Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 28
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE ENGLISH IN NEW HOLLAND AND THE
ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC.
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 Willliam 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 colony[1] 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."[2]
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,"[3] 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; whereever 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—
The white man landed!—need the rest be told?
The New World stretched its dusk hand to the old;
Each was to each a marvel, and the tie
Of wonder warmed to better sympathy.
Kind was the welcome of the sun-born sires,
And kinder still their daughters' gentler fires.
Their union grew: the children of the storm
Found beauty linked with many a dusky form;
While these in turn admired the paler glow,
Which seem'd so white in climes that knew no snow.
The chase, the race, the liberty to roam
The soil where every cottage shewed a home;
The sea-spread net, the lightly launched canoe,
Which stemmed the studded Archipelago,
O'er whose blue bosom rose the starry isles;
The healthy slumber caused by sportive toils;
The palm, the loftiest dryad of the woods,
Within whose bosom infant Bacchus broods,
While eagles scarce build higher than the crest
Which shadows o'er the vineyard in her breast;
The cava feast, the yam, the cocoa's root.
Which bears at once the cup, and milk, and fruit;
The bread-tree, which, without the ploughshare, yields
The utireaped harvest of unfurrowed fields,
And bakes its unadulterated loaves
Without a furnace in unpurchased groves,
And flings off famine from its fertile breast,
A priceless market for the gathering guest:—
These, with the solitudes of seas and woods,
The airy joys of social solitudes:—
The Island—Lord Byron.
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 iron-work 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,
Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams;—
The goldless ages, where gold disturbs no dreams.
Besides the benefits accruing from this improved state to the natives, great are the benefits that accrue from it to the Europeems. The benefit of commerce, from their use of European articles, is and must be considerable. They furnish, too, articles of commerce in no small quantities. Instead of European crews now, in case of wreck on their coasts, being murdered and devoured, they are rescued from the waves at the risk of the lives of the people themselves, and received, as the evidence and works of Ellis and Williams testify, in most remarkable instances, with the greatest hospitality.
But all this springing civilization—this young Christianity,—this scene of beauty and peace, are endangered. The founders of a new and happier state, the pioneers and artificers of civilization, stand aghast at the ruin that threatens their labours,—that threatens the welfare,—nay, the very existence of the simple islanders amongst whom they have wrought such miracles of love and order. And whence arises this danger? whence comes this threatened ruin? Is some race of merciless savages about to burst in upon these interesting people, and destroy them? Yes, the same "irreclaimable and indomitable savages," that have ravaged and oppressed every nation which they have conquered, "from China to Peru." The same savages that laid waste the West Indies; that massacred the South Americans; that have chased the North Americans to the "far west;" that shot the Caffres for their cattle; that have covered the coasts of Africa with the blood and fires and rancorous malice of the slave-wars; that have exterminated millions of Hindus by famine, and hold a hundred millions of them, at this moment, in the most abject condition of poverty and oppression; the same savages that are at this moment also carrying the Hill Coolies from the East—as if they had not a scene of enormities there wide enough for their capacity of cruelty—to sacrifice them in the West, on the graves of millions of murdered negroes; the same savages are come hither also. The savages of Europe, the most heartless and merciless race that ever inhabited the earth—a race, for the range and continuance of its atrocities, without a parallel in this world, and, it may be safely believed, in any other, are busy in the South Sea Islands. A roving clan of sailors and runaway convicts have revived once more the crimes and character of the old bucaniers. They go from island to island, diffusing gin, debauchery, loathsome diseases, and murder, as freely as if they were the greatest blessings that Europe had to bestow. They are the restless and triumphant apostles of misery and destruction; and such are their achievements, that it is declared that, unless our government interpose some check to their progress, they will as completely annihilate the islanders, as the Charibs were annihilated in the West Indies. When Captain Cook was at the Sandwich Islands, he estimated the inhabitants at 400,000. In 1823, Mr. Williams made a calculation, and found them about 150,000. Mr. Daniel Wheeler, a member of the Society of Friends, who has just returned from those regions, states that they now are reduced to 110,000; a diminution of 40,000 in fifteen years. Captain Cook estimated the population of Tahiti at 200,000: when the missionaries arrived there, there were not above 8,000.
What a shocking business is this, that when Christianity has been professed in Europe for this 1800 years, it is from Europe that the most dreadful corruption of morals, and the most dismal defiance of every sound principle come. If Christianity, despised and counterfeited by its ancient professors, flies to some remote corner of the globe, and there unfolds to simple admiring eyes her blessings and her charms, out, from Europe, rush hordes of lawless savages, to chase her thence, and level to the dust the dwellings and the very being of her votaries. Shall this be! Will no burning blush rise to European cheeks at this reflection? But let us hear what was said on this subject before the British Parliament.
"It will be hard, we think, to find compensation, not only to Australia, but to New Zealand, and to the innumerable islands of the South Seas, for the murders, the misery, the contamination which we have brought upon them. Our runaway convicts are the pests of savage as well as of civilized society; so are our runaway sailors; and the crews of our whaling vessels, and of the traders from New South Wales, too frequently act in the most reckless and immoral manner when at a distance from the restraints of justice: in proof of this we need only refer to the evidence of the missionaries.
"It is stated that there have been not less than 150 or 200 runaways at once on the island of New Zealand, counteracting all that was done for the moral improvement of the people, and teaching them every vice.
" 'I beg leave to add,' remarks Mr. Ellis, 'the desirableness of preventing, by every practicable means, the introduction of ardent spirits among the inhabitants of the countries we may visit or colonize. There is nothing more injurious to the South Sea islanders than seamen who have absconded from ships, setting up huts for the retail of ardent spirits, called grog-shops, which are the resort of the indolent and vicious of the crews of the vessels, and in which, under the influence of intoxication, scenes of immorality, and even murder, have been exhibited, almost beyond what the natives witnessed among themselves while they were heathen. The demoralization and impediments to the civilization and prosperity of the people that have resulted from the activity of foreign traders in ardent spirits, have been painful in the extreme. In one year it is estimated that the sum of 12,000 dollars was expended, in Taheité alone, chiefly by the natives, for ardent spirits.'
"The lawless conduct of the crews of vessels must necessarily have an injurious effect on our trade, and on that ground alone demands investigation. In the month of April, 1834, Mr. Busby states there were twenty-nine vessels at one time in the Bay of Islands; and that seldom a day passed without some complaint being made to him of the most outrageous conduct on the part of their crews, which he had not the means of repressing, since these reckless seamen totally disregarded the usages of their own country, and the unsupported authority of the British resident.
"The Rev. J. Williams, missionary in the Society Islands, states, 'that it is the common sailors, and the lowest order of them, the very vilest of the whole, who will leave their ship and go to live amongst the savages, and take with them all their low habits and all their vices.' The captains of merchant vessels are apt to connive at the absconding of such worthless sailors, and the atrocities perpetrated by them are excessive; they do incalculable mischief by circulating reports injurious to the interests of trade. On an island between the Navigator's and the Friendly group, he heard there were on one occasion a hundred sailors who had run away from shipping. Mr. Williams gives an account of a gang of convicts who stole a small vessel from New South Wales, and came to Raiatia, one of the Sandwich Islands, where he resided, representing themselves as shipwrecked mariners. Mr. Williams suspected them, and told them he should inform the governor, Sir T. Brisbane, of their arrival, on which they went away to an island twenty miles off, and were received with every kindness in the house of the chief. They took an opportunity of stealing a boat belonging to the missionary of the station, and made off again. The natives immediately pursued, and desired them to return their missionary's boat. Instead of replying, they discharged a blunderbus that was loaded with cooper's rivets, which blew the head of one man to pieces; they then killed two more, and a fourth received the contents of a blunderbus in his hand, fell from exhaustion amongst his mutilated companions, and was left as dead. This man, and a boy who had saved himself by diving, returned to their island. 'The natives were very respectable persons; and had it not been that we were established in the estimation of the people, our lives would have been sacrificed. The convicts then went in the boat down to the Navigator's Islands, and there entered with savage ferocity into the wars of the savages. One of these men was the most savage monster that ever I heard of: he boasted of having killed 300 natives with his own hands.'
"And in June 1833, Mr. Thomas, Wesleyan missionary at the Friendly Islands, still speaks of the mischief done by ill-disposed captains of whalers, who, he says, 'send the refuse of their crews on shore to annoy us;' and proceeds to state, 'the conduct of many of these masters of South-Sea whalers is most abominable; they think no more of the life of an heathen than of a dog. And their cruel and wanton behaviour at the different islands in those seas has a powerful tendency to lead the natives to hate the sight of a white man.' Mr. Williams mentions one of these captains, who with his people had shot twenty natives, at one of the islands, for no offence; and 'another master of a whaler, from Sidney, made his boast, last Christmas, at Tonga, that he had killed about twenty black fellows,—for so he called the natives of the Samoa, or Navigator's Islands—for some very trifling offence; and not satisfied with that, he designed to disguise his vessel, and pay them another visit, and get about a hundred more of them.' 'Our hearts,' continues Mr. Thomas, 'almost bleed for the poor Samoa people; they are a very mild, inoffensive race, very easy of access; and as they are near to us, we have a great hope of their embracing the truth, viz. that the whole group will do so; for you will learn from Mr. Williams' letter, that a part of them have already turned to God. But the conduct of our English savages has a tone of barbarity and cruelty in it which was never heard of or practised by them.' "
But these are not all the exploits of these white savages. Those who have seen in shop-windows in London, dried heads of New Zealanders, may here learn how they come there, and to whom the phrenologists and curiosi are indebted.
"Till lately the tattooed heads of New Zealanders were sold at Sidney as objects of curiosity; and Mr. Yate says he has known people give property to a chief for the purpose of getting them to kill their slaves, that they might have some heads to take to New South Wales.
"This degrading traffic was prohibited by General Darling, the governor, upon the following occasion: In a representation made to Governor Darling, the Rev. Mr. Marsden states, that the captain of an English vessel being, as he conceived, insulted by some native women, set one tribe upon another to avenge his quarrel, and supplied them with arms and ammunition to fight.
"In the prosecution of the war thus excited, a party of forty-one Bay of Islanders made an expedition against some tribes of the South. Forty of the former were cut off; and a few weeks after the slaughter, a Captain Jack went and purchased thirteen chiefs' heads, and, bringing them back to the Bay of Islands, emptied them out of a sack in the presence of their relations. The New Zealanders were, very properly, so much enraged that they told this captain they should take possession of the ship, and put the laws of their country into execution. When he found that they were in earnest, he cut his cable and left the harbour, and afterwards had a narrow escape from them at Taurunga. He afterwards reached Sidney, and it came to the knowledge of the governor, that he brought there ten of these heads for sale, on which discovery the practice was declared unlawful. Mr. Yate mentions an instance of a captain going 300 miles from the Bay of Islands to East Cape, enticing twenty-five young men, sons of chiefs, on board his vessel, and delivering them to the Bay of Islanders, with whom they were at war, merely to gain the favour of the latter, and to obtain supplies for his vessel. The youths were afterwards redeemed from slavery by the missionaries, and restored to their friends. Mr. Yate once took from the hand of a New-Zealand chief a packet of corrosive sublimate, which a captain had given to the savage in order to enable him to poison his enemies."
Such is the general system. The atrocious character of particular cases would be beyond credence, after all that has now been shewn of the nature of Europeans, were they not attested by the fullest and most unexceptionable authority. The following case was communicated by the Rev. S. Marsden, to Governor-general Darling, and was also afterwards reported to the governor in person by two New Zealand chiefs. Governor Darling forwarded the account of it to Lord Goderich, together with the depositions of two seamen of the brig Elizabeth, and those of J. B. Montefiore, Esq., and A. Kennis, Esq. merchants of Sidney, who had embarked on board the Elizabeth on its return to Entry Island, and had there learned the particulars of the case, had seen the captive chief sent ashore, and had been informed that he was sacrificed.
"In December 1830, a Captain Stewart, of the brig Elizabeth, a British vessel, on promise of ten tons of flax, took above 100 New Zealanders concealed in his vessel, down from Kappetee Entry Island, in Cook's Strait, to Takou, or Bank's Peninsula, on the Middle Island, to a tribe with whom they were at war. He then invited and enticed on board the chief of Takou, with his brother and two daughters: 'When they came on board, the captain took hold of the chief's hand in a friendly manner, and conducted him and his two daughters into the cabin; shewed him the muskets, how they were arranged round the sides of the cabin. When all was prepared for securing the chief, the cabin-door was locked, and the chief was laid hold on, and his hands were tied fast; at the same time a hook, with a cord to it, was struck through the skin of his throat under the side of his jaw, and the line fastened to some part of the cabin: in this state of torture he was kept for some days, until the vessel arrived at Kappetee. One of his children clung fast to her father, and cried aloud. The sailors dragged her from her father, and threw her from him; her head struck against some hard substance, which killed her on the spot.' The brother, or nephew, Ahu (one of the narrators), 'who had been ordered to the fore-castle, came as far as the capstan and peeped through into the cabin, and saw the chief in the state above mentioned.' They also got the chief's wife and two sisters on board, with 100 baskets of flax. All the men and women who came in the chief's canoe were killed. 'Several more canoes came off also with flax, and the people were all killed by the natives of Kappetee, who had been concealed on board for the purpose, and the sailors who were on deck, who fired upon them with their muskets.' The natives of Kappetee were then sent on shore with some sailors, with orders to kill all the inhabitants they could find; and it was reported that those parties who went on shore murdered many of the natives; none escaped but those who fled into the woods. The chief, his wife and two sisters were killed when the vessel arrived at Kappetee, and other circumstances yet more revolting are added."
We will now close this black recital of crimes by one more case, in which the natives are represented as the aggressors, though alone upon the evidence of the accused party, and particularly on that of Captain Guard, of whom Mr. Marshall of the Alligator, stated that, " 'in the estimation of the officers of the Alligator, the general sentiment was one of dislike and disgust at his conduct on board, and his conduct on shore.' He has himself heard him say, that a musket-ball for every New Zealander was the best mode of civilizing the country.
"In April, 1834, the barque Harriet, J. Guard, master, was wrecked at Cape Egmont, on the coast of New Zealand. The natives came down to plunder, but refrained from other violence for about ten days, in which interval two of Guard's men deserted to the savages. They then got into a fray with the sailors, and killed twelve of them: on the part of the New Zealanders twenty or thirty were shot. The savages got possession of Mrs. Guard and her two children. Mr. Guard and the remainder were suffered to retreat, but surrendered themselves to another tribe whom they met, and who finally allowed the captain to depart, on his promising to return, and to bring back with him a ransom in powder; and they retained nine seamen as hostages. Three native chiefs accompanied Guard to Sidney. Captain Guard had been trading with the New Zealanders from the year 1823, and it was reported that his dealings with them had, in some instances, been marked with cruelty. On Mr. Guard's representation to the government at Sidney, the Alligator frigate, Captain Lambert, and the schooner Isabella, with a company of the 50th regiment, were sent to New Zealand for the recovery of Mrs. Guard and the other captives, with instructions, if practicable, to obtain the restoration of the captives by amicable means. On arriving at the coast near Cape Egmont, Captain Lambert steered for a fortified village or pah, called the Nummo, where Mrs. Guard was known to be detained. He sent two interpreters on shore, who made promises of payment (though against Captain Lambert's order) to the natives, and held out also a prospect of trade in whalebone, on the condition that the women and children should be restored. The interpreter could not, from stress of weather, be received on board for some days. The vessel proceeded to the tribe which held the men in captivity, and they were at once given up on the landing of the chiefs whom Captain Lambert had brought back from Sidney. Captain Lambert returned to the tribe at the Nummo, with whom he had communicated through the interpreter, and sent many messages to endeavour to persuade them to give up the woman and one child (the other was held by a third tribe), but without offering ransom. On the 28th September, the military were landed, and two unarmed and unattended natives advanced along the sands. One announced himself as the chief who retained the woman and child, and rubbed noses with Guard in token of amity, expressing his readiness to give them up on the receipt of the promised 'payment.' 'In reply,' as Mr. Marshall, assistant-surgeon of the Alligator, who witnessed the scene, states, 'he was instantly seized upon as a prisoner of war' (by order of Captain Johnson, commanding the detachment), 'dragged into the whale-boat, and despatched on board the Alligator, in custody of John Guard and his sailors. On his brief passage to the boat insult followed insult; one fellow twisting his ear by means of a small swivel which hung from it, and another pulling his long hair with spiteful violence; a third pricking him with the point of a bayonet. Thrown to the bottom of the boat, she was shoved off before he recovered himself, which he had no sooner succeeded in doing than he jumped overboard, and attempted to swim on shore, to prevent which he was repeatedly fired upon from the boat; but not until he had been shot in the calf of the leg was he again made a prisoner of. Having been a second time secured, he was lashed to a thwart, and stabbed and struck so repeatedly, that, on reaching the Alligator, he was only able to gain the deck by a strong effort, and there, after staggering a few paces aft, fainted, and fell down at the foot of the capstan in a gore of blood. When I dressed his wounds, on a subsequent occasion, I found ten inflicted by the point and edge of the bayonet over his head and face, one in his left breast, which it was at first feared would prove, what it was evidently intended to have proved, a mortal thrust, and another in the leg.'
"Captain Lambert, who did not himself see the seizure, admits that the chief was unarmed when he came down to the shore, and that he 'certainly was severely wounded: he had a ball through the calf of his leg, and he had been struck violently on the head.'
"Captain Johnson proceeded to the pah or fortified village, found it deserted, and burnt it the next morning. On the 30th September, Mrs. Guard and one child were given up, and the wounded chief thereupon was very properly sent on shore, without waiting for the delivery of the other child; but 'in the evening of the same day,' Captain Lambert states, 'I again sent Lieutenant Thomas to ask for the child, whose patience and firmness during the whole of the negotiations, notwithstanding the insults that were offered to him, merit the greatest praise. He shortly after returned on board, having been fired at from one of the pahs while waiting outside the surf. Such treachery could not be borne, and I immediately commenced firing at them from the ship; a reef of rocks, which extend some distance from the shore, I regret, prevented my getting as near them as I could have wished. Several shots fell into the pahs, and also destroyed their canoes.'[4]
"October 8. After some fruitless negotiation, all the soldiers and several seamen were landed, making a party of 112 men, and were stationed on two terraces of the cliff, one above the other, with a six-pounder carronade, while the interpreter and sailors were left below to wait for the boy. The New Zealanders approached at first with distrust; but at length a fine tall man came forward, and assured Mr. Marshall that the child should be immediately forthcoming, and also forbade our fighting, alleging that his 'tribe had no wish to fight at all.' Soon afterwards the boy was brought down on the shoulders of a chief, who expressed to Lieutenant M'Murdo his desire to go on board for the purpose of receiving a ransom:—
"On being told that none would be given, he turned away, when one of the sailors seized hold of the child, and discovered it was fastened with a strap or cord; to use his own expression, he had recourse to cutting away, and the child fell upon the beach. Another seaman, thinking the chief would make his escape, levelled his firelock, and shot him dead. The troops hearing the report of the musket, and thinking it was fired by the natives, immediately opened a fire from the top of the cliff upon them, who made a precipitate retreat to the pahs. The child being now in our possession, I made a signal to the ships for the boats, intending to reimbark the troops; but the weather becoming thick, and a shift of wind obliging the vessels to stand out to sea, and, at the same time, finding myself attacked by the natives, who were concealed in the high flax, I found my only alternative was to advance on the pahs. I therefore ordered Lieutenant Gunton with thirty men to the front, in skirmishing order, for the purpose of driving the natives from the high flax from which they were firing: this was done, and, as I have reason to think, with considerable loss on the part of the natives.'[5]
"The body of the chief is said to have been mutilated, and the head cut off by a soldier, and kicked about. It was identified by means of a brooch, which Mrs. Guard said belonged to the chief, who had adopted and protected her son. It is scarcely necessary to add, that this wanton act met with the reprobation it deserved from Captain Lambert and his officers.
"Captain Lambert states, that he should think there were between twenty and thirty of the natives wounded (and this, be it observed, after the child was recovered), but it was not ascertained. 'The English went straight forward to attack the pahs, and they had no communication with the natives after.' The troops immediately took possession of the two villages; and on quitting them, three days afterwards, burnt them to the ground.' "
The language of Lord Goderich, on reviewing some of these cases, must be that of every honourable man.
"'It is impossible to read, without shame and indignation, the details which these documents disclose. The unfortunate natives of New Zealand, unless some decisive measures of prevention be adopted, will, I fear, be shortly added to the number of those barbarous tribes who, in different parts of the globe, have fallen a sacrifice to their intercourse with civilized men, who bear and disgrace the name of Christians. . . . I cannot contemplate the too probable results without the deepest anxiety. There can be no more sacred duty than that of using every possible method to rescue the natives of those extensive islands from the further evils which impend over them, and to deliver our own country from the disgrace and crime of having either occasioned or tolerated such enormities.'"