overtaken him at last, and punished him by the hands of those very people who have suffered so much from him; he being known to have exercised his barbarous disposition in murdering or torturing any who unfortunately came within his reach." The indignation of honest old Governor Davey was strongly excited, when in 1813 he penned these words: "That he could not have believed that British subjects would have so ignominiously stained the honour of their country and themselves, as to have acted in the manner they did toward the Aborigines."
In the year 1814 a number of them, who had been accustomed to pay visits to the Camp at Hobart Town, were regaled with ration flour. In the merriment and excitement of the feast, some white monsters decoyed away and stole several of the children. At the discovery of their loss, the parents sought by passionate entreaties to procure the restitution of their offspring, but were met with but brutal jests from the kidnappers. Returning in sorrow and rage to their hilly homes, no black was seen in the streets of the Christian savages for several years after.
The public sentiment appears to have been either one of indifference toward the Natives, or that of direct antipathy. Many sympathised too much in the feeling of the man who said, "I'd as leave shoot 'em as so many sparrows." Even Captain Stokes was forced to write: "Such is the perversion of feeling among the colonists, that they cannot conceive that any one can sympathise with the Black race as their fellow-men." In an early proclamation. Governor Sorell thus records his condemnation of such treatment: "Cruelties have been perpetrated upon the Aborigines repugnant to humanity, and disgraceful to the British character; whilst few attempts can be traced on the part of the colonist, to conciliate the Natives, or to make them sensible that peace and forbearance were the objects desired."
Governor Arthur was equally shocked at the barbarity of his people, and unable to prevent the evil. Immediately after his arrival in the colony, a tribe applied to him for protection, and it was readily granted. All that personal attention and kindness could do was done to retain them near Hobart Town, and to secure them from insult and injury. They settled at Kangaroo Point, a tongue of land separated from the town by the broad estuary of the Derwent. There they stayed quietly and happily for a couple of years, when a savage murder was committed by
