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 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
colony[80] 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—
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 unreaped 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 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,
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 Europeans. 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 buccaneers. 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 forecastle, 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 musketball 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.’[83]
“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 McMurdo 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.’[84]
“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.’”