Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/98

90 The following incidents of the war, as it was carried on, on the North East Coast, are offered as illustrations of the many savage but unrecorded encounters that took place in the Cape Portland districts about 50 years ago, between the straitsmen and blacks, and may be relied on as perfectly authentic narratives:—

In about 1826, there were living on Guncarriage, now Vansittart Island, Bass' Straits, a number of sealers, that is to say several parties of them, who worked in gangs of fours or fives. Each party was furnished with a first class boat, suitable for the perilous enterprises they were so often engaged in on the rocks of the Straits, (then much resorted to by the beautiful fur-seal), often requiring them to undertake long boat voyages from group to group, during the breeding season; or to the mainlands of Australia or Tasmania as kangaroo hunters, which occupation, after the seals left our coasts, they followed as a branch of their calling.

Of these parties one was headed by a man named Duncan, who was the owner of one of these clipping boats. This person had formerly been the mate of a ship, and the crew he now worked with consisted of himself—two men who were natives of Sydney—and one other named Thomas Tucker, the last named person taking chief part in the transactions that I am about to give an account of.

Of this man Tucker, however it may have happened that he now followed the half savage life of a sealer in Bass' Straits, (a quarter then too often the refugium of men of bad character and practises,) was a gentleman by birth, education, &c., and had once held a commission in the Royal Navy; and in writing of times when Tasmania was a convict colony, it may be as well to say, that he was always a free person. A love of perilous enterprise and wild adventure, I presume it was, that threw him amongst the sealers of Bass' Straits.

He is described to me as a rather extraordinary person, of great natural talents, and acquired endowments, having had an excellent education and careful home training in youth. He was a very ingenious fellow, who could turn his hand to anything, and was therefore perfectly self-reliant, and it is believed that up to the present time his moral character was not a bad one.

He was the most daring, active and servicableserviceable [sic] man in the Straits; and it has to be said to his credit, that he made a better use of the good training he himself had received, than almost any other person would voluntarily have done, in educating gratuitously the sealers' children, during such periods of leisure as he could snatch from his adventurous calling.