Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/80

72 they had an abundance of their most favourite diet.

But death which was now demolishing this people, well nigh as rapidly as he could cut them down, followed on their tracks, and overtook them here also; and 13 of them succumbed to his shafts within the first fortnight of their landing on the Hunters. The doom of numbers of them appears to have been greatly accelerated by removal from their ancient haunts, and the partial adoption, perhaps too hastily, of European habits. Thus in 1829, when he gathered together a couple of score of them on Bruny Island, 22 of them died between the 12th of June and the 23rd of September of that year, in other words in about 15 weeks. (Report, 23rd of September, 1829.) This mortality was also very rapid at their little village, which they called Wyba-Luma, at Flinders Island, where Robinson says about 250 were landed altogether, of whom 120 had gone to the grave, by the date of his general report on their condition of "July 1836;" of the remaining 130 (exclusive of a few births that happened at Wyba-Luma) 46 only were living, on the removal of the establishment to Oyster Cove in 1847, the great majority of whom were young or middle-aged persons when taken and landed there. When I visited Oyster Cove eight years afterwards, April 1855, 30 of this miserable remnant were lying in the little graveyard of the Cove, and at this moment of writing, one only (Robinson's first and principal decoy-duck) survives to mourn over the fall, and possibly to deplore, the active share she had in the ruin of her race.

I have but a few more words to say about the captives on Hunter's Island, and these are only to describe the rapidity of their decay, when sickness seized upon them; and here again I must quote from Robinson, who was the eye-witness of these death-bed scenes. Speaking first of his domesticated blacks, he says, he is happy to say that they are in a state of "invalescence," for he is fond of unusual words; but he "regrets to state that the strangers have been subjected to a severe mortality, and out of the 27 of the last removed, 13 are defunct. This dire malady," he says, "had every appearance of an epedemic, the patient seldom living longer than 48 hours after being attacked. All ages and sexes fell victims to its ravages, and they generally expired in a state of delirium. They were all in apparent health when first brought to the settlement."

It would be tiresome to pursue him in his other hard and long journeys, after the residue of the blacks who dwelt either in the interior districts or the west coasts. It is enough to say that in the end he removed them all except four. The last tribe that was brought in was captured by his son G. A. Robinson, on the 28th December, 1834. It consisted of only eight persons.