Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land, 1830-1840 - Page 16
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 16]
by endeavouring to damp the ardour and zealous exections of the colonists, and even to question the justice and policy of attacking the Blacks, though the whites were every day murdered by them under circumstances of the greatest and most barbarous cruelty. This was a Mr Gregson. When the officers appointed to go round the District wherein Mr Gregson resided to inquire the names and number of volunteers each settler who was willing
to send in the Field, this gentleman (Mr Gregson) gravely asserted that it was nought but an act of usurpation on
the part of the English to take possession of this island - that the one who would kill a black man would also kill a
white man, and he flatly refused to send a single servant in the field, although the Government had assigned
to his Service a number of prisoners of the Crown. - All others sent in proportion to the number of servants allowed them by the Crown, and some went farther, and furnished free servants.-
Some of the Mr Gregson's friends and sincerest welwishers of this modern Las Coras remonstrated
with him : they argued that if the right we claimed in the soil of this island was usurpation, and he holding out that
was so, he committed an act of the