Appendix.
I have said nothing of Colonel Arthur's project for capturing the aborigines—a scheme that was devised and attempted in 1830; and I shall here say as little as I can of this absurd passage in the history of the colony.
The ill advised operations that he then undertook against so clever and crafty a foe, that have received the designation of the "Black War," (whereby he thought to enclose them within a moving line, advancing from north to south on a point of the coast, where two large peninsulas are united with the main by a narrow isthmus called East Bay Neck) was too chimerical in its conception, too absurd in its progress, and too inconsiderable in its results, to deserve serious notice. A line of troops and ready volunteers and others, numbering more than 4,000[1] persons, was stretched across the midland and eastern districts, to advance in thin but regular array. These districts, though open and level in some parts, are, as a whole, woody and very hilly; and as unfavourable for military operations of any kind, unless perhaps defensive ones, as it is possible to imagine. No such line could possibly move in such a country, with any degree of regularity; nor could the necessary communications be kept up. Some of the many intervening eminences have more the aspect and general character of mountains than of ordinary hills, and here and there are so covered with underwood that a rat could hardly creep through; others are precipitous, and most of them very steep. The late Captain Vicary, of the 63rd, told me that in crossing a very rugged eminence, called the Blue-hill, between the Clyde and Shannon Rivers, with his company, each man marching as usual a few yards apart, the regularity of their advance was wholly broken in ten minutes, and to use his own expression, "The devil a man of them did he see the whole of the rest of the day;" and this was- ↑ See Melville's "Van Diemen's Land Annual" (1833) page 94.
