paper thus: "Let them have enough of red-coats and bullet-fare. For every man they murder hunt them down, and drop ten of them. This is our specific; try it." There was an Aborigines' Protection Society in Hobart Town, which pointed out that the blacks were driven to retaliation. Arthur offered a reward for the apprehension of Musquito. For a long time the wary Australian defied all efforts to capture him. At last, by the aid of a black native lad, secret information was obtained, Musquito was surprised unarmed, shot, imprisoned, and executed. The author of a work on the native tribes of Tasmania (Mr. Calder) declares that "it is not easy to understand on what it was the" grim chieftain "was convicted, there being" no legal proof of any guilt." But he adds that it may have been necessary to "intimidate his surviving brethren into submission." To remove him from his old haunts by capture or death, was, in Mr. Calder's phrase, "no longer a simple desire, but an overpowering necessity." Mr. Calder relates that Musquito was notable for his pursuit of Michael Howe, the bushranger, and that the Government might have conferred "something more than mere dismissal" on their benefactor. They preferred to drive him to desperation. The Tasmanian natives had become deeply attached to him. They interceded for him in vain, and his death deepened their hatred of his slayers. Henceforward there was no hope. Musquito died on the scaffold in sullen silence, in 1825. As doggedly his companions met their fates in the forest. In 1826, Arthur issued a proclamation lamenting the failure of his efforts to conciliate the natives. He invited settlers to arm themselves and join with the military in repelling attacks, as well as in capturing felons. Where to be black was to be a felon, such terms were dangerously wide, and were widely availed of.[1] In
- ↑ "One Henry Widowson in 1825 went to Van Diemen's Land as "Agent for the Van Diemen's Land Agricultural Establishment." He dedicated to Lord Althorp a volume on the State of Van Diemen's Land (London, 1829). He said that "of late the audacious atrocities of the natives have been lamentably great; although at the same time I have little hesitation in saying they have arisen from the cruel treatment experienced by some of their women from the hands of the distant stock-keepers. Indeed these poor mortals have, I know, been shot at merely to gratify a most barbarous cruelty" (p. 191). Colonel Arthur on the occasion of the execution of two
