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.