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  and lily roots and game in the swamps.

[centred] 3
Hence the serious necessity for either placing the bêche-de-mer aboriginal labour under the most
stringent regulations or refusing to allow such labour at all under any conditions.
A somewhat similar indictment is aimed at a section of the pearl-shell fishery, and the result is an
exactly similar verdict. A recognition of the utter unfitness of civilised men to be allowed an unfettered
and irresponsible control over a savage race was the cause of inducing the Queensland Government to
place the kanaka traffic and labour under such careful and stringent supervision as to reduce even the
possibility of abuse of any kind to a minimum. A similar recognition of the abuse of aboriginal labour
in the bêche-de-mer and pearl fisheries will doubtless lead the Government in an equally humane spirit
of justice to an equally desirable result. At present the pearl-shell boats are nearly all controlled and
manned by coloured men; a heterogeneous mixture of Javanese, Malays, and Polynesians. I saw at
least 100 luggers with not a white man on one of them. These men, as a class, are not fitted by either
natural or acquired qualifications to come into contact with the mainland aboriginals-—men, women, or
children.
One of the first effects on a black race of contact with a white one is to excite cupidity, involving
degeneracy towards a social and moral depravity that even sacrifices the virtue of the women in order that
the cupidity may be gratified.
It is a common practice for bêche-de-mer and pearl-shell boats to run down to some point on the
coast where blacks are camped, send their boats ashore, and purchase a number of women, paying for
them usually with flour and tobacco. These women are sent ashore before the boats depart. In some
cases the women were taken by force, and in the disturbance that followed one or more of the men were
shot. Before the boats were prohibited from taking native women on board for a cruise, the abuses were
of a much more serious character. The pearl-shell boats are a mischievous nuisance to the Batavia
River missionaries. Even on the morning of my arrival at Mapoon, by way of the Ducie River, when
crossing Port Musgrave, I saw a lugger just leaving the anchorage off the open beach about a mile behind
the Mission Station. She had anchored there on the previous night, sent the boats ashore, bought half-a-
dozen women, took them on board all night, and returned them next morning. Most of the blacks were
away using the flour and tobacco which formed one of the terms of contract. These practices are well
known to the boys and girls on the Mission Station; and if the schoolgirls were not under proper
control and guarded at night, the old men of the tribe would periodically dispose of them in a
similar manner. These undesirable marine visitors sometimes leave a legacy of disease, and always a
certain demoralisation against which the missionaries have to wage perpetual warfare. There is reason
to believe that from Albatross Bay south to the Mitchell River, or even to the mouth of the Gilbert, and
fifty miles eastward, the wild coast tribes allow their women no acquaintance or contact whatever with
any outside race. These tribes are still in a perfectly wild state; active, strong, healthy men and women,
with abundance of food. The inland tribes call them "mangrove people," as they live chiefly in the
vast belts of tall mangroves along the creeks and rivers of the west coast. Their food is
principally oysters, crabs, mussels, stinging rays, porpoises, dugong, and many kinds of fish. There are
also fruits, yams, nuts, grass seeds, mangrove shoots, eggs of birds and crocodiles, besides bustards, emu,
pigeons, wallabies, kangaroo, iguana, snakes, phalangers, bandicoots, &c., &c., in the open forest country,
and lily roots and game in the swamps.
As they occupy country not required for settlement, and therefore need not necessarily be
disturbed, it seems desirable only to establish friendship, visit them occasionally to hear their grievances,
give them some useful and ornamental presents, and leave them alone.
The tribes whom I mustered at the Moreton Telegraph Station, on the upper Batavia, came from a
radius of forty miles to the east, west, and north; from down the Batavia to tidal water, from the head
of the Ducie and the ranges behind Weymouth Bay. One old fellow remembered Kennedy's expedition
of 1848, and all the fatal circumstances of the last sad days. He said Kennedy had been shooting blacks
all along his track. They thought guns were the source of thunder and lightning.
The tribes from the eastward and the head of the Ducie were extremely wild and intensely
suspicious. They had never been interfered with by white men, but the white man's reputation had gone
before him, and was not particularly good. They sent in small parties of fifteen to twenty-five men to
meet me, and the main bodies remained concealed at a distance. The tribes within ten miles of the
telegraph line, west and south, had been frequently in collision with white men and the native police,
and gave me minute details of transactions one would gladly regard as incredible, if incredibility were
fortunate enough to have anything solid to rest on. At the time of my visit there was a rule
in the Telegraph Department that blacks were not allowed into any station on the overland line.
That rule has since been wisely cancelled by the present Postmaster-General. Practically applied,
it was regarded by the blacks as a declaration of hostility. If they had retaliated in a hostile
spirit no white man could have ridden along the line or worked on it without an armed guard. His
life would not have been worth an hour's purchase. Fortunately it was a rule more honoured
in the breach than the observance. One telegraph officer had established friendly relations, with
very satisfactory results, and another had let a contract to ten aboriginals who performed their
work in a most intelligent and efficient manner. Those officers were reported charged with
harbouring the blacks after the committal of sundry offences. All along the line similar charges
were made against telegraph officers whose instincts of common humanity, apart from any special
friendship for the blacks, prompted them to object emphatically to being accessories before or after facts
according to the old style of "dispersal." I found the blacks quite as much in need of protection as
the whites. I met one tribe whose men and women were like hunted wild beasts, afraid to go to sleep
in their own country. These and other wild tribes were said to be ferocious savages among whom no
white man dare venture without companions fully armed. And yet for weeks I trusted myself alone
among them, placed my life entirely at their disposal, and what was the result? I treated them as
friends and was received as a friend. At any time I am prepared to go alone, unarmed, and meet all
those tribes on their own territory. If we treat the aboriginal as a dangerous wild animal, what wonder
if he occasionally acts the character forced upon him? Do we expect the savage of the Stone Age
to show more forbearance, more forgiveness and humility, than the white man with his inheritance from
5,000 years of accumulated civilisation? Considering the treatment he has received for 100 years, and