mfortable abodes, females as well as males, and taken to
the same savage mode of living, where the supply of food was often
precarious, their comforts not to be called such, and their lives
perpetually in danger. As a proof of the little personal safety which
they enjoyed, a young woman, the wife of a man named Ye-ra-ni-be, both of
whom had been brought up in the settlement from their childhood, was
cruelly murdered at the brick-fields by her husband, assisted by another
native, Cole-be, who first beat her dreadfully about the head (the common
mode of chastising their women), and then put an end to her existence by
driving a spear through her heart.

When spoken to or censured for robbing the maize-grounds, these people,
to be revenged, were accustomed to assemble in large bodies, burn the
houses of the settlers if they stood in lonely situations, and frequently
attempted to take their lives; yet they were seldom refused a little corn
when they would ask for it. It was imagined that they were stimulated to
this destructive conduct by some run-away convicts who were known to be
among them at the time of their committing these depredations. In order
to get possession of these pests, a proclamation was issued, calling on
them by name to surrender themselves within 14 days, declaring them
outlaws if they refused, and requiring the inhabitants, as they valued
the peace and good order of the settlement, and their own security, to
assist in apprehending and bringing them to justice. The governor also
signified his determination, if any of the natives could be detected in
the act of robbing the settlers, to hang one of them in chains upon a
tree near the spot as a terror to the others. Could it have been
foreseen, that this was their natural temper, it would have been wiser to
have kept them at a distance, and in fear, which might have been effected
without so much of the severity which their conduct had sometimes
compelled him to exercise towards them. But the kindness which had been
shown them, and the familiar intercourse with the white people in which
they had been indulged, tended only to make them acquainted with those
concerns in which they were the most vulnerable, and brought on all the
evils which they suffered from them.

In the evening of the 16th, his Majesty's ship _Supply_ arrived from
the Cape of Good Hope; from which place she sailed about the middle of
last month, with a quantity of young cattle on board for t