[Footnote 25: "They pine away: more than one half have died, not from any positive disease, but from a disease they (physicians) call _home sickness_;'--a disease which is common to some Europeans, particularly the Swiss soldiers. They die from a disease of the stomach, which comes on entirely from a desire to return to their own country."--_Evidence of Col. Surgeon Barnes: Par. Papers._]
[Footnote 26: The subjoined abbreviated list may give an idea of the rapid decline:--
December 24.--The native youth, George. 30.--The native man, Nimrod. 1837-- January 28.--The native man, Columbus. 29.--The native woman, Pupedar. February 5.--Of acute pneumonia, the native man Samuel. 20.--Of chronic visceral inflammation, the native man, Algernon. 25.--Of the same, the native man, Matthew. 26.--Of the same, native man, Omega. 29.--Of the same, native woman, Truedeberrie. March 16.--The native woman, Tyree. 21.--The native woman, Queen Charlotte. 30.--The native woman, Manoon, ditto Maria, and an infant.
June 3.--Of extreme debility, Daniel. 20.--Of inflammation in the intestines, the aboriginal native, King William.
_Origin._--The traditions of the natives afford no clue to their origin. They are, perhaps, a branch of the Australasian family settled in New Holland(?). _Mocha_, is the name for water among the western tribe of this island: it is known by the same sound at Cape Leeuwin, on the continent. Though boats were not employed, they constructed a catamaran of bark, or decayed wood, of the specific gravity of cork: these materials, tied together, enabled them to pass to the islands of the Straits.
Lieutenant Gunn found at Maria Island, and preserved for several months, a catamaran, sufficiently tight and strong to drift for sixteen or twenty miles: each would convey from four to seven persons. The catamaran described by the French naturalist, found in Adventure Bay, was made of pieces of bark, and held together by cords made of grass, and assumed the appearance of meshes worked in the form of a _pentagon_. Mr. Taw, the pilot of Macquarie Harbour, saw the natives cross the river: on this occasion, a man swam on either side of the raft--formed of the bark of the "swamp tree." The distance between the islets is not sufficient to shut us up to the notion of a local creation.[28] A New Holland woman, taken to Flinders', remembered a tradition, that her ancestors had driven out the original inhabitants--the fathers, it is _conjectured_, of the Tasmanian race. History carries us back to the year 1642, and it is in vain to seek authentic information from a people destitute of records, and perpetually wandering. The time between the first visit and colonisation, was quite sufficient to obliterate the traces of earlier migrations.