DISCIPLINE OF ABORIGINES.

New Zealand Colonist and Port Nicholson Advertiser, Volume I, Issue 60, 24 February 1843, Page 4

DISCIPLINE OF ABORIGINES.

On the coast of Western Australia is a small island, called Rottenest, whither native criminals are sent as to a kind of penal settlement, and there they are employed on a kind of public works. The plan has been quite successful : the convicts perform the tasks set them with propriety and sufficient ability; they improve under the discipline ; and the deterrent example is efficacious with their brethren at large. We saw recently, in the same colony, the ill feeling produced by the execution of a native for murder : the Blacks seemed to regard it as an act of revenge, demanding retaliation on their part. In fact, it strictly resembles a custom of their own, which, assuming that every death is the result of some sinister violence, seeks reparation in inflicting death on the supposed slayer. The capital punishment must therefore have been less a deterrent example than an exasperated confirmation of one of their own barbarous customs. Not so the exile to Rottenest Island : that is a new thing to their ideas: unaccompanied by violence, and yet presenting a protracted coercion, inflicted as retribution, it will appear strictly an an act of discipline. Supposing a Black tempted to commit some crime, the threat of capital punishment would merely stimulate his lawless daring; but exile to Rottenest Island is something too disagreeable, too unexciting, and too irksome, not to give him pause, if any thing can ; and it appears that it does so. The refinements of law, indeed, are as unintelligible to him as the subtleties of the metaphysician ; but the threat of labour in Rottenest is a very simple idea, and one perfectly comprehensible to the meanest capacity.

So far as it has gone, the punishment is efficacious ; and why can a similar plan not be tried elsewhere —in South Australia, Sydney, New Zealand, the Cape ? There is an obvious advantage in fixing on one spot as the site of punishment for native convicts in each colony ; for the very singleness of the place helps the simplicity and therefore the distinctness of the idea in the rude mind of the savage. It is equally obvious, that to carry out the discipline to its fullest extent, a special code would be requisite to make the laws which it enforced clear to the native, and also to make it embrace some of the offences peculiar to his customs or to the circumstances of his relations with the White settler.

Monuments of the Pacific Isles. —The general impression respecting the numerous isles of the Pacific is, that they exhibit the elements and materials of a new continent, rising in parts and patches out of the deep, and the foundations of which are created by the labours of myriads of coral worms. This view of the matter, which we believe to be the correct one, has been doubted by some observers, and that chiefly on account of some remarkable architec-

Lira] relics visible upon several of these isles, and which relics appear not only to be of great antiquity, but to be of a kind which the present inhabitants of these isles are seemingly incapable of producing. Based upon this fact, a conjecture has lately been advanced, that the isles of the Pacific are rather the remains of an old and submerged continent, than of a new one just emerging from the waters. A few particulars on this subject may interest our readers. On the Marianne Isles, lying in 14 or 15 degrees of north latitude, and about two degrees to the eastward of the Philippine Isles, various remarkable ruins are found. The island of Tinian, we are informed by a late circumnavigator, though but twelve miles long by six in breadth, contains ari immense number of rude gigantic ruins. “ The stone is composed of sand, consolidated by cement,” and their general shape is that of immense walls, with archways in them, the whole forming great open edifices, called by the inhabitants the Houses of the Ancients. But it seems more probable that their character was that of temples, as some of these Tinian buildings appear to have been fully four hundred paces in length —a size very unlike that suited for the residence of human beings. In some places they are formed merely of long rows of rough pillars, half of them strewed on the ground. You cannot go any where without finding such monuments. “ The whole island of Tinian seems to be but one ruin.” The neighbouring island of Rota presents similar characteristics. “ Fragments of pillars, three feet in diameter, are still lying on the earth which has been raised around them. They certainly formed only a single circular edifice, more than eight hundred paces in circumference.” Altogether, in their general character, these ruins are very similar to those which we find to have been erected by the northern European nations, and by various others, at a period when they had grown numerous and powerful, but were still altogether unacquainted, or nearly so, with the arts of civilisation. The Druidical remains are the very rudest of this order. The Vitrified Forts, again, which are common enough in Scotland, indicate a more advanced state of refinement, and we may suppose the Tinian monuments, which exhibit no traces of sculpture, to have been erected by a people much in the same condition as those who erected the forts—namely, powerful as regarded numbers, and consequently capable of erecting massive piles by a concentration of their physical energies, yet quite unable to give these the polish and perfection of art.

It is because the Marianne Islands do not at this day present a population of the kind in question, that some observers have been inclined to think that these islands have been the scene of some great convulsion of nature, which has swept its former inhabitants from the face of the earth, and left the islands themselves but a wreck of what they were. But this is an erroneous supposition. Tinian has now but fourteen or fifteen inhabitants, but the case was very different about a century and a half ago. Anson, who visited the place in one of his voyages, relates that the island, not above fifty years before, had contained thirty thousand inhabitants ! The swords of the Spanish settlers, and the epidemics introduced by them, were the agents in converting Tinian from a well-peopled garden into a tenantless wilderness. This historical truth at once overturns the idea that the island has sustained any destructive convulsion of nature, and shows us that the immediate ancestors of the present race were a people quite capable, as regarded numbers, of erecting the monuments found there —and numbers, as has been observed, form almost the only creative agency required. The same arguments apply to all the other Pacific isles, and the monuments upon them. There can be little doubt that these lands are literally the newest on the face of the globe.

Origin of the Bowie Knife. Bowie was a reckless drunkard who had squandered his property, and was subsequently obliged to fly from his country (the United States) for slaying a man in a duel. This fact is well known in Texas, and was told me by a friend of Bowie’s, who was present when Razin Bowie fought a duel with knives across a table, at the Alamo, a few days before Santa Anna took it. His first duel was fought at Natchez, on the Mississipi, in the fall of 1834. The dispute arose at a card table, in the middle of the day, between Bowie and a man named Black. The lie was given by Bowie to his opponent, and at the same moment drawing his knife, (which was a case one, with a blade about four inches long, such as the Americans always carry about their pockets,) he challenged them an to fight, which was accepted, and Black having taken his seat opposite Bowie, at a small square table, the conflict began. It had lasted about twenty minutes, during which both parties were severely cut, when Bowie rose from the table, and with a desperate oath, rushed upon his antagonist, who immediately fell dead at his feet. The inconvenience felt by Bowie on this Occasion from the smallness of the knife, having called forth the exercise of his debauched and sanguinary mind, he invented, a weapon, which would enable him, to use his own words, “ to rip a man up right away.”