or the
protection of the face, which was covered with a thick branch, interwoven
with grass and fern so as to form a complete screen. Around the neck was
a strip of the bark of which they make fishing lines, and a young strait
stick growing near was stripped of its bark and bent down so as to form an
arch over the body, in which position it was confined by a forked branch
stuck into the earth.

On examining the corpse, it was found to be warm. Through the shoulder had
passed a musquet ball, which had divided the subclavian artery and caused
death by loss of blood. No mark of any remedy having been applied could
be discovered. Possibly the nature of the wound, which even among us would
baffle cure without amputation of the arm at the shoulder, was deemed so
fatal, that they despaired of success, and therefore left it to itself. Had
Mr. White found the man alive, there is little room to think that he
could have been of any use to him; for that an Indian would submit to so
formidable and alarming an operation seems hardly probable.

None of the natives who had come in the boat would touch the body, or even
go near it, saying, the mawn would come; that is literally, 'the spirit of
the deceased would seize them'. Of the people who died among us, they had
expressed no such apprehension. But how far the difference of a natural
death, and one effected by violence, may operate on their fears to induce
superstition; and why those who had performed the rites of sepulture should
not experience similar fears and reluctance, I leave to be determined.
Certain it is (as I shall insist upon more hereafter), that they believe
the spirit of the dead not to be extinct with the body.

Baneelon took an odd method of revenging the death of his countryman. At
the head of several of his tribe, he robbed one of the private boats of
fish, threatening the people, who were unarmed, that in case they resisted
he would spear them. On being taxed by the governor with this outrage, he
at first stoutly denied it; but on being confronted with the people who
were in the boat, he changed his language, and, without deigning even to
palliate his offence, burst into fury and demanded who had killed Bangai.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Transactions of the Colony continued to the End of May, 1791.

December, 1790. The Dutch snow from Batavia arrived on the 17th of the
month, after a passage of twelve weeks, in which she had lost sixteen of
her people. B