“Now their kraals and our fathers’ kraals were separate. The boors made commandoes on our fathers. Our fathers drove them out of the Zureveld. We dwelt there because we had conquered it. There we married wives, and there our children were born. The white men hated us, but they could not drive us away. When there was war, we plundered you. When there was peace, some of our bad people stole; but our chiefs forbade it. Your treacherous friend, Gaika, always had peace with you, yet, when his people stole he shared in the plunder. Have your patroles ever, in time of peace, found cattle, runaway slaves, or deserters in the kraals of our chiefs? Have they ever gone into Gaika’s country without finding such cattle, such slaves, such deserters in Gaika’s kraals? But he was your friend; and you wished to possess the Zureveld. You came at last like locusts.69 We stood; we could do no more. You said, ‘Go over the Fish River—that is all we want.’ We yielded, and came here. We lived in peace. Some bad people stole, perhaps; but the nation was quiet—the chiefs were quiet. Gaika stole—his chiefs stole—his people stole. You sent him copper; you sent him beads; you sent him horses—on which he rode to steal more. To us you sent only commandoes!
“We quarrelled with Gaika about grass—no business of yours. You sent a commando.70 You took our last cow. You left only a few calves, which died for want, along with our children. You gave half the spoil to Gaika—half you kept yourselves. Without milk—our corn destroyed, we saw our wives and children perish—we saw that we must ourselves perish. We fought for our lives—we failed—and you are here. Your troops cover the plains and swarm in the thickets, where they cannot distinguish the men from the women, and shoot all.71
“You want us to submit to Gaika. That man’s face is fair to you, but his heart is false; leave him to himself, and we shall not call on you for help. Set Makanna at liberty; and Islambi, Dushani, Kongo, and the rest, will come to make peace with you at any time you fix. But if you will make war, you may indeed kill the last man of us; but Gaika shall not rule over the followers of those who think him a woman.”72
It is said that this energetic address, containing so many awful truths, affected some of those who heard it even to tears. But what followed? The Caffres were still sternly commanded to deliver up their other chiefs; treachery is said to have been used to compass it, but in vain; so the English made a desert of the whole country, and carried off 30,000 head of cattle.73 Makanna was sent to Cape-Town, and thence transported to Robben Island, a spot appropriated to felons and malefactors doomed to work in irons. Here, in an attempt with some few followers to effect his escape, he was drowned by the upsetting of the boat, and died cheering his unfortunate companions till the billows swept him from a rock to which he clung.74
The English had hitherto gratified their avarice and bad passions with their usual freedom in their colonies, on those who had no further connexion with them than happening to possess goodly herds under their eye; but now they turned their hand upon their friend and ally, Gaika. Having devoured, by his aid, his countrymen, they were ready now to devour him. Gaika was called upon to give up a large portion of Caffre land, that is, from the Fish River to the Keisi and Chumi rivers—a tract which added about 2,000 square miles to our own boundaries. This he yielded most reluctantly, and only on condition that the basin of the Chumi, a beautiful piece of country, should not be included, and that all his territory should be considered neutral ground. Gaika himself narrowly escaped being seized by the English in 1822—for what cause does not appear,—but it does appear that he only effected his escape in the mantle of his wife; and that in 1823 a large force, according to the evidence of Capt. Aichison, in which he was employed, surprised the kraals of his son Macomo, and took from them 7,000 beasts. Well might Gaika say—“When I look at the large tract of fine country that has been taken from me, I am compelled to say that though protected, I am rather oppressed by my protectors.”75
This Macomo, the son of Gaika, seems to be a fine fellow. Desirous of cultivating peace and the friendship of the English; desirous of his people receiving, the benefits of civilization and the Christian religion; yet, notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding the alliance which had subsisted between the English and his father, his treatment at the hands of the Cape government has always been of the most harsh and arbitrary kind. He has been driven with his people from one location to another, and the most serious devastation committed on his property. Pringle’s words regarding him are—“He has uniformly protected the missionaries and traders; has readily punished any of his people who committed depredations on the colonists, and on many occasions has given four or five-fold compensation for stolen cattle driven through his territory by undiscovered thieves from other clans. Notwithstanding all this, however, and much more stated on his behalf in the Cape papers, colonial oppression continues to trample down this chief with a steady, firm, relentless foot.” The same writer gives the following instance of the sort of treatment which was received from the authorities by this meritorious chief.
“On the 7th of October last (1833), Macomo was invited by Mr. Read to attend the anniversary meeting of an auxiliary missionary society at Philipton, Kat River. The chief went to the military officer commanding the nearest frontier post, and asked permission to attend, but was peremptorily refused. He ventured, nevertheless, to come by another way, with his ordinary retinue, but altogether unarmed, and delivered in his native tongue a most eloquent speech at the meeting, in which he seconded a motion, proposed by the Rev. Mr. Thompson, the established clergyman, for promoting the conversion of the Caffres. Alluding to the great number of traders residing in Caffreland, contrasted with the rude prohibition given to his attending this Christian assembly, he said, in the forcible idiom of his country—‘There are no Englishmen at Kat River; there are no Englishmen at Graham’s Town; they are all in my country, with their wives and children, in perfect safety, while I stand before you as a rogue and a vagabond, having been obliged to come by stealth.’76 Then, addressing his own followers, he said—‘Ye sons of Kahabi, I have brought you here to behold what the Word of God hath wrought. These Hottentots were but yesterday as much despised and oppressed as to-day are we—the Caffres: but see what the Great Word has done for them! They were dead—they are now alive; they are men once more. Go and tell my people what you have seen and heard; for such things as you have seen and heard, I hope ere long to witness in my own land. God is great, who has said it, and will surely bring it to pass!’ In the midst of this exhilarating scene—the African chief recommending to his followers the adoption of that Great Word which brings with it at once both spiritual and social regeneration—they were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a troop of dragoons, despatched from the military post to arrest Macomo for having crossed the frontier line without permission. This was effected in the most brutal and insulting manner possible, and not without considerable hazard to the chieftain’s life, from the ruffian-like conduct of a drunken sergeant, although not the slightest resistance was attempted.”77
It should be borne in mind by the reader that this Kat River settlement, where Macomo was attending the meeting, is the same from which he had been expelled in 1829, and in which the Hottentots were located, and, as I have already related, were making such remarkable progress. Macomo had therefore not only repassed the boundary line over which he had been driven, and the repassing of which the government would naturally regard with great jealousy, knowing well what injury they had done him, and which the sight of his old country must forcibly revive in his mind, knowing also that they were at this moment planning fresh outrages against him. This meeting took place in October, 1833, and therefore, at that very time, an order was signed by the governor for his removal from the lands he was then occupying; for the Parliamentary Report informs us that Sir Lowry Cole, before leaving the colony for Europe, on the 10th of August, 1833, signed an order for removing the chief Tyalie from the Muncassana beyond the boundaries; and in November of that year Captain Aichison was ordered to remove Macomo, Botman, and Tyalie, beyond the boundary; that is, beyond the Keiskamma, which he says he did. Capt. Aichison stated in evidence before the Select Committee, that he could assign no cause for this removal, and he never heard any cause assigned. But this was not the worst. These poor people, thus driven out in November, when all their corn was green, and that and the crops of their gardens and their pumpkins thus lost, were suffered to return in February, 1834, and again, in October of that year, driven out a second time! Colonel Wade stated in evidence, that at the time of their second removal, 21st of October, 1834, “they had rebuilt their huts, established their cattle kraals, and commenced the cultivation of their gardens.” He stated that, together with Colonel Somerset, he made a visit to Macomo and Botman’s kraal, across the Keiskamma, and that Macomo rode back with them, when they had recrossed the river and reached the Omkobina, a tributary of the Chumie. “These valleys were swarming with Caffres, as was the whole country in our front as far as the Gaga; the people were all in motion, carrying off their effects, and driving away their cattle towards the drifts of the river, and to my utter amazement the whole country around and before us was in a blaze. Presently we came up with a strong patrol of the mounted rifle corps, which had, it appeared, come out from Fort Beaufort that morning; the soldiers were busily employed in burning the huts and driving the Caffres towards the frontier.”
Another witness said, “the second time of my leaving Caffreland was in October, last year, in company with a gentleman who was to return towards Hantam. We passed through the country of the Gaga at ten o’clock at night; the Caffres were enjoying themselves after their custom, with their shouting, feasting, and midnight dances; they allowed us to pass on unmolested. Some time after I received a letter from the gentleman who was my travelling companion on that night, written just before the breaking out of the Caffre war: in it he says, ‘you recollect how joyful the Caffres were, when we crossed the Gaga; but on my return a dense smoke filled all the vales, and the Caffres were seen lurking here and there behind the mimosa; a patrol, commanded by an officer, was driving them beyond the colonial boundary.’ (This piece of country has very lately been claimed by the colony.) I saw one man near me, and I told my guide to call him to me: the poor fellow said, ‘No, I cannot come nearer; that white man looks too much like a soldier;’ and all our persuasions could not induce him to advance near us. ‘Look,’ said he, pointing to the ascending columns of smoke, ‘what the white men are doing.’ Their huts and folds were all burned.”
Such was the treatment of the Caffres up to the end of 1834, notwithstanding the most forcible and pathetic appeals to their English tyrants. Dr. Philip stated that, speaking with these chiefs at this time, he said to Macomo, that he had reason to believe that the governor, when he came to the frontier, would listen to all his grievances, and treat him with justice and generosity. “These promises,” he replied, “we have had for the last fifteen years;” and pointing to the huts then burning, he added, “things are becoming worse: these huts were set on fire last night, and we were told that to-morrow the patrol is to scour the whole district, and drive every Caffre from the west side of the Chumie and Keiskamma at the point of the bayonet.” And Dr. Philip having stated rather strongly the necessity the chiefs would be under of preventing all stealing from the colony as the condition of any peaceable relations the governor might enter into with them, Botman made the following reply: “The governor cannot be so unreasonable as to make our existence as a nation depend upon a circumstance which is beyond the reach of human power. Is it in the power of any governor to prevent his people stealing from each other? Have you not within the colony magistrates, policemen, prisons, whipping-posts, and gibbets? and do you not perceive that in spite of all these means to make your people honest, that your prisons continue full, and that you have constant employment for your magistrates, policemen, and hangmen, without being able to keep down your colonial thieves and cheats? A thief is a wolf; he belongs to no society, and yet is the pest and bane of all societies. You have your thieves, and we have thieves among us; but we cannot as chiefs, extirpate the thieves of Caffreland, more than we can extirpate the wolves, or you can extirpate the thieves of the colony. There is however this difference between us: we discountenance thieves in Caffreland, and prevent, as far as possible, our people stealing from the colony; but you countenance the robbery of your people upon the Caffres, by the sanction you give to the injustice of the patrol system. Our people have stolen your cattle, but you have, by the manner by which you have refunded your loss, punished the innocent; and after having taken our country from us, without even a shadow of justice, and shut us up to starvation, you threaten us with destruction for the thefts of those to whom you left no choice but to steal or die by famine.”
What force and justice of reasoning in these abused Caffres! what force and injustice of action in the English! Who could have believed that from the moment of our becoming masters of the Cape colony such dreadful and wicked scenes as these could be going on, up to 1834, by Englishmen. But the end was not yet come; other, and still more abominable deeds were to be perpetrated. Another war broke out, and the people of England asked, why? Dr. Philip, before the Parliamentary Committee, said,— “The encroachments of the colonists upon the Caffres, when they came in contact with them on the banks of the Gamtoos river; their expulsion from the Rumfield, now Albany, in 1811; the commandoes of Colonel Brereton, in 1818; our conduct to Gaika, our ally, in 1819, in depriving him of the country between the Fish and Keiskamma Rivers; the injury inflicted upon Macomo and Gaika, by the ejectment of Macomo and his people, with many of the people of Gaika, from the Kat River, in 1829; the manner in which the Caffres were expelled from the west bank of the Chumie and Keiskamma, in 1833, and, subsequently, again (after having been allowed to return) in 1834; and the working of the commando system, down to December, 1834,—were sufficient in themselves to account for the Caffre war, if the Caffres are allowed to be human beings, and to possess passions like our own.”
To all this series of insults and inflictions were soon added fresh ones.
“On the 2nd December, of this very year,” continued Dr. Philip, “Ensign Sparkes went to one of the Chief Eno’s kraals, for the purpose of getting some horses, supposed to have been stolen. Not finding them there, he proceeded to take by force a large quantity of cattle as an indemnity. This proceeding roused the dormant anger of the Caffres; they surrounded his party, and manifested an intention of attacking it. They did not, however, venture upon a general engagement, though one of them, more daring, and perhaps a greater loser than the rest, wounded Ensign Sparkes in the arm with an assagai, or spear, whilst the soldiers under his command were busily employed in driving the cattle out of the bush. Macomo no sooner heard of this affair, than he gave up of his own property, to the colony, 400 head of cattle, and went himself frequently to visit the young man who had been wounded, expressing great sorrow at what had occurred. This conduct was highly praiseworthy, as it was evidently for the sake of preventing any misunderstanding, but more especially so, because the deed had been committed, not by one of his people, but by a Caffre belonging to Eno’s tribe. On the 18th of the same month, a patrol under Lieut. Sutton seized a number of cattle at one of Tyalie’s kraals, for some horses alleged to have been stolen, but not found there. On this occasion the Caffres seem to have determined to resist to the last. An affray took place, in which they were so far successful as to retake the cattle. Two of them were, however, shot dead, and two dangerously wounded, one of whom was Tyalie’s own brother (not, however, Macomo), who had two slugs in his head. An individual residing in the neutral territory, referring to this affair, thus expressed his opinion: ‘The system carried on, and that to the last moment, is the cause the Caffres could not bear it any longer. The very immediate cause was the wounding of Gaika’s son, at which the blood of every Caffre boiled.’”
According to the evidence of John Tzatzoe, “every Caffre who saw Xo-Xo’s wound, went back to his hut, took his assagai and shield, and set out to fight, and said, ‘It is better that we die than be treated thus.’”
The war being thus wantonly and disgracefully provoked by the English, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, the governor, marched into the territory of the Caffre king Hintza, and summoned him to his presence. The king, alarmed, and naturally expecting some fresh act of mischief, fled, driving off his cattle to a place of security. He was threatened with immediate proclamation of war if he did not return; and to convince him that there would be no dallying, Colonel Smith immediately marched his troops into the mountain districts where Hintza had taken refuge, was very near seizing him by surprise, and carried off 10,000 head of cattle. Hintza, now, on sufficient security being given, came to the camp, where the various charges were advanced against him, and the following modest conditions of peace proposed,—that he should surrender 50,000 head of cattle, 1,000 horses, and emancipate all his Fingoe slaves. There was no alternative but agreeing to these terms; but unfortunately for him, the Fingoe slaves, now considering themselves put under the patronage of the governor, and knowing how fond the English are of Caffre cattle, carried off 15,000 head belonging to the people. The people flew to arms—and Hintza was made responsible. The governor declared to him that if he did not put a stop to the fighting in three hours, and order the delivery of the 50,000 head of cattle, he would hang him, his son Creili, and his counsellor and brother Bookoo, on the tree under which they were sitting.78 Poor Hintza issued his orders—the fighting ceased, but the cattle did not arrive. He therefore proposed to go, under a sufficient guard, to enforce the delivery himself. The proposal was accepted, and he set out with Col. Smith and a body of cavalry. Col. Smith assured him on commencing their march, that if he attempted to escape he should certainly shoot him. We shall soon see how well he kept his word. They found the people had driven the cattle to the mountains, and Hintza sent one of his counsellors to command them to stop. On the same day they came to a place where the cattle-track divided, and they followed that path, at the advice of Hintza, which led up an abrupt and wooded hill to the right, over the precipitous banks of the Kebaka river. What followed we give in the language of Col. Smith:—
“It had been observed that this day Hintza rode a remarkably fine horse, and that he led him up every ascent; the path up this abrupt and wooded hill above described is by a narrow cattle-track, occasionally passing through a cleft of the rock. I was riding alone at the head of the column, and having directed the cavalry to lead their horses, I was some three or four horses’ length in front of every one, having previously observed Hintza and his remaining two followers leading their horses behind me, the corps of Guides close to them; when nearing the top, I heard a cry of ‘Hintza,’ and in a moment he dashed past me through the bushes, but was obliged, from the trees, to descend again into the path. I cried out, ‘Hintza, stop!’ I drew a pistol, and presenting it at him, cried out, ‘Hintza,’ and I also reprimanded his guard, who instantly came up; he stopped and smiled, and I was ashamed of my suspicion. Upon nearing the top of this steep ascent, the country was perfectly open, and a considerable tongue of land running parallel with the rugged bed of the Kebaka, upon a gradual descent of about two miles, to a turn of the river, where were several Caffre huts. I was looking back to observe the march of the troops, when I heard a cry of ‘Look, Colonel!’ I saw Hintza had set off at full speed, and was 30 yards a-head of every one; I spurred my horse with violence; and coming close up with him, called to him; he urged his horse the more, which could beat mine; I drew a pistol, it snapped; I drew another, it also snapped; I then was sometime galloping after him, when I spurred my horse alongside of him, and struck him on the head with the butt-end of a pistol; he redoubled his efforts to escape, and his horse was three lengths a-head of mine. I had dropped one pistol, I threw the other after him, and struck him again on the head. Having thus raced about a mile, we were within half a mile of the Caffre huts; I found my horse was closing with him; I had no means whatever of assailing him, while he was provided with his assagais; I therefore resolved to attempt to pull him off his horse, and I seized the athletic chief by the throat, and twisting my hand in his karop, I dragged him from his seat, and hurled him to the earth; he instantly sprang on his legs, and sent an assagai at me, running off towards the rugged bed of the Kebaka. My horse was most unruly, and I could not pull him up till I reached the Caffre huts. This unhorsing the chief, and his waiting to throw an assagai at me, brought Mr. George Southey of the corps of Guides up; and, at about 200 yards’ distance, he twice called to Hintza, in Caffre, to stop, or he would shoot him. He ran on; Mr. Southey fired, and only slightly struck him in the leg, again calling to him to stop, without effect; he fired, and shot him through the back; he fell headlong forwards, but springing up and running forwards, closely pursued by my aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Balfour, he precipitated himself down a kloof into the Kebaka, and posting himself in a narrow niche of the rock, defied any attempt to secure him; when, still refusing to surrender, and raising an assagai, Mr. George Southey fired, and shot him through the head. Thus terminated the career of the chief Hintza, whose treachery, perfidy, and want of faith, made him worthy of the nation of atrocious and indomitable savages over whom he was the acknowledged chieftain. One of his followers escaped, the other was shot from an eminence. About half a mile off I observed the villain Mutini and Hintza’s servant looking on.”
Such is the relation of the destroyer of Hintza, and surely a more brutal and disgusting detail never came from the chief actor of such a scene. England has already testified its opinion both of this act and of this war; and “this nation of atrocious and indomitable savages,” both before and since this transaction, have given such evidences of sensibility to the law of kindness as leave no doubt where the “treachery, perfidy, and want of faith,” really lay. At the very time this affair was perpetrated, two British officers had gone with proposals from the governor to the Caffre camp. While they remained there they were treated most respectfully and honourably by these “irreclaimable savages,” and dismissed unhurt when the intelligence arrived of Hintza’s having been made prisoner. What a contrast does this form to our own conduct!
The war was continued after the event of the death of Hintza, until the Caffres had received what the governor considered to be “sufficient” punishment; this consisted in the slaughter of 4,000 of their warriors, including many principal men. “There have been taken from them also,” says a despatch, “besides the conquest and alienation of their country, about 60,000 head of cattle, almost all their goats; their habitations everywhere destroyed, and their gardens and corn-fields laid waste.”79
The cost of this war to the British nation, is estimated at 241,884l. besides putting a stop to the trade with the colony amounting to 30,000l. per annum, though yet in its infancy. If any one wishes to know how absurd it is to talk of the Caffres as “atrocious and indomitable savages,” he has only to look into the Parliamentary Report, so often referred to in this chapter, in order to blush for our own barbarism, and to execrate the wickedness which could, by these reckless commandoes and exterminating wars, crush or impede that rising civilization, and that growing Christianity, which shew themselves so beautifully in this much abused country. It is the wickedness of Englishmen that has alone stood in the way of the rapid refinement of the Caffre, as it has stood in the way of knowledge and prosperity in all our colonies.
“Whenever,” says John Tzatzoe, a Caffre chief, who had, before the war at his own place, a missionary and a church attended by 300 people, “the missionaries attempt to preach to the Caffres, or whenever I myself preach or speak to my countrymen, they say, ‘Why do not the missionaries first go and preach to the people on the other side; why do not they preach to their own countrymen, and convert them first?’”
But the very atrocity of this last war roused the spirit of the British nation, awakened parliamentary investigation; the Caffre territory is restored by order of government; a new and more rational system of policy is adopted, and it is to be hoped will be steadily persevered in.
In this chapter we shall take a concluding view of our countrymen amongst the aborigines of the countries they have visited or settled in; and in doing this it will not be requisite to go back at all into the past. To trace the manner in which they possessed themselves of these regions, or in which they have from that period to the present extended their power, and driven back the natives, would be only treading over for the tenth time the scenes of arbitrary assumption and recklessness of right, which must be, now, but too familiar to my readers. We will, therefore, merely look at the present state of English conduct in those remote regions; and, for this purpose, the materials lie but too plentifully before us. With the exception of the missionary labours, the presence of the Europeans in these far regions is a fearful curse. The two great prominent features of their character there, are violence and debauchery. If they had gone thither only to seize the lands of the natives, as they have done everywhere else, it might have excited no surprise; for who, after perusing this volume, should wonder that the Europeans are selfish: if they had totally exterminated the aborigines with the sword and the musket, it might even then have passed in the ordinary estimate of their crimes, and there might have been hope that they might raise some more imposing, if not more virtuous, fabric of society than that which they had destroyed; but here, the danger is that they will demolish a rising civilization of a beautiful and peculiar character, by their pestilent profligacy. That dreadful and unrighteous system, which Columbus himself introduced in the very first moment of discovery, and which I have more than once pointed to, in the course of this volume, as a very favourite scheme of the Europeans, and especially the English, the convict system—the penal colony system—the throwing off the putrid matter of our corrupt social state on some simple and unsuspecting country, to inoculate it with the rankness of our worst moral diseases, without relieving ourselves at all sensibly by the unprincipled deed, has here shewn itself in all its hideousness. New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land have been sufficient to curse and demoralize all this portion of the world. They have not only exhibited the spectacle of European depravity in the most frightful forms within themselves, but the contagion of their evil and malignity has been blown across the ocean, and sped from island to island with destructive power.
In these colonies, no idea of any right of the natives to the soil, or any consideration of their claims, comforts, or improvements, seem to have been entertained. Colonies were settled, and lands appropriated, just as they were needed; and if the natives did not like it, they were shot at. The Parliamentary Inquiry of 1836, elicited by Sir William Molesworth, drew forth such a picture of colonial infamy as must have astonished even the most apathetic; and the Report of 1837 only confirms the horrible truth of the statements then made.
It says: “These people, unoffending as they were towards us, have, as might have been expected, suffered in an aggravated degree from the planting amongst them of our penal settlements. In the formation of these settlements it does not appear that the territorial rights of the natives were considered, and very little care has since been taken to protect them from the violence or the contamination of the dregs of our countrymen.
“The effects have consequently been dreadful beyond example, both in the diminution of their numbers and in their demoralization.”
Mr. Bannister, late attorney-general for that colony, says in his recent work, “British Colonization and the Coloured Tribes,”—“In regard to New South Wales, some disclosures were made by the secretary of the Church Missionary Society, Mr. Coates, and by others, that are likely to do good in the pending inquiries concerning transportation; and if that punishment is to be continued, it would be merciful to destroy all the natives by military massacre, as a judge of the colony once coolly proposed for a particular district, rather than let them be exposed to the lingering death they now undergo. But half the truth was not told as to New South Wales. Military massacres have been probably more common there than elsewhere; in 1826, Governor Darling ordered such massacres—and in consequence, one black native, at least, was shot at a stake in cool blood. The attorney-general of the colony80 remonstrated against illegal orders of this kind, and was told that the secretary of state’s instructions authorized them.”
Lord Glenelg, however, adopted in his despatch to Sir James Stirling in 1835 a very different language, in consequence of an affair on the Murray River. “The natives on this river, in the summer of the year 1834, murdered a British soldier, having in the course of the previous five years killed three other persons. In the month of October, 1834, Sir James Stirling, the governor, proceeded with a party of horse to the Murray River, in search of the tribe in question. On coming up with them, it appears that the British horse charged this tribe without any parley, and killed fifteen of them, not, as it seems, confining their vengeance to the actual murderers.” After the rout, the women who had been taken prisoners were dismissed, having been informed, “that the punishment had been inflicted because of the misconduct of the tribe; that the white men never forget to punish murder; that on this occasion the women and children had been spared; but if any other persons should be killed by them, not one would be allowed to remain on this side of the mountains.”
That is, these white men, “who never forget to punish murder,” would, if another person was killed by the natives, commit a wholesale murder, and drive the natives out of one other portion of their country. Lord Glenelg, however, observed that it would be necessary that inquiry should be made whether some act of harshness or injustice had not originally provoked the enmity of the natives, before such massacres could be justified. His language is not only just, but very descriptive of the cause of these attacks from the natives.
“It is impossible to regard such conflicts without regret and anxiety, when we recollect how fatal, in too many instances, our colonial settlements have proved to the natives of the places where they have been formed; and this too by a series of conflicts in every one of which it has been asserted, and apparently with justice, that the immediate aggression has not been on our side. The real causes of these hostilities are to be found in a course of petty encroachments and acts of injustice committed by the new settlers, at first submitted to by the natives, and not sufficiently checked in the outset by the leaders of the colonists. Hence has been generated in the minds of the injured party a deadly spirit of hatred and vengeance, which breaks out at length into deeds of atrocity, which, in their turn, make retaliation a necessary part of self-defence.”81
It is some satisfaction that the recent inquiries have led to the appointment of a protector of the Aborigines, but who shall protect them from the multitudinous evils which beset them on all sides from their intercourse with the whites—men expelled by the laws from their own country for their profligacy, or men corrupted by contact with the plague of their presence? Grand individual massacres, and cases of lawless aggression, such as occasioned the abandonment of the colony at Raffles’ Bay, on the northern coast of Australia, where for the trifling offence of the theft of an axe, the sentinels were ordered to fire on the natives whenever they approached, and who yet were found by Captain Barker, the officer in command when the order for the abandonment of the place arrived, to be “a mild and merciful race of people;” such great cases of violence may be prevented, or reduced in number, but what ubiquitous protector is to stand between the natives and the stock-keepers (convicts in the employ of farmers in the outskirts of the colony), of the cedar-cutters, the bush-rangers, and free settlers in the remote and thinly cultivated districts?—a race of the most demoralized and fearful wretches on the face of the earth, and who will shoot a native with the same indifference as they shoot a kangaroo. Who shall protect them from the diseases and the liquid fire which these penal colonies have introduced amongst them? These are the destroying agencies that have compelled our government to commit one great and flagrant act of injustice to remedy another—actually to pursue, run down, and capture, as you would so many deer in a park, or as the Gauchos of the South American Pampas do wild cattle with their lassos, the whole native population of Van Dieman’s land; and carry them out of their own country, to Flinder’s Island? Yes, to save these wretched people from the annihilation which our moral corruption and destitution of all Christian principle were fast bringing upon them, we have seized and expelled them all from their native land. What a strange alternative, between destruction by our violence and our vices, and the commission of an act which in any other part or age of the world would be regarded as the most wicked and execrable. We have actually turned out the inhabitants of Van Dieman’s Land, because we saw that it was “a goodly heritage,” and have comfortably sate down in it ourselves; and the best justification that we can set up is, that if we did not pass one general sentence of transportation upon them, we must burn them up with our liquid fire, poison them with the diseases with which our vices and gluttony have covered us, thick as the quills on a porcupine, or knock them down with our bullets, or the axes of our wood-cutters! What an indescribable and monstrous crime must it be in the eye of the English to possess a beautiful and fertile island,—that the possessors shall be transported as convicts to make way for the convicts from this kingdom who have been pronounced by our laws too infamous to live here any longer! To such a pass are we come, that the Jezebel spirit of our lawless cupidity does not merely tell us that it will give us a vineyard, but whatever country or people we lust after.
We have then, totally cleared Van Dieman’s Land of what Colonel Arthur himself, an agent of this sweeping expulsion of a whole nation, calls “a noble-minded race,”82 and have reduced the natives of New Holland, so far as we have come in contact with them, to misery.
This is the evidence given by Bishop Broughton:—“They do not so much retire as decay; wherever Europeans meet with them, they appear to wear out, and gradually to decay: they diminish in numbers; they appear actually to vanish from the face of the earth. I am led to apprehend that within a very limited period, a few years,” adds the Bishop, “those who are most in contact with Europeans will be utterly extinct—I will not say exterminated—but they will be extinct.”
As to their moral condition, the bishop says of the natives around Sidney—“They are in a state which I consider one of extreme degradation and ignorance; they are, in fact, in a situation much inferior to what I suppose them to have been before they had any communication with Europe.” And again, in his charge, “It is an awful, it is even an appalling consideration, that, after an intercourse of nearly half a century with a Christian people, these hapless human beings continue to this day in their original benighted and degraded state. I may even proceed farther, so far as to express my fears that our settlement in their country has even deteriorated a condition of existence, than which, before our interference, nothing more miserable could easily be conceived. While, as the contagion of European intercourse has extended itself among them, they gradually lose the better properties of their own character, they appear in exchange to acquire none but the most objectionable and degrading of ours.”
The natives about Sidney and Paramatta are represented as in a state of wretchedness still more deplorable than those resident in the interior.
“Those in the vicinity of Sidney are so completely changed, they scarcely have the same pursuits now; they go about the streets begging their bread, and begging for clothing and rum. From the diseases introduced among them, the tribes in immediate connexion with those large towns almost became extinct; not more than two or three remained, when I was last in New South Wales, of tribes which formerly consisted of 200 or 300.”
Dr. Lang, the minister of the Scotch church, writes, “From the prevalence of infanticide, from intemperance, and from European diseases, their number is evidently and rapidly diminishing in all the older settlements of the colony, and in the neighbourhood of Sidney especially, they present merely the shadow of what were once numerous tribes.” Yet even now “he thinks their number within the limits of the colony of New South Wales cannot be less than 10,000—an indication of what must once have been the population, and what the destruction. It is only,” Dr. Lang observes, “through the influence of Christianity, brought to bear upon the natives by the zealous exertions of devoted missionaries, that the progress of extinction can be checked.”
Enormous as are these evils, it would be well if they stopped here; but the moral corruption of our penal colonies overflows, and is blown by the winds, like the miasma of the plague, to other shores, and threatens with destruction one of the fairest scenes of human regeneration and human happiness to which we can turn on this huge globe of cruelty for hope and consolation. Where is the mind that has not dwelt in its young enthusiasm on the summer beauty of the Islands of the Pacific? That has not, from the day that Captain Cook first fell in with them, wandered in imagination with our voyagers and missionaries through their fairy scenes—been wafted in some magic bark over those blue and bright seas—been hailed to the sunny shore by hundreds of simple and rejoicing people—been led into the hut overhung with glorious tropical flowers, or seated beneath the palm, and feasted on the pine and the bread-fruit? These are the things which make part of the poetry of our memory and our youth. There is not a man of the slightest claims to the higher and better qualities of our nature to whom the existence of these oceanic regions of beauty has not been a subject of delightful thought, and a source of genial inspiration. Here in fancy—
These were the dreams of many a young dreamer—and yet they were the realities of the Indian seas. But even there, regeneration was needed to make this ocean-paradise perfect. Superstition and evil passions marred the enjoyment of the natives. Mr. William Ellis, the able secretary of the London Missionary Society, and author of Polynesian Researches, says—“They were accustomed to practise infanticide, probably more extensively than any other nation; they offered human sacrifices in greater numbers than I have read of their having been offered by any other nation; they were accustomed to wars of the most savage and exterminating kind. They were lazy too, for they found all their wants supplied by nature. ‘The fruit ripens,’ said they, ‘and the pigs get fat while we are asleep, and that is all we want; why, therefore, should we work?’ The missionaries have presented them with that which alone they needed to insure their happiness,—Christianity; and the consequence has been, that within the last twenty years they have conveyed a cargo of idols to the depôt of the Missionary Society in London; they have become factors to furnish our vessels with provisions, and merchants to deal with us in the agricultural growth of their own country. Their language has been reduced to writing, and they have gained the knowledge of letters. They have, many of them, emerged from the tyranny of the will of their chiefs into the protection of a written law, abounding with liberal and enlightened principles, and 200,000 of them are reported to have embraced Christianity.”
The most beautiful thing is, that when they embraced Christianity, they embraced it in its fulness and simplicity. They had no ancient sophisms and political interests, like Europe, to induce them to accept Christianity by halves, admitting just as much as suited their selfishness, and explaining away, or shutting their eyes resolutely to the rest; they, therefore, furnished a most striking practical proof of the manner in which Christianity would be understood by the simple-hearted and the honest, and in doing this they pronounced the severest censures upon the barbarous and unchristian condition of proud Europe. “When,” says Mr. Ellis, “Christianity was adopted by the people, human sacrifices, infant murder, and war, entirely ceased.” Mr. Ellis and Mr. Williams agree that they also immediately gave freedom to all their slaves. They never considered the two things compatible.
According to the evidence of Mr. Williams, the Tahitian and Society Islands are christianized; the Austral Island group, about 350 miles south of Tahiti; the Harvey Islands, about 700 miles west of Tahiti; the Vavou Islands, and the Hapai and the Sandwich Islands, where the American missionaries are labouring, and are 3,000 miles north of Tahiti, and the inhabitants also of the eastern Archipelago, about 500 or 600 miles east of Tahiti.
The population of these Islands, including the Sandwich Islands, are about 200,000. The Navigators’ Islands, Tongatabu, and the Marquesas, are partially under the influence of the gospel, where missionary labours have just been commenced. They are supposed to contain from 100,000 to 150,000 people.
Wherever Christianity has been embraced by them, the inhabitants have become actively industrious, and, to use the words of Mr. Williams, are “very apt indeed” at learning European trades. Mr. Ellis’s statement is:—“There are now carpenters who hire themselves out to captains of ships to work at repairs of vessels, etc., for which they receive regular wages; and there are blacksmiths that hire themselves out to captains of ships, for the purpose of preparing ironwork required in building or repairing ships. The natives have been taught not only to construct boats, but to build vessels, and there are, perhaps, twenty (there have been as many as forty) small vessels, of from forty to eighty or ninety tons burthen, built by the natives, navigated sometimes by Europeans, and manned by natives, all the fruit of the natives’ own skill and industry. They have been taught to build neat and comfortable houses, and to cultivate the soil. They have new wants; a number of articles of clothing and commerce are necessary to their comfort, and they cultivate the soil to supply them. At one island, where I was once fifteen months without seeing a single European excepting our own families, there were, I think, twenty-eight ships put in for provisions last year, and all obtained the supplies they wanted. Besides cultivating potatoes and yams, and raising stock, fowls and pigs, the cultivation, the spinning and the weaving of the cotton has been introduced by missionary artizans; and there are some of the chiefs, and a number of the people, especially in one of the islands, who are now decently clothed in garments made after the European fashion, produced from cotton grown in their own gardens, spun by their own children, and woven in the islands. One of the chiefs of the island of Rarotonga, as stated by the missionaries, never wears any other dress than that woven in the island. They have been taught also to cultivate the sugarcane, which is indigenous, and to make sugar, and some of them have large plantations, employing at times forty men. They supply the ships with this useful article, and, at some of the islands, between fifty and sixty vessels touch in a single year. The natives of the islands send a considerable quantity away; I understand that one station sent as much as forty tons away last year. In November last a vessel of ninety tons burthen, built in the islands, was sent to the colony of New South Wales laden with Tahitian-grown sugar. Besides the sugar they have been taught to cultivate, they prepare arrow-root, and they sent to England in one year, as I was informed by merchants in London, more than had been imported into this country for nearly twenty previous years. Cattle also have been introduced and preserved, chiefly by the missionaries; pigs, dogs, and rats were the only animals they had before, but the missionaries have introduced cattle among them. While they continued heathen, they disregarded, nay, destroyed some of those first landed among them; but since that time they have highly prized them, and by their attention to them they are now so numerous as to enable the natives to supply ships with fresh beef at the rate of threepence a pound. The islanders have also been instructed by the missionaries in the manufacture of cocoa-nut oil, of which large quantities are exported. They have been taught to cultivate tobacco, and this would have been a valuable article of commerce had not the duty in New South Wales been so high as to exclude that grown in the islands from the market. The above are some of the proofs that Christianity prepares the way for, and necessarily leads to, the civilization of those by whom it is adopted. There are now in operation among a people who, when the missionaries arrived, were destitute of a written language, seventy-eight schools, which contain between 12,000 and 13,000 scholars. The Tahitians have also a simple, explicit, and wholesome code of laws, as the result of their imbibing the principles of Christianity. This code of laws is printed and circulated among them, understood by all, and acknowledged by all as the supreme rule of action for all classes in their civil and social relations. The laws have been productive of great benefits.”
Here again they have far outstripped us in England. When shall we have a code of laws, so simple and compact, that it may be “printed and circulated amongst us, and understood by all?” The benefits resulting from this intelligible and popular code, Mr. Ellis tells us, have been great. No doubt of it. The benefits of such a code in England would be incalculable; but when will the lawyers, or our enlightened Parliament let us have it? The whole scene of the reformation, and the happiness introduced by Christianity into the South-Sea Islands, is, however, most delightful. Such a scene never was exhibited to the world since its foundation. Mr. Williams’ recent work, descriptive of these islands and the missionary labours there, is fascinating as Robinson Crusoe himself, and infinitely more important in its relations. If ever the idea of the age of gold was realized, it is here; or rather,