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Updated: June 7, 2025
In Tasmania, for instance, where the blacks were of a fine robust type, convicts in the early days, escaping to the Bush, by their cruelties inflamed the natives to hatred of the white disturbers, and outrages were frequent. The state of affairs got to be so bad that the Government formed the idea of capturing all the natives of Tasmania and putting them on a special reserve on Tasman Peninsula.
Tasman, upon seeing these pacific dispositions, despatched a boat for the purpose of obtaining a more accurate knowledge of the shore. Of the sailors who manned it, three were killed without provocation by the natives, while the others escaped by swimming, and were picked up by the ships' boats, but by the time they were in readiness to fire upon the assailants, these had disappeared.
Skin, bone, glittering eyes, and savage, despairing ferocity; that was all there was left of Tasman, three months after the death of his son Lupus. He had lived so long almost entirely upon insects, grubs, scraps of carrion dropped by birds, and the like.
The day after he quitted Amsterdam, he passed the island of Pilstart; an island which had been discovered by Tasman.
It may not be amiss to observe here, that what Captain Tasman calls the coast of New Guinea, is in reality the coast of New Britain, which Captain Dampier first discovered to be a large island separated from the coast of New Guinea. On the 25th, in the latitude of 4 degrees 35 minutes south, and in the longitude of 175 degrees 10 minutes, we found the variation 9 degrees 30 minutes east.
But no effort was made by Spain to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen.
Then, as is not unusual, it attracted undue consideration and importance. Mr Finkerton has re-published the account of this voyage in his collection. Tasman discovered New Zealand on the 13th September, 1642, but did not land on it, an unfortunate event having given him a total distrust of the natives.
His loins and thighs were those of a fleet runner, and his fore-part, in every hair of it, was that of a killer. Tasman was feared on that range rather as a tradition than as a killer; Lupus was feared and obeyed as an actual, living ruler. It was many months since Warrigal had seen the old wolf Tasman, but Lupus was abroad every night of his life.
Tasman had his back against the side of the den's mouth now, and he flung Warrigal from him, with a slash of his jaws and a twist of his still powerful neck.
They were stupefied for a moment at the flash and roar of the cannon and the crash of the wood-work of their canoes; then they turned and fled, carrying with them, however, one of the bodies. Tasman sailed down into Cook Strait, which he very naturally took to be a bay, the weather being too thick for him to see the passage to the south-east.
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