Next, a picture in black and white. It wandered into the gallery of Sir George's Pro-Consulship in South Australia. At the entrance to Spencer's Gulf lies an island, on which a fortuitous little colony had established itself. The colonists were mostly escaped convicts, from the penal settlements of Australia and Van Diemen's Land, or sailors who had deserted their ships. The men killed the seals which frequented the island, trading in their skins with vessels that now and then called for the purpose.
'I had never judged it my business,' Sir George spoke of this matter, 'to interfere with those sealers. They kept the peace among themselves, and did not come into contact with the settlement at Adelaide. Indeed, they had some form of justice, under which a member who did anything wrong, was transported for a time to a smaller neighbouring island. There he could live on oysters of a sort, and on fish caught with lines supplied to him. It was being sent to Coventry, new style, including oysters, which, like all delicacies, will, I suppose, cause surfeit.
'The chief of this settlement, as he might be termed, had brought a native woman with him from Van Diemen's Land. He was fairly educated, not without considerable power of reasoning, and I had repeated talks with him. Most of his companions had Australian black women living with them, and there was a story that these had been taken by force from the mainland. The natives of Van Diemen's Land were entirely distinct from the natives of Australia, and the differences have been much debated. The hair of a Van Diemen's Land woman was curly and woolly, Kaffir like; that of the Australian woman long and straight.
'Very well, I was anxious to obtain a genuine specimen of the Tasmanian female's hair. It would, I believed, be valuable to posterity, as bearing upon the divergencies of two neighbouring races. Of course, the Tasmanians have now been extinct for years, and their disappearance was then rapidly approaching. It was best, to prevent any doubt, that I should myself cut the tress of hair from the woman's head. The chief of the colony, in response to my request, said he was quite willing that she should visit Adelaide for this purpose. She was agreeable herself; curious as to the scenes, strange to her, which she might witness in Adelaide. As we are all born hungry, so we are all born curious; merely we differ in degree. In due time she arrived, and I secured the necessary sample of her hair, which remains, probably, in the Auckland Museum.
'Delighted with a new stock of clothes, the woman left Adelaide on her return to the island, this also having been arranged. She was to light a fire on a crag of the mainland, at which signal her lord and master would put over with his boat to fetch her. Now recur my conversations with him, which included the question, "Is it not rather bad that you should all be living here with these native women?"
'His answer, coming from such a quarter, surprised me, and proved him a regular controversialist. "It does nobody harm," he argued, "and we are much more comfortable than we should otherwise be. There was nothing hasty in what we did; every step was taken deliberately. Knowing we could not re-enter the world, and there being no settlers, then, in these parts, we considered: Could we not found a small nation ourselves? The greatest nation of ancient times, cast in very similar circumstances, did not feel it wrong to carry off, by force, the females of another people. Thus, they acquired women to look after their homes, while otherwise they would have been living in a pitiable state, with no ties. What that nation did, we have done." Such was the word of the island chief, and no appeal, in justification, to history, could ever have been made in stranger circumstances.
'Was it not,' Sir George felt, 'extraordinary to hear the case of the Romans and the Sabine women, pleaded in defence of a tiny outlawed community, situate on the wild Australian coast, where another empire, more magnificent even than that of Rome, was just planting itself? The thing almost swept one's mind from the question itself—a difficult one to answer as submitted.' Then, in this odd affair, the untutored far south was springing to the support of Sir George's views as to cause and effect. Imitators of ancient Rome, on an island of Spencer's Gulf, Australia, many centuries later! The theory of the universe, expressed as 'cause and effect,' had been borne in upon Sir George from the moment he turned thinker. It was a favourite text between him and Babbage, into whose ear he poured his reasonings.
'Subjects occurred to me,' he said, 'which I believed had not been given sufficient prominence, and this was one of them. I fancy Babbage wrote about it.'
Every motion, every word spoken, they agreed, abode an eternal influence in the world. Nothing, either in action or in reasoning, was lost; the unborn ages made response. If we could go back far enough we should be able to trace, by the influence it had wrought, that red streak, the murder of Abel. Had we a divine intellect, we could see the whole universe, a complete machine, at work. Sir George would marvel at the splendour of that creation, asking himself, 'Might it, if fully revealed, not be all too dazzling for human eyes?'
The Aborigine—Australian, Maori, and Kaffir—was to him a guarantee, by physical evidence, of the same law of the universe. They three had passed intimately before him, and he had mapped the intertwine of their paths. These were noteworthy, being a fruit of Sir George's observation on the human race in primitive lands. First, consider the women, who, among barbarians, not having animals of burden, had always been pack horses.