he knew Mosquito when at service with a Mr. Lord, and that he there contracted an improper connexion with Black Hannah, whom he subsequently murdered in a fit of passion.
Mr. Melville mentions that he was employed to track Bushrangers. For such a task he was peculiarly suited. Of a very tall, slim figure, of a wiry, active frame, with remarkable acuteness of sense, even for a native, and animated by a profound love of excitement and mischief, he made an admirable bloodhound. Distinguished success attended his tracking. But, as the constables with whom he was associated were men of the prisoner class, some of them ex-Bushrangers, and all with a powerful sympathy for the unfortunate robber, excepting in cases where his capture would bring dollars to their pockets, the zeal of Mosquito soon excited their ill-will, and plots were laid to get him into trouble.
Being sent down to Hobart Town in 1818, he formally connected himself with some half-civilized, alias drunken. Aborigines, who hung about the town, over whom, by his superior intellectual energy, he established his authority. The Rev. Mr. Horton, on his visit to the colony, fell in with this so-called Tame Mob, and wrote the following account for a London magazine of 1822:—
"It consisted of persons (twenty or thirty of both sexes) who had absconded from their proper tribes in the interior, and is governed by a native of Port Jackson, named Muskitoo. This man was transported from Sydney to Van Diemen's Land, some years ago, for the murder of a woman, and was for some time after his arrival employed as a stock-keeper. How he was raised to this present station, as a leader of this tribe, I know not, unless it was in consideration of his superior skill and muscular strength. This party, like the rest of their race, never work, nor have any settled place of abode, but wander about from one part to another, subsisting on what is given them by the benevolent, and on kangaroos, opossums, oysters, &c. which they procure for themselves."
This man had drawn them around him as their acknowledged chief, in a sense superior to any known among the equality-loving Tasmanians, and governed them after the approved European model. Many of them had transgressed tribal laws in their own districts, and were obliged to live abroad for a
