Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/85

Rh listening. The unflinching heroine walked straight to it and fired on him, but as might be expected of one of her sex, unaccustomed to the use of arms, missed him, and he fled to the woods.

The horsemen whose advance the natives had heard, now galloped up, and rescued the lady from her perilous positonposition [sic], and she was eventually restored by them to her recreant husband.

In a previous part of this paper, I have had occasion to speak of the frequency with which murder and other outrage was done by the primitive inhabitants of this country on the colonists, and of the savage violence with which they treated any victim who fell into their hands, instances of which came to light almost every week, but particularly at those times when the natives were on the move from district to district, or from the coasts into the interior and vice versa; their migrations frequently extending over large portions of the island. These ever recurring instances of slaughter, fire-raising, &c., &c., kept the colonists in a state of constant ferment and excitement such as a few of the present generation can have any conception of; and the conversations of every fire-side related in some form or other to these deplorable acts of the natives, which but for the will of the Almighty in afflicting them with sickness in a very fatal form, might, and most probably would have continued to this hour; for with the advantages they possessed of a most difficult country for an European to advance through, it is not easy to understand how they could have been put down, had the tribes remained at anything like their original strength.

But of all the murders that were committed on our race by this people, none that I recollect caused the same amount of regret and consternation as were felt at the deaths of Captain Bartholomew Boyle Thomas, and his faithful farm overseer Mr. James Parker, who died by the hands of the blacks on the 31st of August, 1831; that is to say by the hands of a detachment of the Big River tribe, then encamped very far away from the river by the name of which they were known to the colonists, namely, at Port Sorell on the North Coast.

Captain Thomas had settled in Tasmania about five years before the date indicated above, landing in Hobart Town from the ship Albion on the 3rd of May, 1826. He came hither as manager of an Agricultural Company that had been formed in England the year before—a season known in commercial history as the Year of Bubbles, when all sorts of mad projects that an inordinate thirst for gain could beget, were afloat in England,