their hands; and M'Entire spoke to them in their own language, when one of them, without the least warning, sent a spear into his left side. The wound was pronounced by the surgeons to be mortal; then, writes Tench:—
'The poor wretch … began to utter the most dreadful exclamations, and to accuse himself of the commission of crimes of the deepest dye, accompanied with such expressions of his despair of God's mercy as are too terrible to repeat. He lingered until the 20th of January, and then expired. From the aversion uniformly shewn by all the natives to this unhappy man, he had long been suspected by us of having in his excursions shot and injured them. To gain information on this head from him, the moment of contrition was seized. On being questioned with great seriousness, he, however, declared that he had never fired but once on a native, and then had not killed, but severely wounded him, and this in his own defence. Notwithstanding this death-bed confession, most people doubted the truth of the relation, from his general character and other circumstances.'
Believing that the murder of M'Entire was quite unprovoked, the Governor was determined to inflict a stern punishment upon the natives. He, like many other cultured men, no doubt thought that that instinctive desire to kill strangers, so predominant in savage races, and termed bloodthirsty treachery by
