Page:Last of the tasmanians.djvu/303

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THE LAST OF THE TASMANIANS.

be accomplished without any unnecessary delay, Mr. Milligan's arrival will take place on or about the first proximo, when you will have the goodness to hand over the charge to that gentleman, and be prepared to return to Van Diemen's Land by the same vessel which conveys him to the settlement."

In vain ever since has Dr. Jeanneret sought compensation for the harshness of his treatment. It may be some satisfaction for him to know that, when I was at Oyster Cove a dozen years after, his name was spoken of with respect by the Natives. Even one of them, who had before opposed him, declared him to be a just and good man; and another asserted that he kept the bad men from troubling them there, and that they were far happier on Flinders than ever they had been since. But the easy, jovial, rotund Irishman, with his laughing wit, his demonstrative sympathy, his affectionate language, his companionable nature, was naturally preferred to the more scholarly, upright, but externally colder. Superintendent.

Dr. Jeanneret was virtually the last Superintendent of Flinders Island. He remained to see the embarkation of the Natives under his successor. Dr. Milligan, all bound for Oyster Cove, in D'Entrecasteaux Channel.

After the departure of the people, the island was let with the stock to Captain Smith, at a rental of 100l. a year. The Bishop in 1854 thus moralized over the past: "Nearly eleven years have passed since I landed on the self-same rocks with Sir John Franklin. How changed the scene! Then, the beach was covered with the Aborigines, who greeted their kind and loved benefactor with yells of delight; capering and gesticulating with movements more indicative of exuberant, wild joy, than of elegance or propriety. Now all this is still. It was painful to witness the scene of ruin in the once neat and well-ordered settlement. Desolation stared me in the face, wherever the eye was turned: the comfortable house of the Superintendent rapidly falling to decay; the gardens well-nigh rooted up; the range of buildings in which the Aborigines were formerly hutted, untenanted, broken, and tumbling down."

But a more indignant letter was published in 1862, describing the visit of Mr. Nantes. Arriving at Settlement Point, he exclaims: "This is the spot that was chosen by the Van Diemen's Land Government for the settlement of the Natives when