'Why not, since he lives with you, speaks your tongue, wears your dress, and uses your implements?' Then with scornful expressions of countenance and angry intonation, they summed up all by declaring that he was neither a white man nor a black man, and added, in pure English, 'He is no good.' Bill, on the other hand, being asked, after the interview, what he thought of his countrymen, replied, 'Oh! they are dirty brutes;' and added, 'I don't like Black fellows, they are a dirty, lazy set.' "
The occupation of sealers and their aboriginal companions would lead one to the natural history of the seal, chased by the men, and the mutton-bird, caught by the women.
The seal of the Straits early excited the acquisitiveness of the new settlers of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. Mr. Flinders, when in those waters in 1798, describes the creatures as "thousands of timid animals." Of his disturbance of one community, near the Furneaux group, he thus speaks: "Those who have seen a farmyard, well stocked with pigs, calves, sheep, oxen, and with two or three litters of puppies, with their mothers, in it, may form a good idea of the confused noise of the seals at Cove Point. The sailors killed as many of these harmless, and not unamiable creatures, as they were able to skin during the time necessary for me to take the requisite angles; and we then left the poor affrighted multitude to recover from the effects of our inauspicious visit." It is somewhat singular that the discoverer, so to speak, of the Straits' seals, and the discoverer of Flinders Island, should have been thus indirectly associated with the extinction of the furred animal and the dark-skinned man.
Mr. Flinders also led the sealers to Kangaroo Island. When he discovered the place in 1801, he found the kangaroos and seals had passed so undisturbed an existence in this paradise of theirs, that, upon the approach of the sailors, the seals gazed upon them with complacency, from the probable likeness to the kangaroo, and the hopping animal confronted them without fear, from the supposed resemblance they bore to the crawling seal. Both parties were, unfortunately, soon made aware of the difference, and of the termination of their golden age, by the advent of a cruel iron one.
Captain Collins, who had the story of the Straits discovery from Mr. Bass, tells us: "The males, who possessed a rock to
