he had acquired an ascendancy so complete over those of these simple minded savages whom he had subdued to his service, as to have left them almost literally without the faculty of volition. Hence he often urged them on enterprises of danger that they would have willingly evaded, had it been permitted them to consult their own inclinations. In several of his official reports, he acknowledges engaging them in embassies so fraught with peril, that death seemed the certain consequence of their obedience. All his interviews with the still unsubdued tribes, were preceded by negotiations first opened by his "friendly natives," as he calls these humble agents, in which Truganini took so prominent a part, that it is said when the deluded blacks found themselves prisoners, they often taunted her with being the author of their downfall. (See Tasmanian Tribune, 9th of May, 1876). But the poor woman could have had no idea of the doom that awaited them.
To other services this community, and prominently Robinson himself, owed this last survivor of a now wholly extinct nation, was his own preservation from death in the midst of his useful career; when she displayed such courage as was creditable to her in a very high degree. The details of this adventure, where these two, after a savage assault on the lives of their party by a horde of infuriated blacks, were separated from the others and driven into the Arthur River, where but for her he must have perished, are given in a former page. In his official reports of this repulse, he does not indicate the woman who preserved him; but in his private conversations he always named her as the one to whom he owed his escape. Of those to whom he related it some are still in life.
The age of Truganini has been recently computed to be seventy-three; but this is a mistake for she was not nearly so old. At the time of her capture, 16th of January, 1830, she was only about eighteen, which fixes he birth, approximately, at 1812. Her age was therefore but little over sixty-four. Her birth, it may be presumed, happened when Colonel Andrew Geils administered the Government of Tasmania.
Throughout this history, wherever her name occurs, I have adopted the orthography of Robinson, namely, Truganini. But I have lately been informed by Mr. J. W. Graves, who has paid particular attention to her own pronunciation of it, that it should be spelled Trucanini, which is the term by which her tribe designated a plant found by the sea side, which we call barilla.
