some others took advantage of a robbery at Hamilton, and charged it upon an inoffensive tribe in the neighbourhood. Without warning, an expedition was fitted out in the night, and a terrible slaughter took place. The miserable remnant were infuriated at the treachery and cruelty, and revenged themselves by years of outrage and murder. Mr. Shoobridge's father was dining with a country settler, when a man came in, and called out, "Well, Master! I've shot three more crows to-day,"—meaning, Blacks.
The Rev. Mr. West did not exaggerate when he wrote: "The wounded were brained; the infant cast into the flames; the musket was driven into the quivering flesh; and the social fire, around which the Natives gathered to slumber, became, before morning, their funeral pile." The Courier of June 11, 1836, admits that "thousands were hunted down like wild beasts, and actually destroyed." M. Domény de Rienzi, the historian of the Marion's visit to Van Diemen's Land, had the same opinion. "One cannot deny," he says, in 1837, "that these unfortunates have been often treated like wild beasts. Is it then astonishing that they should seek the means of avenging themselves on the strangers who have taken from them the island where they were born, the fruits which nourished them, and even the places where the bones of their fathers repose?"
The Launceston Advertiser, mourning over the oft-repeated tale of horrors, exclaims, "We have seen the Natives despoiled of their lands by a strange race of men, and we have seen them ill-treated by the invaders, their provisions destroyed, and their lives cruelly and wantonly taken by men whose nation proudly boasts of her inhabitants being the most civilized and most noble-souled creatures on the face of the globe." The learned Dr. Broca asserts that the English "have committed upon the Tasmanian race, and that in the nineteenth century, execrable atrocities a hundred times less excusable than the hitherto unrivalled crimes of which the Spaniards were guilty in the sixteenth century in the Antilles."
The public mind gets callous by the continuance of scenes of blood, as the history of the French Revolution testifies. For the character of our colonies, we could wish that such a paragraph as the following, in the year 1826, had never seen the light: "Let them have enough of Redcoats and bullet fare.
