nations. And in North America, too, it was by allying themselves with the willing daughters of the Abenakis that the sons of France created that vigorous Acadian stock whose patriotic spirit has more than once kept at bay the proud rulers of Old and New England.
"What a pity," said the Indians after the capitulation of Quebec, 'that the French were conquered! Their young men used to marry our daughters.' Those mixed marriages gave us faithful allies, and enabled our colonists, abandoned by the mother-country, to make head for a century against the inexhaustible forces of Great Britain."[1] In like manner may the popinée, he thinks, prove the main-stay of France in the Pacific.
There is no more romantic and extraordinary instance of a new human variety starting into life, and, in spite of deplorable beginnings, taking on the better characteristics of the wild and the civilized race, than that of the Pitcairn-Islanders. The story is well known, and I need scarcely repeat it. It may suffice to say that, after the tragedy of the Bounty, the refugee mutineers, nine English sailors, accompanied by six men and fifteen women of Tahiti, settled on that little secluded islet. By feuds of race the colony was reduced in four years to four white men and ten Tahitian women. A few years later, Adams, the pious patriarch of the community, was the sole survivor of the repentant mutineers. But, meanwhile, children had been born, who grew up and married and had families, and in 1830 the population of the island was eighty-seven. Some of them were then transferred, at their own desire, to Otaheite, but they had been religiously trained, and the loose morals prevalent there disgusted them. So most of them returned home within the year. In 1856 a second experiment at emigration was made, Pitcairn proving too small to support the rapidly growing population. But Norfolk Island was nearly as distasteful to the half-breeds as Otaheite had been, and in a few years they had almost all come back. When Admiral de Horsey visited the colony in 1878, he found sixteen men, nineteen women, twenty-five boys, and thirty girls—in about sixteen families. At that time the elected governor was James Russell McCay, steersman of the island whale-boat, of which he was also the builder. The law of the land was the simple, but morally rigorous, code drawn up by Adams. The colony, as the admiral described it, was a community of contented, friendly, gentle, pious people, poor but happy, strict in attending to their religious duties, and taking their recreation mainly in the form of music, most of them being good singers. A later visit to Pitcairn of an English vessel was some time ago described in the London "Daily Telegraph."
The communities of half-breeds to which I have been directing attention are mainly composed of English, French, or Spanish, blended
- ↑ I would like to know where M. Joppicourt obtained his information concerning the frequency of mixed marriages in Canada under the old régime.
