e fears of the
women, sufficient to induce them to dissemble in the presence of
strangers. Backhouse relates, that two girls, Jumbo and Jackey,
pretended, while in the company of their masters, either by silence, or
feigned anger, to resent the proposal to take them away; but when they
were assured that their liberty would be protected, they embraced it
with joy.

Jeffreys, whose narrative is tinged with romance, depicts the fondness
and contentment of the women in lively colors. Glad to escape the
tyranny of their countrymen, they displayed to these amiable white men,
warm, though jealous, affection;--whose occasional absence they
regretted, and for whose speedy return they invoked some imaginary deity
in plaintive melodies! It is not improbable, that they were sensible of
kindness, but it is very certain that this was not their ordinary lot.
Unanimous testimony permits no doubt that they experienced the severity,
which men of low intellect, and of fierce and capricious passions,
inflict on women of an inferior race.

The sealers, when they came to the main land, rarely brought their
captives: they were in danger of losing them. Their fickleness or
revenge, was sometimes fatal: in 1824, a party, engaged in an expedition
to entice the girls of a tribe, took with them one who had a half-caste
infant, and sent her on shore as a decoy. She returned, bringing
promises from her countrywomen to appear the following day; but at that
time the blacks descended in great force, and all the adventurers,
except one, were slain.

The sealers, by the names they gave the women, which were rarely
feminine, and were sometimes ludicrously absurd, indicated the notions
which prevailed. However slight their apparent importance, it has been
justly observed, they betray the low civilisation of the persons who
invented, and the degraded condition of those who bore them.

The intercourse of the stockmen was generally confined to the periods of
migration: sometimes with the connivance, at others, the express consent
of the men; but the detention was often compulsory. Dr. Ross found a
stock-keeper seated on a fallen tree, exhausted with hunger. He had
chained a woman to a log, "to tame her;" but she escaped, with his only
shirt, which he had bestowed in his fondness. For five hours he had
pursued her, catching glimpses of his shirt through the breaks of the
forest: at last, this signal disappeared; and having lost his way for
two days, he wa