A LOST RACE.*
ARE there some, and those the most primitive races of the earth, who are utterly incapable of civilization, not so much intellectually, as morally and physically incapable ?—who pine and die when the free range of their savage and wandering instincts are denied to them?—who dwindle into fewness as that free range is contracted by the advancing tide of immigration ?—whose work in this world is over when the spear and the battle-axe are beaten into the plough-share?—who have no part at all in their younger and more favoured brother's blessing ?
The history of the Red Men of North America, of the Australian Blacks, of the degraded races who hide in the forest of Ceylon and Borneo and among the hills of India, and (perhaps the most striking of all, from the swiftness of their decay) of the early inhabitants of Tasmania, would seem to point to some such law of nature ; and it would let in a strange light upon the obscure subject of prehistoric man, if it could be made out that all these dying races are connected together in the closest relationship ; that they are but the separated remnants of a great multitude that dwelt on a continent of which Madagascar and Ceylon on one side, Australia with its neighbouring islands on the other, are the sole memorials left.
Mr. Bonwick advocates this theory, and brings a great array of authorities in its support. The resemblance between the natives of these now widely-severed lands is not more striking than is that between their floras and faunas, as many of the most eminent men of science have noticed and recorded. " But," writes our author, " Madagascar has an interesting means of identification with Australia and New Zealand in its former possession of a huge bird. At first the egg was discovered. This was twice the length and breadth of that laid by the ostrich. Subsequently, portions of its skeleton were recovered. So large a struthious creature would demand plains of an extent not now to be found in the mountain hold of Madagascar. The island must greatly have extended eastward at no very distant period. The bird, doubtless, belonged to the now sunken continent, as did the diornis of New Zealand, and the monster bird whose remains have lately been disinterred in Queensland of Australia. Marco Polo heard romantic tales of the rukh of Madagascar, as the Maories now have tradi- tions of the departed moa." The mystery of that wonder of our childhood, the egg of the mighty roc, deepens as we see it thus dimly connected with a drowned continent and a wholly different configuration of half the globe. Apart from its antiquarian interest (a subject into which Mr. Bonwick goes with a a zeal and industry which lay before his readers all that has been learnt or conjectured), there is little of peculiar attraction in the Tasmanians themselves. They appear to have been a simple and, compared with other savage nations, a kindly people ; not so low in the scale of being as they have been thought to be, but showing a fair degree of intelligence in providing for their simple wants, and much capacity for feeling. When, writes Mr. Bonwick, "Mango, the native guide, in 1830 came with the English roving party suddenly upon the spot where a massacre of his people had taken place, he became much affected. But when some of the rough Bushmen began kicking the bones about, the poor fellow was seized with shivering fits from the intensity of his feeling. For days he refused food, and appeared wholly given up to melancholy. He was at length forwarded on to Oatland in an exhausted state."
There is no true savage like a white one.
The affectionateness of their dispositions, which Mr. Bonwick says was so great that there are " several well-known instances of friends refusing food and dying of regret for a lost one " is curiously shown by a custom they had of wearing the skull or some other bone of their departed friends around their necks, so that on one occasion "quite a bushel of old bones was collected among forty natives." " They had few crimes against each other. Faults not immediately punished were usually overlooked. In- juries were soon forgotten. The camp was commonly a scene of affectionate regard. The parental relation was seen in pleasing exercise, and many bore testimony to their love of children. In
• Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanian. By James Bonwick, F.B.G.S. London: Sampson Low and Co.
one "respect they might compare favourably with our own un- educated classes. They took great care of their daughters, the mothers of the wandering tribes building huts for the boys and unmarried, men where they slept round their own fires apart from the family. No " strange native was allowed to approach the fire of the married ; unmarried men never wandered in the bush with women ; if meeting a party of the other sex, native politeness enjoined that they turned and went another way."
It is a very curious fact, and has been put forward as a proof that when first discovered they were ignorant of the art of making fire, that "a party would seldom be seen without its fire-stick, which was either of honeysuckle or grass-tree, and was carried with the lighted end behind, usually by females." Mr. Bonwick; however, asserts that the Tasmanians did produce flame by the friction of two pieces of wood, and that they only wished to "save themselves trouble by carrying fire-sticks wherever they went ; " he much doubts also if the charge of cannibalism can be justly brought against them. Like almost all savage peoples, they were polygamists, the old men engrossing the youngest and prettiest women ; in this they only resembled most other nations where the plurality of wives is recognized. " Often," writes Mr. Bonwick, "have I heard the Australian young black-fellows bemoan their hard fate, and declare, " No good, the like o'that ; old man, him get pretty lubra." " As years are honoured in the forest, only a laughing complaint is made by the young fellows." " In figure the Tasmanian was stout and robust, as compared with the taller and slenderer Australian"; of his face the illustrations to the present volume enable us to judge, and the verdict can scarcely be said to be favourable, although some of the counten- ances, especially that of William Lamle, the last man, are rather more human than Punch's typical Irishman. They resemble the negro in feature, but differ in the quality of the hair, which was more frizzly than woolly, and was worn in corkscrew curls, as well as in the ample growth of the beard, even the women indulging in that ornament as age advanced. " My own first impressions of the people," writes Mr. Bonwick, " were favourable. Several youths had been brought to my house nearly thirty years ago, by their friend the catechist of Flinders Island. Dressed in European clothes, clean in person, healthy in appearance, cheerful and smiling, with flashing dark eyes and expressive features, they arrested my attention, and even my regard. When, after a lapse of eighteen years, I was brought in contact with the whole of the race then alive, but one absent individual, and beheld them sunken in morals, advanced in years, and hopelessly hastening to extinction as a people, my estimate of their physical appearance declined, as my sympathy for their condition increased. The youth had gone to the grave, and the hideous aspect of degraded and miserable old age chilled and shocked me."
Mr. Bonwick has long been favourably known in Australia as an indefatigable writer upon colonial topics. " Everything Australian," we are assured by a local paper, " is tinted with the colours of paradise by the brush of this patriotic painter." Perhaps some allowance must be made for this patriotic glow in reading his two latest works, yet they bear marks of wide reading and careful research ; and, if he has pleaded the cause of a departed race with some little licence of imagination, he has only made his record of their wild and primitive existence the more readable, and probably also the more truthful.
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