Indeed, they
had some form of justice, under which a member who did anything wrong,
was transported for a time to a smaller neighbouring island. There he
could live on oysters of a sort, and on fish caught with lines supplied
to him. It was being sent to Coventry, new style, including oysters,
which, like all delicacies, will, I suppose, cause surfeit.
'The chief of this settlement, as he might be termed, had brought a
native woman with him from Van Diemen's Land. He was fairly educated, not
without considerable power of reasoning, and I had repeated talks with
him. Most of his companions had Australian black women living with them,
and there was a story that these had been taken by force from the
mainland. The natives of Van Diemen's Land were entirely distinct from
the natives of Australia, and the differences have been much debated. The
hair of a Van Diemen's Land woman was curly and woolly, Kaffir like; that
of the Australian woman long and straight.
'Very well, I was anxious to obtain a genuine specimen of the Tasmanian
female's hair. It would, I believed, be valuable to posterity, as bearing
upon the divergencies of two neighbouring races. Of course, the
Tasmanians have now been extinct for years, and their disappearance was
then rapidly approaching.
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