years (between 1829 and 1834) he succeeded in removing every one of them who were left, with the slight exception named above, from the mainland of Tasmania.

I will now take leave to give the details of some of his many pursuits after them, which he continued to make with the most unremitting perseverance at all seasons, and often under circumstances most adverse to success, for five years, during which the native tribes fell one by one into the snare; for, beyond doubt, they were the victims of the well-devised and cleverly-conducted artifices of a man from whom they had no more chance of escaping than a fly has when entangled in the web of the spider.

His first enterprise against them, undertaken at the end of December, 1829, was quite an unsuccessful one, and excited nothing but derision, and, of course, increased his discredit with