CARIBS.

Of the Caribs, the native inhabitants of the West Indies, we need not speak, as of them little more remains than the tradition that they once existed.

CHAPTER XXIV.
TREATMENT OF THE INDIANS BY THE UNITED STATES.

“We were born on this spot; our fathers lie buried in it. Shall we say to the bones of our fathers—‘Arise and come with us into a foreign land?’”—Speech of a Canadian Indian to the French invaders.

It was to be hoped that that great republic, the United States of North America, having given so splendid an example of resistance to the injustice of despotism, and of the achievement of freedom in a struggle against a mighty nation, calculated to call forth all the generous enthusiasm of brave men, would have given a practical demonstration of true liberty to the whole world: that they would have shewn that it was possible for a republic to exist, which was wise and noble enough to be entirely free: that the sarcasm of Milton should not at least be thrown at them—

License they mean when they cry liberty!

The world, however, was doomed to suffer another disappointment in this instance, and the enemies of freedom to enjoy another triumph. The Americans left that highest place in human legislation, the adoption of the divine precept of doing as they would be done by, as the basis of their constitution, still unoccupied. We had the mortification of seeing the old selfishness which had disgraced every ancient republic, and had furnished such destructive arguments to the foes of mankind, again unblushingly displayed. The Americans proclaimed themselves not noble, not generous, not high-minded enough to give that freedom to others which they had declared, by word and by deed, of the same price as life to themselves. They once more mixed up the old crumbling composition of iron and clay, slavery and freedom, and moulded them into an image of civil polity, which must inevitably fall asunder. They published a new libel on man—in the very moment of his most heroic and magnanimous enthusiasm—shewing him as mean and sordid. While he raised his hand to protest to admiring and huzzaing millions, that there was no value in life without liberty, the manacles prepared for the negroes protruded themselves from his pocket, his impassioned action at once took the air of theatrical rant, and the multitudes who were about to admire, laughed out, or groaned, as they were more or less virtuous. The pompous phrases of “Divine liberty! Glorious liberty! Liberty the birthright of every man that breathes!” became the most bitter and humbling mockery, and gave way to the merry sneer of Matthews—“What! d’ye call it liberty when a man may not larrup his own nigger?”

A more natural tone was assumed as regarded the Indians. They were declared to be free and independent nations; not citizens of the United States, but the original proprietors of the soil, and therefore as purely irresponsible to the laws of the United States as any neighbouring nations. They were treated with, as such, on every occasion; their territories and right of self-government were acknowledged by such treaties. “There is an abundance of authorities,” says Mr. Stuart, in his ‘Three Years in North America,’ “in opposition to the pretext, that the Indians are not now entitled to live under their own laws and constitutions; but it would be sufficient to refer to the treaties entered into, year after year, between the United States and them as separate nations.”

“There are two or three authorities, independent of state papers, which most unambiguously prove that it was never supposed that the state governments should have a right to impose their constitution or code of laws upon any of the Indian nations. Thus Mr. Jefferson, in an address to the Cherokees, says—“I wish sincerely you may succeed in your laudable endeavours to save the remnant of your nation by adopting industrious occupations. In this you may always rely on the counsel and assistance of the United States.” In the same way the American negotiators at Ghent, among whom were the most eminent American statesmen, Mr. John Quincy Adams and Mr. Henry Clay, in their note addressed to the British Commissioners, dated September 9, 1814, use the following language:—“The Indians residing within the United States are so far independent that they live under their own customs, and not under the laws of the United States.” Chancellor Kent, of New York state (the Lord Coke or Lord Stair of the United States), has expressly laid it down, that “it would seem idle to contend that the Indians were citizens or subjects of the United States, and not alien and sovereign tribes;” and the Supreme Court of the United States have expressly declared, that “the person who purchases land from the Indians within their territory incorporates himself with them; and, so far as respects the property purchased, holds his title under their protection, subject to their laws: if they annul the grant, we know of no tribunal which can revise and set aside the proceeding.” Mr. Clay’s language is quite decided:—“The Indians residing within the United States are so far independent that they live under their own customs, and not under the laws of the United States; that their rights, where they inhabit or hunt, are secured to them by boundaries defined in amicable treaties between the United States and themselves.” Mr. Wirt, the late Attorney-General of the United States, a man of great legal authority, has stated it to be his opinion, “that the territory of the Cherokees is not within the jurisdiction of the State of Georgia, but within the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the Cherokee nation; and that, consequently, the State of Georgia has no right to extend her laws over that territory.” General Washington in 1790, in a speech to one of the tribes of Indians, not only recognizes the same national independence, but adds many solemn assurances on behalf of the United States. “The general government only has the power to treat with the Indian nations, and any treaty formed and held without its authority will not be binding.

“Here, then, is the security for the remainder of your lands. No state nor person can purchase your lands, unless by some public treaty held under the authority of the United States. The general government will never consent to your being defrauded, but it will protect you in all your just rights.

“But your great object seems to be the security of your remaining lands, and I have, therefore, upon this point, meant to be sufficiently strong and clear.... That, in future, you cannot be defrauded of your lands. That you possess the right to sell, and the right of refusing to sell your lands.... That, therefore, the sale of your lands in future will depend entirely upon yourselves. But that, when you find it for your interest to sell any part of your lands, the United States must be present, by their agent, and will be your security that you shall not be defrauded in the bargain you make.... The United States will be true and faithful to their engagements.”

These are plain and just declarations; and, had they been faithfully maintained, would have conferred great honour on the United States. How they have been maintained, all the world knows. The American republicans have followed faithfully, not their own declarations, but the maxims and the practices of their English progenitors. The Indians have been declared savage and irreclaimable. They have been described as inveterately attached to hunting and a roving life, as a stumbling-block in the path of civilization. As perfectly incapable of settling down to the pursuits of agriculture, social arts, and domestic habits. It has been declared necessary, on these grounds, to push them out of the settled territories, and every means has been used to compel them to abandon the lands of their ancestors, and to seek a fresh country in the wilds beyond the Mississippi. Even so respectable an author as Malte Brun has, in Europe, advanced a doctrine in defence of this sweeping system of Indian expatriation. “Even admitting that the use of ardent spirits has deteriorated their habits and thinned their numbers, we cannot suppose that the Indian population was ever more than twice as dense as at present, or that it exceeded one person for each square mile of surface. Now, in highly civilized countries, like France and England, the population is at the rate of 150 or 200 persons to the square mile. It may safely be affirmed, therefore, that the same extent of land from which one Indian family derives a precarious and wretched subsistence, would support 150 families of civilized men, in plenty and comfort. But most of the Indian tribes raise melons, beans, and maize; and were we to take the case of a people who lived entirely by hunting, the disproportion would be still greater. If God created the earth for the sustenance of mankind, this single consideration decides the question as to the sacredness of the Indians’ title to the lands which they roam over, but do not, in any reasonable sense, occupy.”—v. 224.

A more abominable doctrine surely never was broached. It breathes the genuine spirit of the old Spaniard; and, if acted upon, would produce an everlasting confusion. Every nation which is more densely populated than another, may, on this principle, say to that less densely peopled state, you are not as thickly planted as God intended you to be; you amount only to 150 persons to the square mile, we are 200 to the same space; therefore, please to walk out, and give place to us, who are your superiors, and who more justly fulfil God’s intentions by the law of density. The Chinese might fairly lay claim to Europe on that ground; and our own swarming poor to every large park and thinly peopled district that they happened to see.

“This single consideration,” indeed, is a very good reason why the Indians should be advised to leave off a desultory life, and take to agriculture and the arts; or it is a very sufficient reason why the Europeans should ask leave to live amongst them, and thus more fully occupy the country, in what the French geographer calls a reasonable sense. And it remained for M. Malte Brun to show that they have ever refused to do either the one or the other. They have, on all occasions when the Europeans have gone amongst them, “in a reasonable sense,” received them with kindness, and even joy. They have been willing to listen to their instructions, and ready to sell them their lands to live upon. But it has been the “unreasonableness” of the whites that has everywhere soon turned the hearts, and made deaf the ears, of the natives. We have seen the lawless violence with which the early settlers seized on the Indians’ territories, the lawless violence and cruelty with which they rewarded them evil for good, and pursued them to death, or instigated them to the commission of all bloody and desperate deeds. These are the causes why the Indians have remained uncivilized wanderers; why they have refused to listen to the precepts of Christianity; and why they roam over, rather than occupy, those lands on which they have been suffered to remain. From the days of Elliot, Mayhew, Brainard, and their zealous compeers, there have never wanted missionaries to endeavour to civilize and christianize; but they have found, for the most part, their efforts utterly defeated by the wicked and unprincipled acts, the wicked and unprincipled character of the Europeans. When the missionaries have preached to the shrewd Indians the genuine doctrines of Christianity, they have immediately been struck with the total discrepancy between these doctrines and the lives and practices of their European professors. “If these are the principles of your religion,” they have continually said, “go and preach them to your countrymen. If they have any efficacy in them, let us see it shewn upon them. Make them good, just, and full of this love you speak of. Let them regard the rights and property of Indians. You have also a people amongst you that you have torn from their own country, and hold in slavery. Go home and give them freedom; do as your book says,—as you would be done by. When you have done that, come again, and we will listen to you.”

This is the language which the missionaries have had everywhere in the American forests to contend with.[58] When they have made by their truly kind and christian spirit and lives some impression, the spirit and lives of their countrymen have again destroyed their labours. The fire-waters, gin, rum, and brandy, have been introduced to intoxicate, and in intoxication to swindle the Indians out of their furs and lands. Numbers of claims to lands have been grounded on drunken bargains, which in their soberness the Indians would not recognize; and the consequences have been bloodshed and forcible expulsion. Before these causes the Indians have steadily melted away, or retired westwards before the advancing tide of white emigration. Malte Brun would have us believe that in the United States there never were many more than twice the present number. Let any one look at the list of the different tribes, and their numbers in 1822, quoted by himself from Dr. Morse, and then look at the numbers of all the tribes which inhabited the old States at the period of their settlement.

In New England2,247
New York5,184
Ohio2,407
Michigan and N. W. territories28,380
Illinois and Indiana17,006
Southern States east of Mississippi65,122
West of Mississippi and north of Missouri33,150
Between Missouri and Red River101,070
Between Red River and Rio del Norte45,370
West of Rocky Mountains171,200
———
471,136

The slightest glance at this table shews instantly the fact, that where the white settlers have been the longest there the Indians have wofully decreased. The farther you go into the Western wilderness the greater the Indian population. Where are the populous tribes that once camped in the woods of New York, New England, and Pennsylvania? In those states there were twenty years ago about 8000 Indians; since then, a rapid diminution has taken place. In the middle of the seventeenth century, and after several of the tribes were exterminated, and after all had suffered severely, there could not be less, according to the historians of the times, than forty or fifty thousand Indians within the same limits. The traveller occasionally meets with a feeble remnant of these once numerous and powerful tribes, lingering amid the now usurped lands of their country, in the old settled states; but they have lost their ancient spirit and dignity, and more resemble troops of gypsies than the noble savages their ancestors were. A few of the Tuscaroras live near Lewistown, and are agriculturists: and the last of the Narragansets, the tribe of Miantinomo, are to be found at Charlestown, in Rhode Island, under the notice of the Boston missionaries. Fragments of the Six Nations yet linger in the State of New York. A few Oneidas live near the lake of that name, now christianized and habituated to the manners of the country. Some of the Senecas and Cornplanters remain about Buffalo, on the Niagara, and at the head-waters of the Alleghany river. Amongst these Senecas, lived till 1830, the famous orator Red-Jacket; one of the most extraordinary men which this singular race has produced. The effect of his eloquence may be imagined from the following passage, to be found in “Buckingham’s Miscellanies selected from the Public Journals.”

“More than thirty years (this was written about 1822) have rolled away since a treaty was held on the beautiful acclivity that overlooks the Canandaigua Lake. Two days had passed away in negotiation with the Indians for the cession of their lands. The contract was supposed to be nearly completed, when Red-Jacket arose. With the grace and dignity of a Roman senator he drew his blanket around him, and with a piercing eye surveyed the multitude. All was hushed. Nothing interposed to break the silence, save the gentle rustling of the tree-tops under whose shade they were gathered. After a long and solemn, but not unmeaning pause, he commenced his speech in a low voice and sententious style. Rising gradually with the subject, he depicted the primitive simplicity and happiness of his nation, and the wrongs they had sustained from the usurpations of white men, with such a bold but faithful pencil, that every auditor was soon roused to vengeance, or melted into tears. The effect was inexpressible. But ere the emotions of admiration and sympathy had subsided, the white men became alarmed. They were in the heart of an Indian country, surrounded by ten times their number, who were inflamed by the remembrance of their injuries, and excited to indignation by the eloquence of a favourite chief. Appalled and terrified, the white men cast a cheerless gaze upon the hordes around them. A nod from one of the chiefs might be the onset of destruction, but at this portentous moment Farmers-brother interposed.”

In the year 1805 a council was held at Buffalo, by the chiefs and warriors of the Senecas, at the request of Mr. Cram from Massachusets. The missionary first made a speech, in which he told the Indians that he was sent by the Missionary Society of Boston, to instruct them “how to worship the Great Spirit,” and not to get away their lands and money; that there was but one true religion, and they were living in darkness, etc. After consultation, Red-Jacket returned, on behalf of the Indians, the following speech, which is deservedly famous, and not only displays the strong intellect of the race, but how vain it was to expect to christianize them, without clear and patient reasoning, and in the face of the crimes and corruptions of the whites.

“Friend and brother, it was the will of the Great Spirit that we should meet together this day. He orders all things, and he has given us a fine day for our council. He has taken his garment from before the sun, and caused it to shine with brightness upon us. Our eyes are opened that we see clearly; our ears are unstopped that we have been able to hear distinctly the words that you have spoken. For all these favours we thank the Great Spirit and him only.

“Brother, this council-fire was kindled by you. It was at your request that we came together at this time. We have listened with great attention to what you have said; you requested us to speak our minds freely: this gives us great joy, for we now consider that we stand upright before you, and can speak whatever we think. All have heard your voice, and all speak to you as one man; our minds are agreed.

“Brother, you say you want an answer to your talk before you leave this place. It is right you should have one, as you are at a great distance from home, and we do not wish to detain you; but we will first look back a little, and tell you what our fathers have told us, and what we have heard from the white people.

“Brother, listen to what we say. There was a time when our forefathers owned this great island. Their seats extended from the rising to the setting sun. The Great Spirit had made it for the use of Indians. He had created the buffalo, the deer, and other animals for food. He made the beaver and the bear, and their skins served us for clothing. He had scattered them over the country, and taught us how to take them. He had caused the earth to produce corn for bread. All this he had done for his red children, because he loved them. If we had any disputes about hunting-grounds, they were generally settled without the shedding of much blood; but an evil day came upon us: your forefathers crossed the great waters, and landed on this island. Their numbers were small; they found friends, and not enemies; they told us they had fled from their own country for fear of wicked men, and came here to enjoy their religion. They asked for a small seat. We took pity on them, granted their request, and they sate down among us. We gave them corn and meat, they gave us poison[59] in return. The white people had now found out our country, tidings were carried back, and more came amongst us; yet we did not fear them, we took them to be friends: they called us brothers, we believed them, and gave them a larger seat. At length their numbers had greatly increased, they wanted more land,—they wanted our country! Our eyes were opened, and our minds became uneasy. Wars took place; Indians were hired to fight against Indians, and many of our people were destroyed. They also brought strong liquors among us; it was strong and powerful, and has slain thousands.

“Brother, our seats were once large, and yours were very small. You have now become a great people, and we have scarcely a place left to spread our blankets. You have got our country, but are not satisfied;—you want to force your religion upon us.

“Brother, continue to listen. You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great Spirit agreeably to his mind, and if we do not take hold of the religion which you white people teach, we shall be unhappy hereafter. You say that you are right, and we are lost; how do you know this? We understand that your religion is written in a book; if it was intended for us as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit given it to us, and not only to us, why did he not give to our forefathers the knowledge of that book, with the means of understanding it rightly? We only know what you tell us about it; how shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the white people?

“Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? why not all agree, as you can all read the book?

“Brother, we do not understand these things. We are told that your religion was given to your forefathers, and has been handed down from father to son. We also have a religion which was given to our forefathers, and has been handed down to us their children. We worship that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favours we receive; to love each other, and to be united;—we never quarrel about religion.

“Brother, the Great Spirit has made us all; but he has made a great difference between his white and red children. He has given us a different complexion, and different customs. To you he has given the arts; to these he has not opened our eyes. We know these things to be true. Since he has made so great a difference between us in other things, why may we not conclude that he has given us a different religion according to our understanding? The Great Spirit does right: he knows what is best for his children: we are satisfied.

“Brother, we do not wish to destroy your religion, or take it from you; we only want to enjoy our own.

“Brother, you say you have not come to get our land or our money, but to enlighten our minds. I will now tell you that I have been at your meetings, and saw you collecting money from the meeting. I cannot tell what this money was intended for, but suppose it was your minister; and, if we should conform to your way of thinking, perhaps you may want some from us.

“Brother, we are told that you have been preaching to the white people in this place. These people are our neighbours; we are acquainted with them: we will wait a little while, and see what effect your preaching has upon them. If we find it does them good, makes them honest and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again what you have said.

“Brother, you have now heard our answer to your talk; and this is all we have to say at present. As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand, and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey, and return you safe to your friends.”

The Missionary, hastily rising from his seat, refused to shake hands with them, saying “there was no fellowship between the religion of God and the works of the devil.” The Indians smiled and retired in a peaceable manner.[60] Which of these parties best knew the real nature of religion? At all events the missionary was awfully deficient in the spirit of his own, and in the art of winning men to embrace it.

CHAPTER XXV.
TREATMENT OF THE INDIANS BY THE UNITED STATES,—CONTINUED.

The Friends have for many years had schools for the education of the children in different States, and persons employed to engage the Indians in agriculture and manual arts, but they, as well as the missionaries, complain that their efforts have been rendered abortive by the continual removals of the red people by the government.

Scarcely was the war over, and American independence proclaimed, when a great strife began betwixt the Republicans and the Indians, for the Indian lands—a strife which extended from the Canadian lakes to the gulph of Florida, and has continued more or less to this moment. Under the British government, the boundaries of the American states had never been well defined. The Americans appointed commissioners to determine them, and appear to have resolved that all Indian claims within the boundaries of the St. Lawrence, the great chain of lakes, and the Mississippi, should be extinguished. They certainly embraced a compact and most magnificent expanse of territory. It was true that the Indians, the ancient and rightful possessors of the soil, had yet large tracts within these lines of demarcation; but, then, what was the power of the Indians to that of the United States? They could be compelled to evacuate their lands, and it was resolved that they should. It is totally beyond the limits of my work to follow out the progress of this most unequal and iniquitous strife; whoever wishes to see it fully and very fairly portrayed may do so in a work by an American—“Drake’s Book of the North American Indians.” I can here only simply state, that a more painful and interesting struggle never went on between the overwhelming numbers of the white men, armed with all the powers of science, but unrestrained by the genuine sentiments of religion, and the sons of the forest in their native simplicity. The Americans tell us that this apparently hard and arbitrary measure will eventually prove the most merciful. That the Indians cannot live by the side of white men; they are always quarrelling with and murdering them; and that is but too true; and the Indians in strains of the most indignant and pathetic eloquence, tell us the reason why. It is because the white invaders are eternally encroaching on their bounds, destroying their deer and their fish, and murdering the Indians too without ceremony. It is this recklessness of law and conscience, and the ever-rolling tide of white population westward, which raised up Tecumseh, and his companions, to combine the northern tribes in resistance. Brant assured the American commissioners, that unless they made the Ohio and the Muskingum their boundaries, there could be no peace with the Indians. These are the causes that called forth Black-Hauk from the Ouisconsin, with the Winnebagoes, the Sacs, and Foxes; that roused the Little-Turtle, with his Miamies, and many other chiefs and tribes, to inflict bloody retribution on their oppressors, but finally to be compelled themselves only the sooner to yield up their native lands. These are the causes that, operating to the most southern point of the United States, armed the great nations of the Seninoles, the Creeks, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees; and have made famous the exterminating campaigns of General Jackson, the bloody spots of Fort Mimms, Autossee, Tippecanoe, Talladega, Horse-shoe-bend, and other places of wholesale carnage. At Horse-shoe-bend, General Jackson says—“determined to exterminate them, I detached General Coffee with the mounted and nearly the whole of the Indian force, early in the morning (March 27, 1814), to cross the river about two miles below their encampment, and to surround the Bend, so that none of them should escape by crossing the river.”

“At this place,” says Drake, “the disconsolate tribes of the South had made a last great stand; and had a tolerably fortified camp. It was said they were 1000 strong.” They were attacked on all sides; the fighting was kept up five hours; five hundred and fifty-seven were left dead on the peninsula, and a great number killed by the horsemen, in crossing the river. It is believed that not more than twenty escaped! “We continued,” says the brave General Jackson, “to destroy many of them who had concealed themselves under the banks of the river, until we were prevented by the night!”

And what had these unfortunate tribes done, that they should be exterminated? Simply this:—When the United States remodelled the southern states, reducing the Carolinas and Georgia, and creating the new states of Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, they stipulated, in behalf of Georgia, to extinguish all the Indian titles to lands in that State, “as soon as it could be done on peaceable terms.” Georgia, impatient to seize on these lands, immediately employed all means to effect this object. When the Indians, in national council, would not sell their lands, they prevailed on a half-breed chief, M’Intosh, and a few others, of no character, to sell them; and, on this mock title, proceeded to expel the Indians. The Indians resisted; an alarm of rebellion was sounded through the States, and General Jackson sent to put it down. The Indians, as in all other quarters, were compelled to give way before the irresistible American power. We cannot go at length into this bloody history of oppression; but the character of the whole may be seen in that of a part.

But the most singular feature of the treatment of the Indians by the Americans is, that while they assign their irreclaimable nature as the necessary cause of their expelling or desiring to expel them from all the states east of the Mississippi, their most strenuous and most recent efforts have been directed against those numerous tribes, that were not only extensive but rapidly advancing in civilization. So far from refusing to adopt settled, orderly habits, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, were fast conforming both to the religion and the habits of the Americans. The Creeks were numbered in 1814 at 20,000. The Choctaws had some years ago 4041 warriors, and could not therefore be estimated at less than four times that number in total population, or 16,000. In 1810, the Cherokees consisted of 12,400 persons; in 1824 they had increased to 15,000. The Chickasaws reckoned some years ago 1000 warriors, making the tribe probably 4000.

The Creeks had twenty years ago cultivated lands, flocks, cattle, gardens, and different kinds of domestic manufactures. They were betaking themselves to manual trades and farming. “The Choctaws,” Mr. Stuart says, “have both schools and churches. A few books have been published in the Choctaw language. In one part of their territory, where the population amounted to 5627 persons, there were above 11,000 cattle, about 4000 horses, 22,000 hogs, 530 spinning-wheels, 360 ploughs, etc.” The missionaries speak in the highest terms of their steadiness and sobriety; and one of their chiefs had actually offered himself as a candidate for Congress. All these tribes are described as rapidly progressing in education and civilization, but the Cherokees present a character which cannot be contemplated without the liveliest admiration. These were the tribes amongst whom Adair spent so many years, about the middle of the last century, and whose customs and ideas as delineated by him, exhibited them as such fine material for cultivation. Since then the missionaries, and especially the Moravians, have been labouring with the most signal success. A school was opened in this tribe by them in 1804, in which vast numbers of Cherokee children have been educated. Such, indeed, have been the effects of cultivation on this fine people, that they have assumed all the habits and pursuits of civilized life. Their progress may be noted by observing the amount of their possessions in 1810, and again, fourteen years afterwards, in 1824. In the former year they had 3 schools, in the latter 18; in the former year 13 grist-mills, in the latter 36; in the former year 3 saw-mills, in the latter 13; in the former year 467 looms, in the latter 762; in the former year 1,600 spinning-wheels, in the latter 2,486; in the former year 30 wagons, in the latter 172; in the former year 500 ploughs, in the latter 2,923; in the former year 6,100 horses, in the latter 7,683; in the former year 19,500 head of cattle, in the latter 22,531; in the former year 19,600 swine, in the latter 46,732; in the former year 1,037 sheep, in the latter 2,546, and 430 goats; in the former year 49 smiths, in the latter 62 smiths’ shops. Here is a steady and prosperous increase; testifying to no ordinary existence of industry, prudence, and good management amongst them, and bearing every promise of their becoming a most valuable portion of the community. They have, Mr. Stuart tells us, several public roads, fences, and turnpikes. The soil produces maize, cotton, tobacco, wheat, oats, indigo, sweet and Irish potatoes. The natives carry on a considerable trade with the adjoining states, and some of them export cotton to New Orleans. Apple and peach orchards are common, and gardens well cultivated. Butter and cheese are the produce of their dairies. There are many houses of public entertainment kept by the natives. Numerous and flourishing villages are seen in every section of the country. Cotton and woollen cloths and blankets are everywhere. Almost every family in the nation produces cotton for its own consumption. Nearly all the nation are native Cherokees.

A printing-press has been established for several years; and a newspaper, written partly in English, and partly in Cherokee, has been successfully carried on. This paper, called the Cherokee Phœnix, is written entirely by a Cherokee, a young man under thirty. It had been surmised that he was assisted by a white man, on which he put the following notice in the paper:—“No white has anything to do with the management of our paper. No other person, whether white or red, besides the ostensible editor, has written, from the commencement of the Phœnix, half a column of matter which has appeared under the editorial head.”[61]

The starting of this Indian newspaper by an Indian, is one of the most interesting facts in the history of civilization. In this language nothing had been written or printed. It had no written alphabet. This young Indian, already instructed by the missionaries in English literature, is inspired with a desire to open the world of knowledge to his countrymen in their vernacular tongue. There is no written character, no types. Those words familiar to all native ears, have no corresponding representation to the eye. These are gigantic difficulties to the young Indian, and as the Christian would call him, savage aspirant and patriot. But he determines to conquer them all. He travels into the eastern states. He invents letters which shall best express the sounds of his native tongue; he has types cut, and commences a newspaper. There is nothing like it in the history of nations in their first awakening from the long fixedness of wild life. This mighty engine, the press, once put in motion by native genius in the western wilderness, books are printed suitable to the nascent intelligence of the country. The Gospel of St. Matthew is translated into Cherokee, and printed at the native press. Hymns are also translated and printed. Christianity makes rapid strides. The pupils in the schools advance with admirable rapidity. There is a new and wonderful spirit abroad. Not only do the Indians throng to the churches to listen to the truths of life and immortality, but Indians themselves become diligent ministers, and open places of worship in the more remote and wild parts of the country. Even temperance societies are formed. Political principles develop themselves far in philosophical advance of our proud and learned England. The constitution of the native state contains admirable stamina; trial by jury prevails; and universal suffrage—a right, to this moment distrustfully withheld from the English people, is there freely granted, and judiciously exercised; every male citizen of eighteen years old having a vote in all public elections.

The whole growth and being, however, of this young Indian civilization is one of the most delightful and animating subjects of contemplation that ever came before the eye of the lover of his race. Here were these Indian savages, who had been two hundred years termed irreclaimable; whom it had been the custom only to use as the demons of carnage, as creatures fit only to carry the tomahawk and the bloody scalping-knife through Cherry-Valley, Gnadenhuetten, or Wyoming; and whom, that work done, it was declared, must be cast out from the face of civilized man, as the reproach of the past and the incubus of the future,—here were they gloriously vindicating themselves from those calumnies and wrongs, and assuming in the social system a most beautiful and novel position. It was a spectacle on which one would have thought the United States would hang with a proud delight, and point to as one of the most noble features of their vast and noble country. What did they do? They chose rather to give the lie to all their assertions, that they drove out the Indians because they were irreclaimable and unamalgamable, and to shew to the world that they expelled them solely and simply because they scorned that one spot of the copper hue of the aborigines should mar the whiteness of their population. They compel us to exclaim with the indignant Abbé Raynal, “And are these the men whom both French and English have been conspiring to extirpate for a century past?” and suggest to us his identical answer,—“But perhaps they would be ashamed to live amongst such models of heroism and magnanimity!”

However, everything which irritation, contempt, political chicanery, and political power can effect, have been long zealously at work to drive these fine Nations out of their delightful country, and beyond the Mississippi; the boundary which American cupidity at present sets between itself and Indian extirpation. Spite of all those solemn declarations, by the venerable Washington and other great statesmen already quoted; spite of the most grave treaties, and especially one of July 2d, 1791, which says, “The United States solemnly guarantee to the Cherokee nation all their lands not hereby ceded,” by a juggle betwixt the State of Georgia and Congress, the Cherokees have been virtually dispossessed of their country. From the period of the American independence to 1802, there had been a continual pressure on the Cherokees for their lands, and they had been induced by one means or another to cede to the States more than two hundred millions of acres. How reluctantly may be imagined, by the decided stand made by them in 1819, when they peremptorily protested that they would not sell another foot. That they needed all they had, for that they were becoming more and more agricultural, and progressing in civilization. One would have thought this not only a sufficient but a most satisfactory plea to a great nation by its people; but no, Georgia ceded to Congress territories for the formation of two new states, Alabama and Mississippi, and Georgia in part of payment receives the much desired lands of the Cherokees. Georgia, therefore, assumes the avowed language of despotism, and decrees by its senate, in the very face of the clear recognitions of Indian independence already quoted, that the right of discovery and conquest was the title of the Europeans; that every foot of land in the United States was held by that title; that the right of the Indians was merely temporary; that they were tenants at will, removable at any moment, either by negotiation or force. “It may be contended,” says the Report of 1827, “with much plausibility, that there is in these claims more of force than of justice; but they are claims which have been recognized and admitted by the whole civilized world, AND IT IS UNQUESTIONABLY TRUE, THAT, UNDER SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES, FORCE becomes RIGHT!”[62]

This language once adopted there needed no further argument about right or justice. Georgia took its stand upon Rob Roy’s law,

That he shall take who has the power,

And he shall keep who can;

and it forthwith proceeded to act upon it. It decreed in 1828, that the territories of the Cherokees should be divided amongst the different counties of Georgia; that after June 1st, 1830, the Cherokees should become the subjects of Georgia; that all Cherokee laws should be abolished, and all Cherokees should be cut off from any benefit of the laws of the State—that is, that no Indian, or descendent of one, should be capable to act as a witness, or to be a party in any suit against a white man. The Cherokees refusing to abandon their hereditary soil without violence, an act was passed prohibiting any white man from residing in the Cherokee country without a permit from the governor, and on the authority of this, soldiers were marched into it, and the missionaries carried off on a Sunday. An attempt was made to crush that interesting newspaper press, by forcing away every white man assisting in the office. Forcible possession was taken of the Indian gold mines by Georgian laws, and the penal statutes exercised against the Indians who did not recognize their authority. The Cherokees, on these outrages, vehemently appealed to Congress. They said—“how far we have contributed to keep bright the chain of friendship which binds us to these United States, is within the reach of your knowledge; it is ours to maintain it, until, perhaps, the plaintive voice of an Indian from the south shall no more be heard within your walls of legislation. Our nation and our people may cease to exist, before another revolving year reassembles this august assembly of great men. We implore that our people may not be denounced as savages, unfit for the good neighbourhood guaranteed to them by treaty. We cannot better express the rights of our nation, than they are developed on the face of the document we herewith submit; and the desires of our nation, than to pray a faithful fulfilment of the promises made by its illustrious author through his secretary. Between the compulsive measures of Georgia and our destruction, we ask the interposition of your authority, and remembrance of the bond of perpetual peace pledged for our safety—the safety of the last fragments of some mighty nations, that have grazed for a while upon your civilization and prosperity, but which are now tottering on the brink of angry billows, whose waters have covered in oblivion other nations that were once happy, but are now no more.

“The schools where our children learn to read the Word of God; the churches where our people now sing to his praise, and where they are taught ‘that of one blood he created all the nations of the earth;’ the fields they have cleared, and the orchards they have planted; the houses they have built,—are dear to the Cherokees; and there they expect to live and to die, on the lands inherited from their fathers, as the firm friends of the people of these United States.”

This is the very language which the simple people of all the new regions whither Europeans have penetrated, have been passionately and imploringly addressing for three hundred years, but in vain. We seem again to hear the supplicating voice of the people of the Seven Reductions of Paraguay, addressed to the expelling Spaniards and Portuguese. In each case it was alike unavailing. The Congress returned them a cool answer, advising the Cherokees to go over the Mississippi, where “the soil should be theirs while the trees grow, or the streams run.” But they had heard that language before, and they knew its value. The State of Georgia had avowed the doctrine of conquest, which silences all contracts and annuls all promises. It is to the honour of the Supreme Court of the United States that, on appeal to it, it annulled the proceedings of Georgia, and recognised the rightful possession of the country by the Cherokees. But what power shall restrain all those engines of irritation and oppression, which white men know how to employ against coloured ones, when they want their persons or their lands. Nothing will be able to prevent the final expatriation of these southern tribes: they must pass the Mississippi till the white population is swelled sufficiently to require them to cross the Missouri; there will then remain but two barriers between them and annihilation—the rocky mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Whenever we hear now of those tribes, it is of some fresh act of aggression against them—some fresh expulsion of a portion of them—and of melancholy Indians moving off towards the western wilds.

Such is the condition to which the British and their descendants have reduced the aboriginal inhabitants of the vast regions of North America,—the finest race of men that we have ever designated by the name of savage.

What term we savage? The untutored heart

Of Nature’s child is but a slumbering fire;

Prompt at a breath, or passing touch to start

Into quick flame, as quickly to retire;

Ready alike its pleasance to impart,

Or scorch the hand which rudely wakes its ire:

Demon or child, as impulse may impel,

Warm in its love, but in its vengeance fell.

And these Columbian warriors to their strand

Had welcomed Europe’s sons, and rued it sore:—

Men with smooth tongues, but rudely armed hand;

Fabling of peace, when meditating gore;

Who their foul deeds to veil, ceased not to brand

The Indian name on every Christian shore.

What wonder, on such heads, their fury’s flame

Burst, till its terrors gloomed their fairer fame?

For they were not a brutish race, unknowing

Evil from good; their fervid souls embraced

With virtue’s proudest homage, to o’erflowing,

The mind’s inviolate majesty. The past

To them was not a darkness; but was glowing

With splendour which all time had not o’ercast;

Streaming unbroken from creation’s birth,

When God communed and walked with men on earth.

Stupid idolatry had never dimmed

The Almighty image in their lucid thought.

To Him alone their zealous praise was hymned;

And hoar Tradition from her treasury brought

Glimpses of far-off times, in which were limned,

His awful glory;—and their prophets taught

Precepts sublime,—a solemn ritual given,

In clouds and thunder, to their sires from heaven.[63]

And in the boundless solitude which fills,

Even as a mighty heart, their wild domains;

In caves and glens of the unpeopled hills;

And the deep shadow that for ever reigns

Spirit-like, in their woods; where, roaring, spills

The giant cataract to the astounded plains,—

Nature, in her sublimest moods, had given

Not man’s weak lore,—but a quick flash from heaven.

Roaming in their free lives, by lake and stream;

Beneath the splendour of their gorgeous sky;

Encamping, while shot down night’s starry gleam,

In piny glades, where their forefathers lie;

Voices would come, and breathing whispers seem

To rouse within, the life which may not die;

Begetting valorous deeds, and thoughts intense,

And a wild gush of burning eloquence.

Such appeared to me ten years ago, when writing these stanzas, the character of the North American Indians; such it appears to me now. What an eternal disgrace to both British and Americans if this race of “mighty hunters before the Lord” shall, at the very moment when they shew themselves ready to lay down the bow and throw all the energies of their high temperament into civilized life, still be repelled and driven into the waste, or to annihilation. Their names and deeds and peculiar character are already become part of the literature of America; they will hereafter present to the imagination of posterity, one of the most singular and interesting features of history. Their government, the only known government of pure intellect; their grave councils; their singular eloquence; their stern fortitude; their wild figures in the war-dance; their “fleet foot” in the ancient forest; and all those customs, and quick keen thoughts which belong to them, and them alone, will for ever come before the poetic mind of every civilized people. Shall they remain, to look back to the days in which the very strength of their intellects and feelings made them repel the form of civilization, while they triumph in the universal diffusion of knowledge and Christian hope? or shall it continue to be said,

The vast, the ebbless, the engulphing tide

Of the white population still rolls on!

And quailed has their romantic heart of pride,—

The kingly spirit of the woods is gone.

Farther and farther do they wend to hide

Their wasting strength; to mourn their glory flown;

And sigh to think how soon shall crowds pursue

Down the lone stream where glides the still canoe.

CHAPTER XXVI.
THE ENGLISH IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Having now quitted North America, let us sail southward. There we may direct our course east or west, we may pass Cape Horn, or the Cape of Good Hope, and enter the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, secure that on whatever shore we may touch, whether on continent or island, we shall find the Europeans oppressing the natives on their own soil, or having exterminated them, occupying their place. We shall find our own countrymen more than all others widely diffused and actively employed in the work of expulsion, moral corruption, and destruction of the aboriginal tribes. We talk of the atrocities of the Spaniards, of the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro, as though they were things of an ancient date, things gone by, things of the dark old days; and seem never for a moment to suspect that these dark old days were not a whit more shocking than our own, or that our countrymen, protestant Englishmen of 1838, can be compared for a moment to the Red-Cross Knights of Mexican and Peruvian butcheries. If they cannot be compared, I blush to say that it is because our infamy and crimes are even more wholesale and inhuman than theirs. Do the good people of England, who “sit at home at ease,” who build so many churches and chapels, and flock to them in such numbers,—who spend about 170,000l. annually on Bibles, and more than half a million annually in missions and other modes of civilizing and christianizing the heathen, and therefore naturally flatter themselves that they are rapidly bringing all the world to the true faith; do they or can they know that at this very moment, wherever their Bibles go, and wherever their missionaries are labouring, their own government and their own countrymen are as industriously labouring also, to scatter the most awful corruption of morals and principles amongst the simple natives of all, to us, new countries? that they are introducing diseases more pestilent than the plague, more loathsome than the charnel-house itself, and more deadly than the simoom of the tropical deserts, that levels all before it? Do they know, that even where their missionaries, like the prophets of old, have gone before the armies of God, putting the terrors of heathenism to flight, making a safe path through the heart of the most dreadful deserts; dividing the very waters, and levelling the old mountains of separation and of difficulty—

By Faith supported and by Freedom led,

A fruitful field amid the desert making,

And dwell secure where kings and priests were quaking,

And taught the waste to yield them wine and bread.—Pringle.

Do they know, that when these holy and victorious men have thus conquered all the difficulties they calculated upon, and seen, by God’s blessing, the savage reclaimed, the idolater convinced, the wilderness turned into a garden, and arts, commerce, and refined life rising around them, a more terrible enemy has appeared in the shape of European, and chiefly English corruption? That out of that England—whence they had carried such beneficent gifts, such magnificent powers of good—have come pouring swarms of lawless vagabonds worse than the Spaniards, and worse than the Buccaneers of old, and have threatened all their works with destruction? Do they know that in South Africa, where Smidt, Vanderkemp, Philip, Read, Kay and others, have done such wonders, and raised the Hottentot, once pronounced the lowest of the human species, and the Caffre, not long since styled the most savage, into the most faithful Christians and most respectable men; and in those beautiful islands that Ellis and Williams have described in such paradisiacal colours, that roving crews of white men are carrying everywhere the most horrible demoralization, that every shape of European crime is by them exhibited to the astonished people—murder, debauchery, the most lawless violence in person and property; and that the liquid fire which, from many a gin-shop in our own great towns, burns out the industry, the providence, the moral sense, and the life of thousands of our own people, is there poured abroad by these monsters with the same fatal effect? Whoever does not know this, is ignorant of one of the most fearful and gigantic evils which beset the course of human improvement, and render abortive a vast amount of the funds so liberally supplied, and the labours so nobly undergone, in the cause of Christianity. Whoever does not know this, should moreover refer to the Parliamentary Report of 1837, on the Aboriginal Tribes.

The limits which I have devoted to a brief history of the treatment of these tribes by the European nations have been heavily pressed upon by the immense mass of our crimes and cruelties, and I must now necessarily make a hasty march across the scenes here alluded to; but enough will be seen to arouse astonishment, and indicate the necessity of counter-agencies of the most impulsive kind.

The Dutch have been applauded by various historians for the justice and mildness which they manifested towards the natives of their Cape colony. This may have been the case at their first entrance in 1652, and until they had purchased a certain quantity of land for their new settlement with a few bottles of brandy and some toys. It was their commercial policy, in the language of the old school of traders, to “first creep and then go.” It was in the same assumed mildness that they insinuated themselves into the spice islands of India. Nothing, however, is more certain than that in about a century they had possessed themselves of all the Hottentot territories, and reduced the Hottentots themselves to a state of the most abject servitude. The Parliamentary Report just alluded to, describes the first governor, Van Riebeck, in the very first year of the settlement, looking over the mud-walls of his fortress on “the cattle of the natives, and wondering at the ways of Providence that could bestow such very fine gifts on heathens.” It also presents us with two very characteristic extracts from his journal at this moment.

“December 13th, 1652.—To-day the Hottentots came with thousands of cattle and sheep close to our fort, so that their cattle nearly mixed with ours. We feel vexed to see so many fine head of cattle, and not to be able to buy to any considerable extent. If it had been indeed allowed, we had opportunity to-day to deprive them of 10,000 head, which, however, if we obtain orders to that effect, can be done at any time, and even more conveniently, because they will have greater confidence in us. With 150 men, 10,000 or 11,000 head of black cattle might be obtained without danger of losing one man; and many savages might be taken without resistance, in order to be sent as slaves to India, as they still always come to us unarmed.

“December 18.—To-day the Hottentots came again with thousands of cattle close to the fort. If no further trade is to be expected with them, what would it matter much to take at once 6,000 or 8,000 beasts from them? There is opportunity enough for it, as they are not strong in number, and very timid; and since not more than two or three men often graze a thousand cattle close to our cannon, who might be easily cut off, and as we perceive they place very great confidence in us, we allure them still with show of friendship to make them the more confident. It is vexatious to see so much cattle, so necessary for the refreshment of the Honourable Company’s ships, of which it is not every day that any can be obtained by friendly trade.”

It is sufficiently clear that no nice scruples of conscience withheld Governor Van Riebeck from laying hand on 10 or 11,000 cattle, or blowing a few of the keepers away with his cannons.

The system of oppression, adds the Report, thus began, never slackened till the Hottentot nation were cut off, and the small remnant left were reduced to abject bondage. From all the accounts we have seen respecting the Hottentot population, it could not have been less than 200,000, but at present they are said to be only 32,000 in number.

In 1702 the Governor and Council stated their inability to restrain the plunderings and outrages of the colonists upon the natives, on the plea that such an act would implicate and ruin half the colony; and in 1798, Barrow, in his Travels in Southern Africa, thus describes their condition:—“Some of their villages might have been expected to remain in this remote and not very populous part of the colony. Not one, however, was to be found. There is not, in fact, in the whole district of Graaff Reynet, a single horde of independent Hottentots, and perhaps not a score of individuals who are not actually in the service of the Dutch. These weak people—the most helpless, and, in their present condition, perhaps the most wretched of the human race,—duped out of their possessions, their country, and their liberty, have entailed upon their miserable offspring a state of existence to which that of slavery might bear the comparison of happiness. It is a condition, however, not likely to continue to a very remote posterity. Their numbers, of late years, have been rapidly on the decline. It has generally been observed, that where Europeans have colonized, the less civilized nations have always dwindled away, and at length totally disappeared.... There is scarcely an instance of cruelty said to have been committed against the slaves in the West Indian islands, that could not find a parallel from the Dutch farmers towards the Hottentots in their service. Beating and cutting with thongs of the sea-cow (hippopotamus), or rhinoceros, are only gentle punishments; though those sort of whips, which they call sjambocs, are most horrid instruments, being tough, pliant, and heavy almost as lead. Firing small shot into the legs and thighs of a Hottentot is a punishment not unknown to some of the monsters who inhabit the neighbourhood of Camtoos. By a resolution of the old government, a boor was allowed to claim as his property, till the age of twenty-five, all the children of the Hottentots to whom he had given in their infancy a morsel of meat. At the expiration of this period, the odds are two to one that the slave is not emancipated; but should he be fortunate enough to escape at this period, the best part of his life has been spent in a profitless servitude, and he is turned adrift without any thing he can call his own, except the sheep-skin on his back.”

These poor people were fed on the flesh of old ewes, or any animal that the boor expected to die of age; or, in default of that, a few quaggas or such game were killed for them. They were tied to a wagon-wheel and flogged dreadfully for slight offences; and when a master wanted to get rid of one, he was sometimes sent on an errand, followed on the road, and shot.[64] The cruelties, in fact, practised on the Hottentots by the Dutch boors were too shocking to be related. Maiming, murder, pursuing them like wild beasts, and shooting at them in the most wanton manner, were amongst them. Mr. Pringle stated that he had in his possession a journal of such deeds, kept by a resident at so late a period as from 1806 to 1811, which consisted of forty-four pages of such crimes and cruelties, which were too horrible to describe. Such as we found them when the Cape finally became our possession, such they remained till 1828, when Dr. Philip published his “Researches in South Africa,” which laying open this scene of barbarities, Mr. Fowell Buxton gave notice of a motion on the subject in Parliament. Sir George Murray, then Colonial Secretary, however, most honourably acceded to Mr. Buxton’s proposition before such motion was submitted, and an Order in Council was accordingly issued, directing that the Hottentots should be admitted to all the rights, and placed on the same footing as the rest of his Majesty’s free subjects in the colony. This transaction is highly honourable to the English government, and the result has been such as to shew the wisdom of such liberal measures. But before proceeding to notice the effect of this change upon the Hottentots, let us select as a specimen of the treatment they were subject to, even under our rule, the destruction of the last independent Hottentot kraal, as related by Pringle.

“Among the principal leaders of the Hottentot insurgents in their wars with the boors, were three brothers of the name of Stuurman. The manly bearing of Klaas, one of these brothers, is commemorated by Mr. Barrow, who was with the English General Vandeleur, near Algoa Bay, when this Hottentot chief came, with a large body of his countrymen, to claim the protection of the British.” “We had little doubt,” says Mr. Barrow, “that the greater number of the Hottentot men who were assembled at the bay, after receiving favourable accounts from their comrades of the treatment they experienced in the British service, would enter as volunteers into this corps; but what was to be done with the old people, the women and children? Klaas Stuurman found no difficulty in making provision for them. ‘Restore,’ said he, ‘the country of which our fathers have been despoiled by the Dutch, and we have nothing more to ask.’ I endeavoured to convince him,” continues Mr. Barrow, “how little advantage they were likely to obtain from the possession of a country, without any other property, or the means of deriving a subsistence from it. But he had the better of the argument. ‘We lived very contentedly,’ said he, ‘before these Dutch plunderers molested us; and why should we not do so again if left to ourselves? Has not the Groot Baas (the Great Master) given plenty of grassroots, and berries, and grasshoppers for our use? and, till the Dutch destroyed them, abundance of wild animals to hunt? and will they not turn and multiply when these destroyers are gone?’”

How uniform is the language of the uncivilized man wherever he has been driven from his ancient habits by the white invaders,—trust in the goodness of Providence, and regret for the plenty which he knew before they came. These words of Klaas Stuurman are almost the same as those of the American Indian Canassateego to the English at Lancaster in 1744.

But we are breaking our narrative. Klaas was killed in a buffalo hunt, and his brother David became the chief of the kraal. “The existence of this independent kraal gave great offence to the neighbouring boors. The most malignant calumnies were propagated against David Stuurman. The kraal was watched most jealously, and every possible occasion embraced of preferring complaints against the people, with a view of getting them rooted out, and reduced to the same state of servitude as the rest of their nation. For seven years no opportunity presented itself; but in 1810, when the colony was once more under the government of England, David Stuurman became outlawed in the following manner:—

“Two Hottentots belonging to this kraal, had engaged themselves for a certain period in the service of a neighbouring boor; who, when the term of their agreement expired, refused them permission to depart—a practice at that time very common, and much connived at by the local functionaries. The Hottentots, upon this, went off without permission, and returned to their village. The boor followed them thither, and demanded them back; but their chief, Stuurman, refused to surrender them. Stuurman was, in consequence, summoned by the landdrost Cuyler, to appear before him; but, apprehensive probably for his personal safety, he refused or delayed compliance. His arrest and the destruction of his kraal were determined upon. But as he was known to be a resolute man, and much beloved by his countrymen, it was considered hazardous to seize him by open force, and the following stratagem was resorted to:—

“A boor, named Cornelius Routenbach, a heemraad (one of the landdrost’s council), had by some means gained Stuurman’s confidence, and this man engaged to entrap him. On a certain day, accordingly, he sent an express to his friend Stuurman, stating that the Caffres had carried off a number of his cattle, and requested him to hasten with the most trusty of his followers to aid him in pursuit of the robbers. The Hottentot chief and his party instantly equipped themselves and set out. When they reached Routenbach’s residence, Stuurman was welcomed with every demonstration of cordiality, and, with four of his principal followers, was invited into the house. On a signal given, the door was shut, and at the same moment the landdrost (Major Cuyler), the field-commandant Stoltz, and a crowd of boors, rushed upon them from an inner apartment, and made them all prisoners. The rest of the Hottentot party, who had remained outside, perceiving that their captain and comrade had been betrayed, immediately dispersed themselves. The majority, returning to their kraal, were, together with their families, distributed by the landdrost into servitude to the neighbouring boors. Some fled into Caffreland; and a few were, at the earnest request of Dr. Vanderkemp, permitted to join the missionary institution at Bethelsdorp. The chief and his brother Boschman, with two other leaders of the kraal, were sent off prisoners to Cape Town, where, after undergoing their trial before the court of justice, upon an accusation of resistance to the civil authorities of the district, they were condemned to work in irons for life, and sent to Robben Island to be confined among other colonial convicts.

“Stuurman’s kraal was eventually broken up, the landdrost Cuyler asked and obtained, as a grant for himself—(Naboth’s vineyard again!)—the lands the Hottentots had occupied. Moreover this functionary kept in his own service, without any legal agreement, some of the children of the Stuurmans, until after the arrival of the Commissioners of Inquiry in 1823.

“Stuurman and two of his comrades, after remaining some years prisoners in Robben Island, contrived to escape, and effected their retreat through the whole extent of the colony into Caffreland, a distance of more than six hundred miles! Impatient, however, to return to his family, Stuurman, in the year 1816, sent out a messenger to the missionary, Mr. Read, from whom he had formerly experienced kindness, entreating him to endeavour to procure permission for him to return in peace. Mr. Read, as he himself informed me, made application on his behalf to the landdrost Cuyler,—but without avail. That magistrate recommended that he should remain where he was. Three years afterwards, the unhappy exile ventured to return into the colony without permission. But he was not long in being discovered and apprehended, and once more sent a prisoner to Cape Town, where he was kept in close confinement till the year 1823, when he was finally transported as a convict to New South Wales. What became of Boschman, the third brother, I never learned. Such was the fate of the last Hottentot chief who attempted to stand up for the rights of his country.”

Mr. Pringle adds, “that this statement, having been published by him in England in 1826, the benevolent General Bourke, then Lieutenant-Governor at the Cape, wrote to the Governor of New South Wales, and obtained some alleviation of the hardships of his lot for Stuurman; that, in 1829, the children of Stuurman, through the aid of Mr. Bannister, presented a memorial to Sir Lowry Cole, then governor at the Cape, for their father’s recall, but in vain; but that, in 1831, General Bourke, being himself Governor of New South Wales, obtained an order for his liberation; but, ere it arrived, ‘the last chief of the Hottentots’ had been released by death.”

Such was the treatment of the Hottentots under the Dutch and under the English; such were the barbarities and ruthless oppressions exercised on them till the passing of the 50th Ordinance by Acting-Governor Bourke in 1828, and its confirmation by the Order in Council in 1829, for their liberation. This act, so honourable to the British government, became equally honourable to the Hottentots, by their conduct on their freedom, and presents another most important proof that political justice is political wisdom. After the clamour of the interested had subsided, and after a vain attempt to reverse this ordinance, a grand experiment in legislation was made. A tract of country was granted to the Hottentots; they were placed on the frontiers with arms in their hands, to defend themselves, if necessary, from the Caffres; and they were told that they must now show whether they were capable of maintaining themselves as a people, in peace, civil order, and independence. Most nobly did they vindicate their national character from all the calumnies of indolence and imbecility that had been cast upon them,—most amply justify the confidence reposed in them! “The spot selected,” says Pringle, “for the experiment, was a tract of wild country, from which the Caffre chief, Makomo, had been expelled a short time before. It is a sort of irregular basin, surrounded on all sides by lofty and majestic mountains, from the numerous kloofs of which six or seven fine streams are poured down the subsidiary dells into the central valley. These rivulets, bearing the euphonic Caffre names of Camalu, Zebenzi, Umtóka, Mankazána, Umtúava, and Quonci, unite to form the Kat River, which finds its way through the mountain barrier by a stupendous poort, or pass, a little above Fort Beaufort. Within this mountain-basin, which from its great command of the means of irrigation is peculiarly well adapted for a dense population, it was resolved to fix the Hottentot settlement.”

It was in the middle of the winter when the settlement was located. Numbers flocked in from all quarters; some possessing a few cattle, but far the greater numbers possessing nothing but their hands to work with. They asked Captain Stockenstrom, their great friend, the lieutenant-governor of the frontier, and at whose suggestion this experiment was made, what they were to do, and how they were to subsist. He told them, “if they were not able to cultivate the ground with their fingers, they need not have come there.” Government, even under such rigorous circumstances, gave them no aid whatever except the gift of fire-arms, and some very small portion of seed-corn to the most destitute, to keep them from thieving. Yet, even thus tried, the Hottentots, who had been termed the fag-end of mankind, did not quail or despair. In the words of Mr. Fairbairn, the friend of Pringle, “The Hottentot, escaped from bonds, stood erect on his new territory; and the feeling of being restored to the level of humanity and the simple rights of nature, softened and enlarged his heart, and diffused vigour through every limb!” They dug up roots and wild bulbs for food, and persisted without a murmur, labouring surprisingly, with the most wretched implements, and those who had cattle assisting those who had nothing, to the utmost of their ability. All winter the Caffres, from whom this location had been unjustly wrested by the English, attacked them with a fury only exceeded by their hope of now regaining their territory from mere Hottentots, thus newly armed, and in so wretched a condition. But, though harassed night and day, and never, for a moment, safe in their sleep, they not only repelled the assailants, but continued to cultivate their grounds with prodigious energy. They had to form dams across the river, as stated by Mr. Read, before the Parliamentary committee, and water-courses, sometimes to the depth of ten, twelve, and fourteen feet, and that sometimes through solid rocks, and with very sorry pickaxes, iron crows, and spades; and few of them. These works, says Mr. Read, have excited the admiration of visitors, as well as the roads, which they had to cut to a considerable height on the sides of the mountains.

At first, from the doubts of colonists as to the propriety of entrusting fire-arms, and so much self-government to these newly liberated men, it was proposed that a certain portion of the Dutch and English should be mixed with them. The Hottentots, who felt this want of confidence keenly, begged and prayed that they might be trusted for two years; and Captain Stockenstrom said to them, “Then show to the world that you can work as well as others, and that without the whip.” Such indeed was their diligence, that the very next summer they had abundance of vegetables, and a plentiful harvest. In the second year they not only supported themselves, but disposed of 30,000 lbs. of barley for the troops, besides carrying other produce to market at Graham’s Town. Their enemies the Caffres made peace with them, and those of their own race flocked in so rapidly that they were soon 4,000 in number, seven hundred of whom were armed with muskets. The settlement was left without any magistrate, or officers, except the native field-cornets, and heads of parties appointed by Captain Stockenstrom, yet they continued perfectly orderly. Nay, they were not satisfied without possessing the means of both religious and other instruction. Within a few months after their establishment, they sent for Mr. Read, the missionary, and Mr. Thompson was also appointed Dutch minister amongst them. They established temperance societies, and schools. Mr. Read says, that during the four years and a half that he was there, they had established seven schools for the larger children, and one school of industry, besides five infant schools. And Captain Stockenstrom, writing to Mr. Pringle in 1833, says, “So eager are they for instruction, that when better teachers cannot be obtained, if they find any person that can merely spell, they get him to teach the rest the little he knows. They travel considerable distances to attend divine service regularly, and their spiritual guides speak with delight of the fruits of their labours. Nowhere have temperance societies been half so much encouraged as among this people, formerly so prone to intemperance; and they have of their own account petitioned the government that their grants of land may contain a prohibition against the establishment of canteens, or brandy-houses. They have repulsed the Caffres on every side on which they have been attacked, and are now upon the best terms with that people. They pay every tax like the rest of the inhabitants. They have cost the government nothing except a little ammunition for their defence, about fifty bushels of maize, and a similar quantity of oats for seed-corn, and the annual stipend for their minister. They have rendered the Kat river by far the safest part of the frontier; and the same plan followed up on a more extensive scale would soon enable government to withdraw the troops altogether.” In 1834, Captain Bradford found that they had subscribed 499l. to build a new church, and had also proposed to lay the foundation of another. In 1833 they paid in taxes 2,300 rix-dollars, and their settlement was in a most flourishing condition. Dr. Philip, before the Parliamentary Committee of 1837, stated that their schools were in admirable order; their infant schools quite equal to anything to be seen in England; and the Committee closed its evidence on this remarkable settlement with this striking opinion: “Had it, indeed, depended on the Hottentots, we believe the frontier would have been spared the outrages from which they as well as others have suffered.”

Of two things in this very interesting relation, we hardly know which is the most surprising—the avidity with which a people long held in the basest thraldom grasp at knowledge and civil life, or the blind selfishness of Englishmen, who, in the face of such splendid scenes as these, persist in oppression and violence. How easy does it seem to do good! How beautiful are the results of justice and liberality! How glorious and how profitable too, beyond all use of whips, and chains, and muskets, are treating our fellow men with gentleness and kindness—and yet after this came the Caffre commandoes and the Caffre war!

Of the same, or a kindred race with the Hottentots, are the Bosjesmen, or Bushmen, and the Griquas; their treatment, except that they could not be made slaves of, has been the same. The same injustice, the same lawlessness, the same hostile irritation, have been practised towards them by the Dutch and English as towards the Hottentots. The bushmen, in fact, were Hottentots, who, disdaining slavery and resenting the usurpations of the Europeans on their lands, took arms, endeavoured to repel their aggressors, and finding that impracticable, fled to the woods and the mountains; others, from time to time escaping from intolerable thraldom, joined them. These bushmen carried on a predatory warfare from their fastnesses with the oppressors of their race, and were in return hunted as wild beasts. Commandoes, a sort of military battu, were set on foot against them. Every one knows what a battu for game is. The inhabitants of a district assemble at the command of an officer, civil or military, to clear the country of wild beasts. They take in a vast circle, beating up the bushes and thickets, while they gradually contract the circle, till the whole multitude find themselves inclosing a small area filled with the whole bestial population of the neighbourhood, on which they make a simultaneous attack, and slaughter them in one promiscuous mass. A commando is a very similar thing, except that in it not only the bestial population of the country, but the human too, are slaughtered by the inhuman. These commandoes, though they have only acquired at the Cape a modern notoriety, have been used from the first day of discovery. They were common in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and under the same name, as may be seen in almost any of the Spanish and Portuguese historians of the West Indies and South America.

The manner in which these commandoes were conducted at the Cape was described, before the Parliamentary Committee of 1837,[65] to be a joint assemblage of burghers and military force for the purpose of enforcing restitution of cattle. Sir Lowry Cole authorized in 1833 any field-cornet, or deputy field-cornet, to whom a boor may complain, to send a party of soldiers on the track and recover the cattle. These persons are often of the most indifferent class of society. It is the interest of these men, as much as that of the boors, to make inroads into the country of the Griquas, Bushmen, or Caffres, and sweep off droves of cattle. These people can call on everybody to aid and assist, and away goes the troop. The moment the Caffres perceive these licensed marauders approaching their kraal, they collect their cattle as fast as they can, and drive them off towards the woods. The English pursue—they surround them if possible—they fall on them; the Caffres, or whoever they are, defend their property—their only subsistence, indeed; then ensues bloodshed and devastation. The cattle are driven off; the calves left behind to perish; the women and children, the whole tribe, are thrown into a state of absolute famine. Besides these “joint assemblages of burghers and military force,” there are parties entirely military sent on the same errand; and to such a pitch of vengeance have the parties arrived that whole districts have been laid in flames and reduced to utter deserts. Such has been our system—the system of us humane and virtuous English, till 1837! To these dreadful and wicked expeditions there was no end, and but little cessation, for the boors were continually going over the boundaries into the countries of Bushmen, Caffres, or Guiquas, just as they pleased. They went over with vast herds and eat them up. “In 1834 there were said to be,” says the Report, “about 1,500 boors on the other side of the Orange River, and for the most part in the Griqua country. Of these there were 700 boors for several months during that year in the district of Philipolis alone, with at least 700,000 sheep, cattle, and horses. Besides destroying the pastures of the people, in many instances their corn-fields were destroyed by them, and in some instances they took possession of their houses. It was contended that the evil could not be remedied; that the state of the country was such that the boors could not be stopped; and yet an enormous body of military was kept up on the frontiers at a ruinous expense to this country. The last Caffre war, brought on entirely by this system of aggression, by these commandoes, and the reprisals generated by them, cost this country 500,000l., and put a stop to trade and the sale of produce to the value of 300,000l. more!” Yet the success of a different policy was before the colony, in the case of the Kat River Hottentots, and that so splendid a one, that the Report says, had it been attended to and followed out, all these outrages might have been spared.

Such are commandoes.—So far as they related to the Bushmen, the following facts are sufficiently indicative. In 1774 an order was issued for the extirpation of the Bushmen, and three commandoes were sent to execute it. In 1795, the Earl of Macartney, by proclamation, authorized the landdrosts and magistrates to take the field against the Bushmen, in such expeditions; and Mr. Maynier gave in evidence, that in consequence, when he was landdrost of Graaf Reynet, parties of from 200 to 300 boors were sent out, who killed many hundreds of Bushmen, chiefly women and children, the men escaping; and the children too young to carry off for slaves had their brains knocked out against the rocks.[66] Col. Collins, in his tour to the north-eastern boundary in 1809, says one man told him that within a period of six years parties under his orders had killed or taken 3,200 of these unfortunate creatures; and another, that the actions in which he had been engaged had destroyed 2,700. That the total extinction of the Bushmen race was confidently hoped for, but sufficient force for the purpose could not be raised. But Dr. Philips’ evidence, presented in a memorial to government in 1834, may well conclude these horrible details of the deeds of our countrymen and colonists.

“A few years ago, we had 1,800 Boschmen belonging to two missionary institutions, among that people in the country between the Snewbergen and the Orange River, a country comprehending 42,000 square miles; and had we been able to treble the number of our missionary stations over that district, we might have had 5,000 of that people under instruction. In 1832 I spent seventeen days in that country, travelling over it in different directions. I then found the country occupied by the boors, and the Boschmen population had disappeared, with the exception of those that had been brought up from infancy in the service of the boors. In the whole of my journey, during the seventeen days I was in the country, I met with two men and one woman only of the free inhabitants, who had escaped the effects of the commando system, and they were travelling by night, and concealing themselves by day, to escape being shot like wild beasts. Their tale was a lamentable one: their children had been taken from them by the boors, and they were wandering about in this manner from place to place, in the hope of finding out where they were, and of getting a sight of them.”

I have glanced at the treatment of the Griquas in the last page but one. Those people were the offspring of colonists by Hottentot women, who finding themselves treated as an inferior race by their kinsmen of European blood, and prevented from acquiring property in land, or any fixed property, fled from contumely and oppression to the native tribes.

Amongst the vast mass of colonial crime, that of the treatment of the half-breed race by their European fathers constitutes no small portion. Everywhere this unfortunate race has been treated alike; in every quarter of the globe, and by every European people. In Spanish America it was the civil disqualification and social degradation of this race that brought on the revolution, and the loss of those vast regions to the mother country. In our East Indies, what thousands upon thousands of coloured children their white fathers have coolly abandoned; and while they have themselves returned to England with enormous fortunes, and to establish new families to enjoy them, have left there their coloured offspring to a situation the most painful and degrading—a position of perpetual contempt and political degradation. In our West Indies how many thousands of their own children have been sold by their white fathers, in the slave-market, or been made to swelter under the lash on their own plantations. Here, in South Africa, this class of descendents were driven from civilization to the woods and the savages, and a miserable and savage race they became. It was not till 1800 that any attempts were made to reclaim them, and then it was no parental or kindred feeling on the part of the colonists that urged it; it was attempted by the missionaries, who, as in every distant scene of our crimes, have stepped in between us and the just vengeance of heaven, between us and the political punishment of our own absurd and wicked policy, between us and the miserable natives. Mr. Anderson, their first missionary, found them “a herd of wandering and naked savages, subsisting by plunder and the chase. Their bodies were daubed with red paint, their heads loaded with grease and shining powder, with no covering but the filthy caross over their shoulders. Without knowledge, without morals, or any traces of civilization, they were wholly abandoned to witchcraft, drunkenness, licentiousness, and all the consequences which arise from the unchecked growth of such vices. With his fellow-labourer, Mr. Kramer, Mr. Anderson wandered about with them five years and a half, exposed to all the dangers and privations inseparable from such a state of society, before they could induce them to locate where they are now settled.”

With one exception, they had not one thread of European clothing amongst them. They were in the habit of plundering one another, and saw no manner of evil in this, or any of their actions. Violent deaths were common. Their usual manner of living was truly disgusting, and they were void of shame. They were at the most violent enmity with the Bushmen, and treated them on all occasions where they could, with the utmost barbarity. So might these people, wretched victims of European vice and contempt of all laws, human or divine, have remained, had not the missionaries, by incredible labours and patience, won their good will. They have now reduced them to settled and agricultural life; brought them to live in the most perfect harmony with the Bushmen; and in 1819 such was their altered condition that a fair was established at Beaufort for the mutual benefit of them and the colonists, at which business was done to the amount of 27,000 rix dollars; and on the goods sold to the Griquas, the colonists realized a profit of from 200 to 500 per cent.!

Let our profound statesmen, who go on from generation to generation fighting and maintaining armies, and issuing commandoes, look at this, and see how infinitely simple men, with but one principle of action to guide them—Christianity—outdo them in their own profession. They are your missionaries, after all the boast and pride of statesmanship, who have ever yet hit upon the only true and sound policy even in a worldly point of view;[67] who, when the profound statesmen have turned men into miserable and exasperated savages, are obliged to go and again turn them from savages to men,—who, when these wise statesmen have spent their country’s money by millions and shed blood by oceans, and find troubles and frontier wars, and frightful and fire-blackened deserts only growing around—go, and by a smile and a shake of the hand, restore peace, replace these deserts by gardens and green fields, and hamlets of cheerful people; and instead of involving you in debt, find you a market with 200 to 500 per cent. profit!

“It was apparent,” says Captain Stockenstrom, “to every man, that if it had not been for the influence which the missionaries had gained over the Griquas we should have had the whole nation down upon us.” What a humiliation to the pride of political science, to the pride of so many soi-disant statesmen, that with so many ages of experience to refer to, and with such stupendous powers as European statesmen have now in their hands, a few simple preachers should still have to shew them the real philosophy of government, and to rescue them from the blundering and ruinous positions in which they have continually placed themselves with uneducated nations! “If these Griquas had come down upon us,” continues Captain Stockenstrom, “we had no force to arrest them; and I have been informed, that since I left the colony, the government has been able to enter into a sort of treaty with the chief Waterboer, of a most beneficial nature to the Corannas and Griquas themselves, as well as to the safety of the northern frontier.”

If noble statesmen wish to hear the true secret of good and prosperous government, they have only to listen to this chief, “who boasts,” to use the words of the Parliamentary Report, “no higher ancestry than that of the Hottentot and the Bushman.”—“I feel that I am bound to govern my people by Christian principles. The world knows by experience, and I know in my small way, and I know also from my Bible, that the government which is not founded on the principles of the Bible must come to nothing. When governments lose sight of the principles of the Bible, partiality, injustice, oppression and cruelty prevail, and then suspicion, want of confidence, jealousy, hatred, revolt, and destruction succeed. Therefore I hope it will ever be my study, that the Bible should form the foundation of every principle of my government; then I and my people will have a standard to which we can appeal, which is clear, and comprehensive, and satisfactory, and by which we shall all be tried, and have our condition determined in the day of judgment. The relation in which I stand to my people as their chief, as their leader, binds me, by all that is sacred and dear, to seek their welfare and promote their happiness; and by what means shall I be able to do this? This I shall best be able to do by alluding to the principles of the Bible. Would governors and governments act upon the simple principle by which we are bound to act as individuals, that is, to do as we would be done by, all would be well. I hope, by the principles of the gospel, the morals of my people will continue to improve; and it shall be my endeavour, in humble dependence on the Divine blessing, that those principles shall lose none of their force by my example. Sound education I know will civilize them, make them wise, useful, powerful, and secure amongst their neighbours; and the better they are educated, the more clearly will they see that the principles of the Bible are the best principles for the government of individuals, of families, of tribes, and of nations.”

Not only governors but philosophers may listen to this African chief with advantage. Some splendid reputations have been made in Europe by merely taking up some one great principle of the Christian code and vaunting it as a wonderful discovery. A thousand such principles are scattered through the Bible, and the greatest philosophers of all, as well as the profoundest statesmen, are they who are contented to look for them there, and in simple sincerity to adopt them.

CHAPTER XXVII.
THE ENGLISH IN SOUTH AFRICA,—CONTINUED.

The details of our barbarisms toward the Hottentots, Bushmen, and Griquas, in the last chapter, are surely enough at this late period of the world to make the wise blush and the humane weep, yet what are they compared to our atrocities towards the Caffres? These are, as described by Pringle, a remarkably fine race of people. “They a are tall, athletic, and handsome race of men, with features often approaching to the European, or Asiatic model, and, excepting their woolly hair, exhibiting few of the peculiarities of the negro race. Their colour is a clear dark brown. Their address is frank, cheerful, and manly. Their government is patriarchal, and the privileges of rank are carefully maintained by the chieftains. Their principal wealth and means of subsistence consist in their numerous herds of cattle. The females also cultivate pretty extensively maize, millet, water-melons, and a few other esculents; but they are decidedly a nation of herdsmen—war, hunting, barter, and agriculture being only occasional occupations.

“In their customs and traditions there seem to be indications of their having sprung, at some remote period, from a people of much higher civilization than is now exhibited by any of the tribes of Southern Africa; whilst the rite of circumcision, universally practised among them without any vestige of Islamism, and several other traditionary customs greatly resembling the Levitical rules of purification, would seem to indicate some former connexion with a people of Arabian, Hebrew, or perhaps, Abyssinian lineage. Nothing like a regular system of idolatry exists among them; but we find some traces of belief of a Supreme Being, as well as of inferior spirits, and sundry superstitious usages that look like the shattered wrecks of ancient religious institutions.”[68]

One of the first of this race, whom this amiable and excellent man encountered in South Africa, was at Bethelsdorp, the missionary settlement, and under the following circumstances:—“A Caffre woman, accompanied by a little girl of eight or ten years of age, and having an infant strapped on her back above her mantle of tanned bullock’s hide. She was in the custody of a black constable, who stated that she was one of a number of female Caffres who had been made prisoners by order of the Commandant on the frontier for crossing the line of demarcation without permission, and that they were now to be given out in servitude among the white inhabitants of this district. While the constable was delivering his message, the Caffre woman looked at him and us with keen and intelligent glances, and though she very imperfectly understood his language, she appeared fully to comprehend its import. When he had finished she stepped forward, drew her figure up to its full height, extended her right arm, and commenced a speech in her native language, the Amakosa dialect. Though I did not understand a single word that she uttered, I have seldom been more struck with surprise and admiration. The language, to which she appeared to give full and forcible intonation, was highly musical and sonorous; her gestures were natural, graceful, and impressive, and her dark eyes and handsome bronze countenance were full of eloquent expression. Sometimes she pointed back to her own country, and then to her children. Sometimes she raised her tones aloud, and shook her clenched hand, as if she denounced our injustice, and threatened us with the vengeance of her tribe. Then, again, she would melt into tears, as if imploring clemency, and mourning for her helpless little ones. Some of the villagers who gathered round, being whole or half Caffres, interpreted her speech to the missionary, but he could do nothing to alter her destination, and could only return kind words to console her. For my part, I was not a little struck by the scene, and could not help beginning to suspect that my European countrymen, who thus made captives of harmless women and children, were, in reality, greater barbarians than the savage natives of Caffraria.” He had soon only too ample proofs of the correctness of his surmise. This fine race of people, who strikingly resemble the North American Indians in their character, their eloquence, their peculiar customs and traditions of Asiatic origin, have exactly resembled them in their fate. They have been driven out of their lands by the Europeans, and massacred by thousands when they have resented the invasion.

The Hottentots were exterminated, or reduced to thraldom, and the European colonists then came in contact with the Caffres, who were numerous and warlike, resisted aggression with greater effect, but still found themselves unable with their light assagais to contend with fire-arms, and were perpetually driven backwards with shocking carnage, and with circumstances of violent oppression which it is impossible to read of without the strongest indignation. Up to 1778 the Camtoos River had been considered the limit of the colony on that side; but at that period the Dutch governor, Van Plattenburgh, says Pringle, “in the course of an extensive tour into the interior, finding great numbers of colonists occupying tracts beyond the frontier, instead of recalling them within the legal limits, he extended the boundary (according to the ordinary practice of Cape governors before and since), adding, by a stroke of his pen, about 30,000 square miles to the colonial territory.” The Great Fish River now became the boundary; which Lord Macartney in 1798, claiming all that Van Plattenburgh had so summarily claimed, confirmed.

It is singular how uniform are the policy and the modes of seizing upon native possessions by Europeans. In America we have seen how continually, when the bulk of the people, or the legitimate chiefs, would not cede territory, the whites made a mock purchase from somebody who had no right whatever to sell, and on that title proceeded to drive out the real owners. In this case, Plattenburgh, to give a colour of justice to his claim, sent out Colonel Gordon in search of Caffres as far as the Keiskamma, who conducted a few to the governor, who consented that the Great Fish River should be the boundary. The real chief, Jalumba, it appears, however, had not been consulted; but the colonists the next year reminded him of the recent treaty with his tribe, and requested him to evacuate that territory. Jalumba refused—a commando was assembled—the intruders, in colonial phrase, but the real and actual owners, were expelled: Jalumba’s own son Dlodlo was killed, and 5,200 head of cattle driven off. This was certainly a wholesale beginning of plunder and bloodshed; but, says the same author, “this was not the worst—Jalumba and his clan were destroyed by a most infamous act of treachery and murder; the details of which may be found in Thompson and Kay.”

It was on such a title as this, that Lord Macartney claimed this tract of country for the English in 1797, the Cape having been conquered by us. It does not appear, however, that any very vigorous measures were employed for expelling the natives from this region till 1811, when it was resolved to drive them out of it, and a large military and burgher force under Col. Graham was sent out for that purpose. The expulsion was effected with the most savage rigour. This clearing took up about a year. In the course of it Landdrost Stokenstrom lost his life by the Caffres, and T’Congo, the father of the chiefs Pato, Kamo, and T’Congo, was butchered by a party of boors while he lay on his mat dying of a mortal disease. The Caffres begged to be allowed to wait to cut their crops of maize and millet, nearly ripe, arguing that the loss of them would subject them to a whole year of famine;—not a day was allowed them. They were driven out with sword and musket. Men and women, wherever found, were promiscuously shot, though they offered no resistance. “Women,” says Lieutenant Hart, whose journal of these transactions is quoted by Pringle, “were killed unintentionally, because the boors could not distinguish them from men among the bushes, and so, to make sure work, they shot all they could reach.” They were very anxious to seize Islambi, a chief who had actively opposed them, for they had been, like Plattenburgh, treating with one chief, Gaika, for cession of claims which he frankly told them belonged to several quite independent of him. On this subject, occurs this entry in Mr. Hart’s journal:—“Sunday, Jan. 12, 1812. At noon, Commandant Stollz went out with two companies to look for Slambi (Islambi), but saw nothing of him. They met only with a few Caffres, men and women, most of whom they shot. About sunset, five Caffres were seen at a distance, one of whom came to the camp with a message from Slambi’s son, requesting permission to wait till the harvest was over, and that then he (if his father would not), would go over the Great Fish River quietly. This messenger would not give any information respecting Slambi, but said he did not know where he was. However, after having been put in irons, and fastened to a wheel with a riem (leathern thong) about his neck, he said, that if the commando went with him, before daylight he would bring them upon 200 Caffres, all asleep.” Having thus treated a messenger from a free chief, and attempted to compel him to betray his master, away went this commando on the agreeable errand of surprising and murdering 200 innocent people in their sleep. But the messenger was made of much better stuff than the English. He led them about on a wild-goose chase for three days, when finding nothing they returned, and brought him back too.

Parties of troops were employed for several weeks in burning down the huts and hamlets of the natives, and destroying their fields of maize, by trampling them down with large herds of cattle, and at length the Caffres were forced over the Great Fish River, to the number of 30,000 souls, leaving behind them a large portion of their cattle, captured by the troops; many of their comrades and females, shot in the thickets, and not a few of the old and diseased, whom they were unable to carry along with them, to perish of hunger, or become a prey to the hyenas.

“The results of this war of 1811 were,” says the Parliamentary Report of 1837, “first, a succession of new wars, not less expensive, and more sanguinary than the former; second, the loss of thousands of good labourers to the colonists (and this testimony as to the actual service done by Caffre labourers, comprises the strong opinion of Major Dundas, when landdrost in 1827, as to their good dispositions, and that of Colonel Wade to the same effect); and thirdly, the checking of civilization and trade with the interior for a period of twelve years.”

The gain was some hundreds of thousands of acres of land, which might have been bought from the natives for comparatively a trifle.

In 1817, those negotiations which had been entered into with Gaika, as if he were the sole and paramount king of Caffreland, were renewed by the governor, Lord Charles Somerset. Other chiefs were present, particularly Islambi, but no notice was taken of them; it was resolved, that Gaika was the paramount chief, and that he should be selected as the champion of the frontiers against his countrymen. Accordingly, we hear, as was to be expected, that the very next year a formidable confederacy was entered into amongst the native chiefs against this Gaika. In the league against him, and for the protection of their country, were his own uncles, Islambi and Jaluhsa, Habanna, Makanna, young Kongo, chief of the Gunuquebi, and Hintza, the principal chief of the Amakosa, to whom in rank Gaika was only secondary. To support their adopted puppet, Col. Brereton was ordered to march into Caffreland. The inhabitants were attacked in their hamlets, plundered of their cattle, and slaughtered or driven into the woods; 23,000 cattle carried off, 9000 of which were given to Gaika to reimburse him for his losses.

Retaliation was the consequence. The Caffres soon poured into the colony in numerous bodies eager for revenge. The frontier districts were overrun; several military posts were seized; parties of British troops and patroles cut off; the boors were driven from the Zureveld, and Enon plundered and burnt.

This and the other efforts of the outraged Caffres, which were now made to avenge their injuries and check the despoiling course of the English, were organized under the influence and counsel of Makanna, a prophet who assumed the sacred character to combine and rouse his countrymen to overturn their oppressors: for not knowing the vast resources of the English, he fondly deemed that if they could vanquish those at the Cape they should be freed from their power; “and then,” said he, “we will sit down and eat honey!”

In this, as in so many other particulars, the Caffres resemble the American Indians. Scarcely a confederacy amongst those which have appeared for the purpose of resisting the aggressions on the Indians but have been inspired and led on by prophets, as the brother of Tecumseh, amongst the Shawanees; the son of Black-Hauk, Wabokieshiek, amongst the Sacs; Monohoe, and others, amongst the Creeks who fell at the bloody battle of Horse-shoe-bend.

Makanna had by his talents and pretences raised himself from the common herd to the rank of a chief, and soon gained complete ascendency over all the chiefs except Gaika, to whom he was opposed as the ally of the English. He went amongst the missionaries and acquired so much knowledge of Christianity as served him to build a certain motley creed upon, by which he mystified and awed the common people. After Col. Brereton’s devastations he roused up his countrymen to a simultaneous attack upon Graham’s Town. He and Dushani, the son of Islambi, mustered their exasperated hosts to the number of nine or ten thousand in the forests of the Great Fish River, and one morning at the break of day these infuriated troops were seen rushing down from the mountains near Graham’s Town to assault it. A bloody conflict ensued: the Caffres, inflamed by their wrongs and the eloquence of Makanna, fought desperately; but they were mown down by the European artillery, fourteen hundred of their warriors were left on the field, and the rest fled to the hills and woods. The whole burgher militia of the colony were called out to pursue them, and to ravage their country in all directions. It was resolved to take ample vengeance on them: their lands were laid waste—their corn trampled down under the feet of the cavalry, their villages burnt to the ground—and themselves chased into the bush, where they were bombarded with grape-shot and congreve-rockets. Men, women, and children, were massacred in one indiscriminate slaughter. A high price was set upon the heads of the chiefs, especially on that of Makanna, and menaces added, that if they were not brought in, nothing should prevent the total destruction of their country. Not a soul was found timid or traitorous enough to betray their chiefs; but to the surprise of the English, Makanna himself, to save the remainder of his nation, walked quietly into the English camp and presented himself before the commander. “The war,” said he, “British chiefs, is an unjust one; for you are striving to extirpate a people whom you forced to take up arms. When our fathers, and the fathers of the Boors first settled in the Zureveld, they dwelt together in peace. Their flocks grazed on the same hills; their herdsmen smoked together out of the same pipes; they were brothers, until the herds of the Amakosa increased so as to make the hearts of the boors sore. What these covetous men could not get from our fathers for old buttons, they took by force. Our fathers were MEN; they loved their cattle; their wives and children lived upon milk; they fought for their property. They began to hate the colonists, who coveted their all, and aimed at their destruction.

“Now their kraals and our fathers’ kraals were separate. The boors made commandoes on our fathers. Our fathers drove them out of the Zureveld. We dwelt there because we had conquered it. There we married wives, and there our children were born. The white men hated us, but they could not drive us away. When there was war, we plundered you. When there was peace, some of our bad people stole; but our chiefs forbade it. Your treacherous friend, Gaika, always had peace with you, yet, when his people stole he shared in the plunder. Have your patroles ever, in time of peace, found cattle, runaway slaves, or deserters in the kraals of our chiefs? Have they ever gone into Gaika’s country without finding such cattle, such slaves, such deserters in Gaika’s kraals? But he was your friend; and you wished to possess the Zureveld. You came at last like locusts.[69] We stood; we could do no more. You said, ‘Go over the Fish River—that is all we want.’ We yielded, and came here. We lived in peace. Some bad people stole, perhaps; but the nation was quiet—the chiefs were quiet. Gaika stole—his chiefs stole—his people stole. You sent him copper; you sent him beads; you sent him horses—on which he rode to steal more. To us you sent only commandoes!

“We quarrelled with Gaika about grass—no business of yours. You sent a commando.[70] You took our last cow. You left only a few calves, which died for want, along with our children. You gave half the spoil to Gaika—half you kept yourselves. Without milk—our corn destroyed, we saw our wives and children perish—we saw that we must ourselves perish. We fought for our lives—we failed—and you are here. Your troops cover the plains and swarm in the thickets, where they cannot distinguish the men from the women, and shoot all.[71]

“You want us to submit to Gaika. That man’s face is fair to you, but his heart is false; leave him to himself, and we shall not call on you for help. Set Makanna at liberty; and Islambi, Dushani, Kongo, and the rest, will come to make peace with you at any time you fix. But if you will make war, you may indeed kill the last man of us; but Gaika shall not rule over the followers of those who think him a woman.”[72]

It is said that this energetic address, containing so many awful truths, affected some of those who heard it even to tears. But what followed? The Caffres were still sternly commanded to deliver up their other chiefs; treachery is said to have been used to compass it, but in vain; so the English made a desert of the whole country, and carried off 30,000 head of cattle.[73] Makanna was sent to Cape-Town, and thence transported to Robben Island, a spot appropriated to felons and malefactors doomed to work in irons. Here, in an attempt with some few followers to effect his escape, he was drowned by the upsetting of the boat, and died cheering his unfortunate companions till the billows swept him from a rock to which he clung.[74]

The English had hitherto gratified their avarice and bad passions with their usual freedom in their colonies, on those who had no further connexion with them than happening to possess goodly herds under their eye; but now they turned their hand upon their friend and ally, Gaika. Having devoured, by his aid, his countrymen, they were ready now to devour him. Gaika was called upon to give up a large portion of Caffre land, that is, from the Fish River to the Keisi and Chumi rivers—a tract which added about 2,000 square miles to our own boundaries. This he yielded most reluctantly, and only on condition that the basin of the Chumi, a beautiful piece of country, should not be included, and that all his territory should be considered neutral ground. Gaika himself narrowly escaped being seized by the English in 1822—for what cause does not appear,—but it does appear that he only effected his escape in the mantle of his wife; and that in 1823 a large force, according to the evidence of Capt. Aichison, in which he was employed, surprised the kraals of his son Macomo, and took from them 7,000 beasts. Well might Gaika say—“When I look at the large tract of fine country that has been taken from me, I am compelled to say that though protected, I am rather oppressed by my protectors.”[75]

This Macomo, the son of Gaika, seems to be a fine fellow. Desirous of cultivating peace and the friendship of the English; desirous of his people receiving, the benefits of civilization and the Christian religion; yet, notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding the alliance which had subsisted between the English and his father, his treatment at the hands of the Cape government has always been of the most harsh and arbitrary kind. He has been driven with his people from one location to another, and the most serious devastation committed on his property. Pringle’s words regarding him are—“He has uniformly protected the missionaries and traders; has readily punished any of his people who committed depredations on the colonists, and on many occasions has given four or five-fold compensation for stolen cattle driven through his territory by undiscovered thieves from other clans. Notwithstanding all this, however, and much more stated on his behalf in the Cape papers, colonial oppression continues to trample down this chief with a steady, firm, relentless foot.” The same writer gives the following instance of the sort of treatment which was received from the authorities by this meritorious chief.

“On the 7th of October last (1833), Macomo was invited by Mr. Read to attend the anniversary meeting of an auxiliary missionary society at Philipton, Kat River. The chief went to the military officer commanding the nearest frontier post, and asked permission to attend, but was peremptorily refused. He ventured, nevertheless, to come by another way, with his ordinary retinue, but altogether unarmed, and delivered in his native tongue a most eloquent speech at the meeting, in which he seconded a motion, proposed by the Rev. Mr. Thompson, the established clergyman, for promoting the conversion of the Caffres. Alluding to the great number of traders residing in Caffreland, contrasted with the rude prohibition given to his attending this Christian assembly, he said, in the forcible idiom of his country—‘There are no Englishmen at Kat River; there are no Englishmen at Graham’s Town; they are all in my country, with their wives and children, in perfect safety, while I stand before you as a rogue and a vagabond, having been obliged to come by stealth.’[76] Then, addressing his own followers, he said—‘Ye sons of Kahabi, I have brought you here to behold what the Word of God hath wrought. These Hottentots were but yesterday as much despised and oppressed as to-day are we—the Caffres: but see what the Great Word has done for them! They were dead—they are now alive; they are men once more. Go and tell my people what you have seen and heard; for such things as you have seen and heard, I hope ere long to witness in my own land. God is great, who has said it, and will surely bring it to pass!’ In the midst of this exhilarating scene—the African chief recommending to his followers the adoption of that Great Word which brings with it at once both spiritual and social regeneration—they were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a troop of dragoons, despatched from the military post to arrest Macomo for having crossed the frontier line without permission. This was effected in the most brutal and insulting manner possible, and not without considerable hazard to the chieftain’s life, from the ruffian-like conduct of a drunken sergeant, although not the slightest resistance was attempted.”[77]

It should be borne in mind by the reader that this Kat River settlement, where Macomo was attending the meeting, is the same from which he had been expelled in 1829, and in which the Hottentots were located, and, as I have already related, were making such remarkable progress. Macomo had therefore not only repassed the boundary line over which he had been driven, and the repassing of which the government would naturally regard with great jealousy, knowing well what injury they had done him, and which the sight of his old country must forcibly revive in his mind, knowing also that they were at this moment planning fresh outrages against him. This meeting took place in October, 1833, and therefore, at that very time, an order was signed by the governor for his removal from the lands he was then occupying; for the Parliamentary Report informs us that Sir Lowry Cole, before leaving the colony for Europe, on the 10th of August, 1833, signed an order for removing the chief Tyalie from the Muncassana beyond the boundaries; and in November of that year Captain Aichison was ordered to remove Macomo, Botman, and Tyalie, beyond the boundary; that is, beyond the Keiskamma, which he says he did. Capt. Aichison stated in evidence before the Select Committee, that he could assign no cause for this removal, and he never heard any cause assigned. But this was not the worst. These poor people, thus driven out in November, when all their corn was green, and that and the crops of their gardens and their pumpkins thus lost, were suffered to return in February, 1834, and again, in October of that year, driven out a second time! Colonel Wade stated in evidence, that at the time of their second removal, 21st of October, 1834, “they had rebuilt their huts, established their cattle kraals, and commenced the cultivation of their gardens.” He stated that, together with Colonel Somerset, he made a visit to Macomo and Botman’s kraal, across the Keiskamma, and that Macomo rode back with them, when they had recrossed the river and reached the Omkobina, a tributary of the Chumie. “These valleys were swarming with Caffres, as was the whole country in our front as far as the Gaga; the people were all in motion, carrying off their effects, and driving away their cattle towards the drifts of the river, and to my utter amazement the whole country around and before us was in a blaze. Presently we came up with a strong patrol of the mounted rifle corps, which had, it appeared, come out from Fort Beaufort that morning; the soldiers were busily employed in burning the huts and driving the Caffres towards the frontier.”

Another witness said, “the second time of my leaving Caffreland was in October, last year, in company with a gentleman who was to return towards Hantam. We passed through the country of the Gaga at ten o’clock at night; the Caffres were enjoying themselves after their custom, with their shouting, feasting, and midnight dances; they allowed us to pass on unmolested. Some time after I received a letter from the gentleman who was my travelling companion on that night, written just before the breaking out of the Caffre war: in it he says, ‘you recollect how joyful the Caffres were, when we crossed the Gaga; but on my return a dense smoke filled all the vales, and the Caffres were seen lurking here and there behind the mimosa; a patrol, commanded by an officer, was driving them beyond the colonial boundary.’ (This piece of country has very lately been claimed by the colony.) I saw one man near me, and I told my guide to call him to me: the poor fellow said, ‘No, I cannot come nearer; that white man looks too much like a soldier;’ and all our persuasions could not induce him to advance near us. ‘Look,’ said he, pointing to the ascending columns of smoke, ‘what the white men are doing.’ Their huts and folds were all burned.”

Such was the treatment of the Caffres up to the end of 1834, notwithstanding the most forcible and pathetic appeals to their English tyrants. Dr. Philip stated that, speaking with these chiefs at this time, he said to Macomo, that he had reason to believe that the governor, when he came to the frontier, would listen to all his grievances, and treat him with justice and generosity. “These promises,” he replied, “we have had for the last fifteen years;” and pointing to the huts then burning, he added, “things are becoming worse: these huts were set on fire last night, and we were told that to-morrow the patrol is to scour the whole district, and drive every Caffre from the west side of the Chumie and Keiskamma at the point of the bayonet.” And Dr. Philip having stated rather strongly the necessity the chiefs would be under of preventing all stealing from the colony as the condition of any peaceable relations the governor might enter into with them, Botman made the following reply: “The governor cannot be so unreasonable as to make our existence as a nation depend upon a circumstance which is beyond the reach of human power. Is it in the power of any governor to prevent his people stealing from each other? Have you not within the colony magistrates, policemen, prisons, whipping-posts, and gibbets? and do you not perceive that in spite of all these means to make your people honest, that your prisons continue full, and that you have constant employment for your magistrates, policemen, and hangmen, without being able to keep down your colonial thieves and cheats? A thief is a wolf; he belongs to no society, and yet is the pest and bane of all societies. You have your thieves, and we have thieves among us; but we cannot as chiefs, extirpate the thieves of Caffreland, more than we can extirpate the wolves, or you can extirpate the thieves of the colony. There is however this difference between us: we discountenance thieves in Caffreland, and prevent, as far as possible, our people stealing from the colony; but you countenance the robbery of your people upon the Caffres, by the sanction you give to the injustice of the patrol system. Our people have stolen your cattle, but you have, by the manner by which you have refunded your loss, punished the innocent; and after having taken our country from us, without even a shadow of justice, and shut us up to starvation, you threaten us with destruction for the thefts of those to whom you left no choice but to steal or die by famine.”

What force and justice of reasoning in these abused Caffres! what force and injustice of action in the English! Who could have believed that from the moment of our becoming masters of the Cape colony such dreadful and wicked scenes as these could be going on, up to 1834, by Englishmen. But the end was not yet come; other, and still more abominable deeds were to be perpetrated. Another war broke out, and the people of England asked, why? Dr. Philip, before the Parliamentary Committee, said,— “The encroachments of the colonists upon the Caffres, when they came in contact with them on the banks of the Gamtoos river; their expulsion from the Rumfield, now Albany, in 1811; the commandoes of Colonel Brereton, in 1818; our conduct to Gaika, our ally, in 1819, in depriving him of the country between the Fish and Keiskamma Rivers; the injury inflicted upon Macomo and Gaika, by the ejectment of Macomo and his people, with many of the people of Gaika, from the Kat River, in 1829; the manner in which the Caffres were expelled from the west bank of the Chumie and Keiskamma, in 1833, and, subsequently, again (after having been allowed to return) in 1834; and the working of the commando system, down to December, 1834,—were sufficient in themselves to account for the Caffre war, if the Caffres are allowed to be human beings, and to possess passions like our own.”

To all this series of insults and inflictions were soon added fresh ones.

“On the 2nd December, of this very year,” continued Dr. Philip, “Ensign Sparkes went to one of the Chief Eno’s kraals, for the purpose of getting some horses, supposed to have been stolen. Not finding them there, he proceeded to take by force a large quantity of cattle as an indemnity. This proceeding roused the dormant anger of the Caffres; they surrounded his party, and manifested an intention of attacking it. They did not, however, venture upon a general engagement, though one of them, more daring, and perhaps a greater loser than the rest, wounded Ensign Sparkes in the arm with an assagai, or spear, whilst the soldiers under his command were busily employed in driving the cattle out of the bush. Macomo no sooner heard of this affair, than he gave up of his own property, to the colony, 400 head of cattle, and went himself frequently to visit the young man who had been wounded, expressing great sorrow at what had occurred. This conduct was highly praiseworthy, as it was evidently for the sake of preventing any misunderstanding, but more especially so, because the deed had been committed, not by one of his people, but by a Caffre belonging to Eno’s tribe. On the 18th of the same month, a patrol under Lieut. Sutton seized a number of cattle at one of Tyalie’s kraals, for some horses alleged to have been stolen, but not found there. On this occasion the Caffres seem to have determined to resist to the last. An affray took place, in which they were so far successful as to retake the cattle. Two of them were, however, shot dead, and two dangerously wounded, one of whom was Tyalie’s own brother (not, however, Macomo), who had two slugs in his head. An individual residing in the neutral territory, referring to this affair, thus expressed his opinion: ‘The system carried on, and that to the last moment, is the cause the Caffres could not bear it any longer. The very immediate cause was the wounding of Gaika’s son, at which the blood of every Caffre boiled.’”

According to the evidence of John Tzatzoe, “every Caffre who saw Xo-Xo’s wound, went back to his hut, took his assagai and shield, and set out to fight, and said, ‘It is better that we die than be treated thus.’”

The war being thus wantonly and disgracefully provoked by the English, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, the governor, marched into the territory of the Caffre king Hintza, and summoned him to his presence. The king, alarmed, and naturally expecting some fresh act of mischief, fled, driving off his cattle to a place of security. He was threatened with immediate proclamation of war if he did not return; and to convince him that there would be no dallying, Colonel Smith immediately marched his troops into the mountain districts where Hintza had taken refuge, was very near seizing him by surprise, and carried off 10,000 head of cattle. Hintza, now, on sufficient security being given, came to the camp, where the various charges were advanced against him, and the following modest conditions of peace proposed,—that he should surrender 50,000 head of cattle, 1,000 horses, and emancipate all his Fingoe slaves. There was no alternative but agreeing to these terms; but unfortunately for him, the Fingoe slaves, now considering themselves put under the patronage of the governor, and knowing how fond the English are of Caffre cattle, carried off 15,000 head belonging to the people. The people flew to arms—and Hintza was made responsible. The governor declared to him that if he did not put a stop to the fighting in three hours, and order the delivery of the 50,000 head of cattle, he would hang him, his son Creili, and his counsellor and brother Bookoo, on the tree under which they were sitting.[78] Poor Hintza issued his orders—the fighting ceased, but the cattle did not arrive. He therefore proposed to go, under a sufficient guard, to enforce the delivery himself. The proposal was accepted, and he set out with Col. Smith and a body of cavalry. Col. Smith assured him on commencing their march, that if he attempted to escape he should certainly shoot him. We shall soon see how well he kept his word. They found the people had driven the cattle to the mountains, and Hintza sent one of his counsellors to command them to stop. On the same day they came to a place where the cattle-track divided, and they followed that path, at the advice of Hintza, which led up an abrupt and wooded hill to the right, over the precipitous banks of the Kebaka river. What followed we give in the language of Col. Smith:—

“It had been observed that this day Hintza rode a remarkably fine horse, and that he led him up every ascent; the path up this abrupt and wooded hill above described is by a narrow cattle-track, occasionally passing through a cleft of the rock. I was riding alone at the head of the column, and having directed the cavalry to lead their horses, I was some three or four horses’ length in front of every one, having previously observed Hintza and his remaining two followers leading their horses behind me, the corps of Guides close to them; when nearing the top, I heard a cry of ‘Hintza,’ and in a moment he dashed past me through the bushes, but was obliged, from the trees, to descend again into the path. I cried out, ‘Hintza, stop!’ I drew a pistol, and presenting it at him, cried out, ‘Hintza,’ and I also reprimanded his guard, who instantly came up; he stopped and smiled, and I was ashamed of my suspicion. Upon nearing the top of this steep ascent, the country was perfectly open, and a considerable tongue of land running parallel with the rugged bed of the Kebaka, upon a gradual descent of about two miles, to a turn of the river, where were several Caffre huts. I was looking back to observe the march of the troops, when I heard a cry of ‘Look, Colonel!’ I saw Hintza had set off at full speed, and was 30 yards a-head of every one; I spurred my horse with violence; and coming close up with him, called to him; he urged his horse the more, which could beat mine; I drew a pistol, it snapped; I drew another, it also snapped; I then was sometime galloping after him, when I spurred my horse alongside of him, and struck him on the head with the butt-end of a pistol; he redoubled his efforts to escape, and his horse was three lengths a-head of mine. I had dropped one pistol, I threw the other after him, and struck him again on the head. Having thus raced about a mile, we were within half a mile of the Caffre huts; I found my horse was closing with him; I had no means whatever of assailing him, while he was provided with his assagais; I therefore resolved to attempt to pull him off his horse, and I seized the athletic chief by the throat, and twisting my hand in his karop, I dragged him from his seat, and hurled him to the earth; he instantly sprang on his legs, and sent an assagai at me, running off towards the rugged bed of the Kebaka. My horse was most unruly, and I could not pull him up till I reached the Caffre huts. This unhorsing the chief, and his waiting to throw an assagai at me, brought Mr. George Southey of the corps of Guides up; and, at about 200 yards’ distance, he twice called to Hintza, in Caffre, to stop, or he would shoot him. He ran on; Mr. Southey fired, and only slightly struck him in the leg, again calling to him to stop, without effect; he fired, and shot him through the back; he fell headlong forwards, but springing up and running forwards, closely pursued by my aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Balfour, he precipitated himself down a kloof into the Kebaka, and posting himself in a narrow niche of the rock, defied any attempt to secure him; when, still refusing to surrender, and raising an assagai, Mr. George Southey fired, and shot him through the head. Thus terminated the career of the chief Hintza, whose treachery, perfidy, and want of faith, made him worthy of the nation of atrocious and indomitable savages over whom he was the acknowledged chieftain. One of his followers escaped, the other was shot from an eminence. About half a mile off I observed the villain Mutini and Hintza’s servant looking on.”

Such is the relation of the destroyer of Hintza, and surely a more brutal and disgusting detail never came from the chief actor of such a scene. England has already testified its opinion both of this act and of this war; and “this nation of atrocious and indomitable savages,” both before and since this transaction, have given such evidences of sensibility to the law of kindness as leave no doubt where the “treachery, perfidy, and want of faith,” really lay. At the very time this affair was perpetrated, two British officers had gone with proposals from the governor to the Caffre camp. While they remained there they were treated most respectfully and honourably by these “irreclaimable savages,” and dismissed unhurt when the intelligence arrived of Hintza’s having been made prisoner. What a contrast does this form to our own conduct!

The war was continued after the event of the death of Hintza, until the Caffres had received what the governor considered to be “sufficient” punishment; this consisted in the slaughter of 4,000 of their warriors, including many principal men. “There have been taken from them also,” says a despatch, “besides the conquest and alienation of their country, about 60,000 head of cattle, almost all their goats; their habitations everywhere destroyed, and their gardens and corn-fields laid waste.”[79]

The cost of this war to the British nation, is estimated at 241,884l. besides putting a stop to the trade with the colony amounting to 30,000l. per annum, though yet in its infancy. If any one wishes to know how absurd it is to talk of the Caffres as “atrocious and indomitable savages,” he has only to look into the Parliamentary Report, so often referred to in this chapter, in order to blush for our own barbarism, and to execrate the wickedness which could, by these reckless commandoes and exterminating wars, crush or impede that rising civilization, and that growing Christianity, which shew themselves so beautifully in this much abused country. It is the wickedness of Englishmen that has alone stood in the way of the rapid refinement of the Caffre, as it has stood in the way of knowledge and prosperity in all our colonies.

“Whenever,” says John Tzatzoe, a Caffre chief, who had, before the war at his own place, a missionary and a church attended by 300 people, “the missionaries attempt to preach to the Caffres, or whenever I myself preach or speak to my countrymen, they say, ‘Why do not the missionaries first go and preach to the people on the other side; why do not they preach to their own countrymen, and convert them first?’”

But the very atrocity of this last war roused the spirit of the British nation, awakened parliamentary investigation; the Caffre territory is restored by order of government; a new and more rational system of policy is adopted, and it is to be hoped will be steadily persevered in.

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 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.’”

CHAPTER XXIX.
CONCLUSION.

Two gods divide them all—pleasure and gain:

For these they live, they sacrifice to these,

And in their service wage perpetual war

With conscience and with thee. Lust in their hearts,

And mischief in their hands, they roam the earth

To prey upon each other; stubborn, fierce,

High-minded, pouring out their own disgrace.

Thy prophets speak of such; and, noting down

The features of the last degenerate times,

Exhibit every lineament of these.

Come then, and added to thy many crowns,

Receive one yet, as radiant as the rest,

Due to thy last and most effectual work,

Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world.

Cowper—The Task.

We have now followed the Europeans to every region of the globe, and seen them planting colonies, and peopling new lands, and everywhere we have found them the same—a lawless and domineering race, seizing on the earth as if they were the firstborn of creation, and having a presumptive right to murder and dispossess all other people. For more than three centuries we have glanced back at them in their course, and everywhere they have had the word of God in their mouth, and the deeds of darkness in their hands. In the first dawn of discovery, forth they went singing the Te Deum, and declaring that they went to plant the cross amongst the heathen. As we have already observed, however, it turned out to be the cross of one of the two thieves, and a bitter cross of crucifixion it has proved to the natives where they have received it. It has stood the perpetual sign of plunder and extermination. The Spaniards were reckless in their carnage of the Indians, and all succeeding generations have expressed their horror of the Spaniards. The Dutch were cruel, and everybody abominated their cruelty. One would have thought that the world was grown merciful. Behold North America at this moment, with its disinherited Indians! See Hindustan, that great and swarming region of usurpations and exactions! Look at the Cape, and ask the Caffres whether the English are tender-hearted and just: ask the same question in New Holland: ask it of the natives of Van Dieman’s Land,—men, transported from the island of their fathers. Ask the New Zealanders whether the warriors whose tattooed heads stare us in the face in our museums, were not delicately treated by us. Go, indeed, into any one spot, of any quarter of the world, and ask—no you need not ask, you shall hear of our aggressions from every people that know us. The words of Red-Jacket will find an echo in the hearts of tens of millions of sorrowful and expatriated and enthralled beings, who will exclaim, “you want more land!—you want our country!” It is needless to tell those who have read this history that there is, and can be, nothing else like it in the whole record of mortal crimes. Many are the evils that are done under the sun; but there is and can be no evil like that monstrous and earth-encompassing evil, which the Europeans have committed against the Aborigines of every country in which they have settled. And in what country have they not settled? It is often said as a very pretty speech—that the sun never sets on the dominions of our youthful Queen; but who dares to tell us the far more horrible truth, that it never sets on the scenes of our injustice and oppressions! When we have taken a solemn review of the astounding transactions recorded in this volume, and then add to them the crimes against humanity committed in the slave-trade and slavery, the account of our enormities is complete; and there is no sum of wickedness and bloodshed—however vast, however monstrous, however enduring it may be—which can be pointed out, from the first hour of creation, to be compared for a moment with it.

The slave-trade, which one of our best informed philanthropists asserts is going on at this moment to the amount of 170,000 negroes a year, is indeed the dreadful climax of our crimes against humanity. It was not enough that the lands of all newly discovered regions were seized on by fraud or violence; it was not enough that their rightful inhabitants were murdered or enslaved; that the odious vices of people styling themselves the followers of the purest of beings should be poured like a pestilence into these new countries. It was not enough that millions on millions of peaceful beings were exterminated by fire, by sword, by heavy burdens, by base violence, by deleterious mines and unaccustomed severities—by dogs, by man-hunters, and by grief and despair—there yet wanted one crowning crime to place the deeds of Europeans beyond all rivalry in the cause of evil,—and that unapproachable abomination was found in the slave-trade. They had seized on almost all other countries, but they could not seize on the torrid regions of Africa. They could not seize the land, but they could seize the people. They could not destroy them in their own sultry clime, fatal to the white men, they therefore determined to immolate them on the graves of the already perished Americans. To shed blood upon blood, to pile bones upon bones, and curses upon curses. What an idea is that!—the Europeans standing with the lash of slavery in their hands on the bones of exterminated millions in one hemisphere, watching with remorseless eyes their victims dragged from another hemisphere—tilling, not with their sweat, but with their heart’s blood, the soil which is, in fact, the dust of murdered generations of victims. To think that for three centuries this work of despair and death has been going on—for three centuries!—while Europe has been priding itself on the growth of knowledge and the possession of the Christian faith; while mercy, and goodness, and brotherly love, have been preached from pulpits, and wafted towards heaven in prayers! That from Africa to America, across the great Atlantic, the ships of outrage and agony have been passing over, freighted with human beings denied all human rights. The mysteries of God’s endurance, and of European audacity and hypocrisy are equally marvellous. Why, the very track across the deep seems to me blackened by this abominable traffic;—there must be the dye of blood in the very ocean. One might surely trace these monsters by the smell of death, from their kidnapping haunts to the very sugar-mills of the west, where canes and human flesh are ground together. The ghosts of murdered millions, were enough, one thinks, to lead the way without chart or compass! The very bed of the ocean must be paved with bones! and the accursed trade is still going on! We are still strutting about in the borrowed plumes of Christianity, and daring to call God our father, though we are become the tormentors of the human race from China to Peru, and from one pole to the other![85]

The whole history of European colonization is of a piece. It is with grief and indignation, that passing before my own mind the successive conquests and colonies of the Europeans amongst the native tribes of newly-discovered countries, I look in vain for a single instance of a nation styling itself Christian and civilized, acting towards a nation which it is pleased to term barbarous with Christian honesty and common feeling. The only opportunity which the aboriginal tribes have had of seeing Christianity in its real form and nature, has been from William Penn and the missionaries. But both Penn and the missionaries have in every instance found their efforts neutralized, and their hopes of permanent good to their fellow-creatures blasted, by the profligacy and the unprincipled rapacity of the Europeans as a race. Never was there a race at once so egotistical and so terrible! With the most happy complacency regarding themselves as civilized and pious, while acting the savage on the broadest scale, and spurning every principle of natural or revealed religion. But where the missionaries have been permitted to act for any length of time on the aboriginal tribes, what happy results have followed. The savage has become mild; he has conformed to the order and decorum of domestic life; he has shewn that all the virtues and affections which God has implanted in the human soul are not extinct in him; that they wanted but the warmth of sympathy and knowledge to call them forth; he has become an effective member of the community, and his productions have taken their value in the general market. From the Jesuits in Paraguay to the missionaries in the South Seas, this has been the case. The idiocy of the man who killed his goose that he might get the golden eggs, was wisdom compared to the folly of the European nations, in outraging and destroying the Indian races, instead of civilizing them. Let any one look at the immediate effect amongst the South Sea Islanders, the Hottentots, or the Caffres, of civilization creating a demand for our manufactures, and of bringing the productions of their respective countries into the market, and then from these few and isolated instances reflect what would have been now the consequence of the civilization of North and South America, of a great portion of South Africa, of the Indian Islands, of the good treatment and encouragement of the millions of Hindustan. Let him imagine, if he can, the immense consumption of our manufactured goods through all these vast and populous countries, and the wonderful variety of their natural productions which they would have sent us in exchange.

There is no more doubt than of the diurnal motion of the earth, that by the mere exercise of common honesty on the part of the whites, the greater part of all these countries would now be civilized, and a tide of wealth poured into Europe, such as the strongest imagination can scarcely grasp; and that, too, purchased, not with the blood and tears of the miserable, but by the moral elevation and happiness of countless tribes. The waste of human life and human energies has been immense, but not more immense than the waste of the thousand natural productions of a thousand different shores and climates. The arrow-root, the cocoa-nut oil, the medicinal oils and drugs of the southern isles; the beautiful flax of New Zealand; sugar and coffee, spices and tea, from millions of acres where they might have been raised ill abundance—woods and gums, fruits and gems and ivories, have been left unproduced or wasted in the deserts, because the wonderful and energetic race of Europe chose to be as lawless as they were enterprising, and to be the destroyers rather than the benefactors of mankind. For more than three centuries, and down to the very last hour, as this volume testifies, has this system, stupid as it was wicked, been going on. Thank God, the dawn of a new era appears at last!

The wrongs of the Hottentots and Caffres, brought to the public attention by Dr. Philip and Pringle,[86] have led to Parliamentary inquiry; that inquiry has led to others;—the condition of the natives of the South Seas, and finally of all the aboriginal tribes in our colonies, has been brought under review. The existence of a mass of evils and injuries, so enormous as to fill any healthy mind with horror and amazement, has been brought to light; and it is impossible that such facts, once made familiar to the British public, can ever be lost sight of again. Some expiation has already been made to a portion of our victims. Part of the lands of the Caffres has been returned, a milder and more rational system of treatment has been adopted towards them. Protectors of the Aborigines have in one or two instances been appointed. New and more just principles of colonization have been proposed, and in a degree adopted. In the proposed Association for colonizing New Zealand, and in the South Australian settlement[87] already made, these better notions are conspicuous. But these symptoms of a more honourable conduct toward the Aborigines, are, with respect to the evils we have done, and the evils that exist, but as the light of the single morning star before the sun has risen. Many are the injuries and oppressions of our fellow-creatures which the philanthropic have to contend against; but there is no evil, and no oppression, that is a hundredth part so gigantic as this. There is no case in which we owe such a mighty sum of expiation: all other wrongs are but the wrongs of a small section of humanity compared with the whole. The wrongs of the Negro are great, and demand all the sympathy and active attention which they receive; but the numbers of the negroes in slavery are but as a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers of the aborigines who are perishing beneath our iron and unchristian policy. The cause of the aborigines is the cause of three-fourths of the population of the globe. The evil done to them is the great and universal evil of the age, and is the deepest disgrace of Christendom. It is, therefore, with pleasure that I have seen the “Aborigines’ Protection Society” raise its head amongst the many noble societies for the redress of the wrongs and the elevation of humanity that adorn this country. Such a society must become one of the most active and powerful agents of universal justice: it must be that or nothing, for the evil which it has to put down is tyrannous and strong beyond all others. It cannot fail without the deepest disgrace to the nation—for the honour of the nation, its Christian zeal, and its commercial interests, are all bound up with it. Where are we to look for a guarantee for the removal of the foulest stain on humanity and the Christian name? Our government may be well disposed to adopt juster measures; but governments are not yet formed on those principles, and with those views, that will warrant us to depend upon them.

There is no power but the spirit of Christianity living in the heart of the British public, which can secure justice to the millions that are crying for it from every region of the earth. It is that which must stand as the perpetual watch and guardian of humanity; and never yet has it failed. The noblest spectacle in the world is that constellation of institutions which have sprung out of this spirit of Christianity in the nation, and which are continually labouring to redress wrongs and diffuse knowledge and happiness wherever the human family extends. The ages of dreadful inflictions, and the present condition of the native tribes in our vast possessions, once known, it were a libel on the honour and faith of the nation to doubt for a moment that a new era of colonization and intercourse with unlettered nations has commenced; and I close this volume of the unexampled crimes and marvellous impolicy of Europe, with the firm persuasion—

That heavenward all things tend. For all were once

Perfect, and all must be at length restored.

So God has greatly purposed; who would else

In his dishonoured works himself endure

Dishonour, and be wronged without redress.

Haste, then, and wheel away a shattered world

Ye slow revolving seasons! We would see—

A sight to which our eyes are strangers yet—

A world that does not hate and dread His laws,

And suffer for its crime; would learn how fair

The creature is that God pronounces good,

How pleasant in itself what pleases Him.—Cowper.