Relative sterility of the interbreeds between the Europeans and the Australians or Tasmanians
At the extremity of the world, and nearly at the antipodes of Great Britain, the English have been for more than half a century in contact with the Melanesian races, and specially with the Australians and Tasmanians. The relative degree of inferiority between these latter races, which differ sensibly in their physical character, may be open to discussion.[47] It is, however, generally admitted that they are inferior at least to all other races who have come in permanent contact with Europeans. The Hottentot race, which has long been considered to occupy the lowest degree, is evidently superior to them. The Hottentots, though refractory to education, have, at least, shown some degree of improvability, while the Australians seem absolutely incorrigible savages. The English have made the most persevering attempts to instruct them, but without any success. As they could not succeed with the adult population, they tried it with children of a tender age, and educated them with European children in orphan asylums; they have there learned to mumble some prayers, even to read and write; but, with approaching puberty, the young pupils succumbed to their savage instincts, and escaped into the woods to live again with their parents whom they had never known. At one time young Australians were transported to England, and confided to the Moravian brothers, who neglected no cares to improve them. “They have returned as brutish as they were before,” says M. Garnat; “a proprietor of a farm in the interior assured me, that he could never succeed to employ them in the most simple agricultural labour.”[48]
What is known of the Tasmanians scarcely permits us to consider them superior to the Australians. It must, however, be admitted that those unfortunate islanders of Van Diemen’s Land have not been so much attended to as the Australians. The English, so humane and patient as regards the latter, have committed upon the Tasmanian race, and that in the nineteenth century, execrable atrocities a hundred times less excusable than the hitherto unrivalled crimes of which the Spaniards were guilty in the fifteenth century in the Antilles.
These atrocities have terminated in a regular extermination,[49] caused, say the optimists, by the absolute unsociability of the Tasmanians.[50] This is not, in our opinion, a mitigatory circumstance, but from all these facts there results evidently, that, of all human beings, the Tasmanians are, or rather were, with the Australians, nearest to the brutal condition.
The investigation of the results obtained from the intermixture of Anglo-Saxons with these inferior races, may give us an idea what the crossing between the two most disparate branches of the human family may produce.
M. Omalius d’Halloy, President of the Belgian Senate, a venerable scholar, as well known for his geological as for his anthropological works, thus concludes the seventh chapter of his Treatise on the Races of Man: “It is remarkable that, though a considerable number of Europeans now inhabit the same countries as the Andamenes, no mention is made of the existence of hybrids resulting front their union.”[51] Under the name of Andamenes, d’Halloy comprises the Australians, Tasmanians, and all the blacks with woolly hair of Melanesia and Malasia.
It may, then, be inferred from this passage, either that the Europeans established in these countries have no connection with the native black women, which appears inadmissible, as we shall presently show, or that the intermixture between the two races is perfectly sterile. This latter assertion is, however, not altogether correct. True it is that the greater part of travellers make no mention whatever of hybrids of Melanesia; it is equally true that they are very rare, but still there exist some. Thus Quoy and Gaymard have seen one hybrid of an European and a Tasmanian woman.[52] Mr. Gliddon, who unfortunately does not cite the source from which he has drawn his information, announces that until the year 1835, when the Tasmanians were exterminated, there were only known, in the whole of Tasmania, two adult Mulattoes.[53] This indicates either that few were born, or that they died at an early age, for the colony, founded in 1803 by a population at first almost exclusively masculine, had, in a few years, considerably increased by the arrival of convicts and free settlers, nearly all males. Mr. Jacquinot, after having announced that there were no hybrids in Australia, adds, “In Hobart Town, and in all Tasmania, there are no hybrids either.”[54] No other author has, to our knowledge, mentioned Tasmanian hybrids.
The intermixture of the English with the native women of Australia has not been more productive. “There are scarcely,” says Jacquinot, “any Mulattoes of Australians and English mentioned.” This absence of Mulattoes between two peoples living in contact on the same soil, proves incontestably the difference of species. It may also be noticed that if such cross-breeds really existed, they would be easily recognised.[55] Mr. Lesson, who lived about two months in Sydney and its environs, and who made several excursions among the natives, mentions only one cross-breed, the offspring of a white man and the wife of a chief named Bongari.[56] Cunningham, a great defender of the Australian race—which, by the way, has finished by killing, and it is even said eating him—has written two volumes on New South Wales, in which neither directly nor indirectly is there mention made of more than one single Mulatto, and it happens that this single Mulatto is precisely the same of whom Mr. Lesson speaks.[57] No statistical writer, nor any historian, enumerates cross-breeds among the Australian population. No where, nevertheless, are the classes of society more numerous and more distinct. The officials, the colonists born in Europe, the colonists born in Australia, the convicts, the emancipated, the descendants of convicts, etc.; form as many classes envious of and despising each other, they dispute their respective privileges, and give each other more or less picturesque nick names. There are sterlings, currencies,[58] the legitimate, the illegitimate,[59] the pure Merinos, the convicts, the titled, the untitled, the canaries, the government men, the bushrangers, the emancipists,[60] and some other classes of immigrants or convicts. In this rich vocabulary there is not a single word to designate the Mulattoes. Yet in all countries where races of different colours mix, the language of the locality contains always distinct denominations for Mulattoes of various shades. Nothing of the kind exists in Australia. There is even a class of white men, the legitimates, which have also the name of cross-breeds.[61] This word everywhere else would designate Mulattoes, in Australia it means European convicts, it being thought impossible that the rare issue of an intermixture between the two races should ever become a part of the population.
It is, however, not merely in New South Wales that we are struck with the paucity of cross-breeds between Europeans and Australians; Mr. McGillivray mentions a similar fact as regards the port of Essingen, an English colony of Northern Australia.[62]
We may, therefore, accept as an authenticated fact, that the cross-breeds between Europeans and native women are very rare in Australia, as they were in Tasmania when the Tasmanian race existed.