—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
Before I saw Australia I had never heard of the “weet-weet” at all. I met but few men who had seen it thrown—at least I met but few who mentioned having seen it thrown. Roughly described, it is a fat wooden cigar with its butt-end fastened to a flexible twig1. The whole thing is only a couple of feet long, and weighs less than two ounces. This feather—so to call it—is not thrown through the air, but is flung with an underhanded throw and made to strike the ground a little way in front of the thrower; then it glances and makes a long skip; glances again, skips again, and again and again, like the flat stone which a boy sends skating over the water. The water is smooth, and the stone has a good chance; so a strong man may make it travel fifty or seventy-five yards; but the weet-weet has no such good chance, for it strikes sand, grass, and earth in its course. Yet an expert aboriginal3 has sent it a measured distance of two hundred and twenty yards. It would have gone even further but it encountered rank ferns and underwood on its passage and they damaged its speed. Two hundred and twenty yards; and so weightless a toy—a mouse on the end of a bit of wire, in effect; and not sailing through the accommodating air, but encountering grass and sand and stuff at every jump. It looks wholly impossible; but Mr. Brough Smyth saw the feat2 and did the measuring, and set down the facts in his book about aboriginal life, which he wrote by command of the Victorian Government.
What is the secret of the feat? No one explains. It cannot be physical strength, for that could not drive such a feather-weight any distance. It must be art. But no one explains what the art of it is; nor how it gets around that law of nature which says you shall not throw any two-ounce thing 220 yards, either through the air or bumping along the ground. Rev4. J. G. Woods says:
“The distance to which the weet-weet or kangaroo-rat can be thrown is truly astonishing. I have seen an Australian stand at one side of Kennington Oval and throw the kangaroo rat completely across it.” (Width of Kennington Oval not stated.) “It darts5 through the air with the sharp and menacing hiss6 of a rifle-ball, its greatest height from the ground being some seven or eight feet . . . . . . When properly thrown it looks just like a living animal leaping along . . . . . . Its movements have a wonderful resemblance to the long leaps of a kangaroo-rat fleeing in alarm, with its long tail trailing behind it.”
The Old Settler said that he had seen distances made by the weet-weet, in the early days, which almost convinced him that it was as extraordinary an instrument as the boomerang.
There must have been a large distribution of acuteness among those naked skinny aboriginals7, or they couldn’t have been such unapproachable trackers and boomerangers and weet-weeters. It must have been race-aversion that put upon them a good deal of the low-rate intellectual reputation which they bear and have borne this long time in the world’s estimate of them.
They were lazy—always lazy. Perhaps that was their trouble. It is a killing8 defect. Surely they could have invented and built a competent house, but they didn’t. And they could have invented and developed the agricultural arts, but they didn’t. They went naked and houseless, and lived on fish and grubs and worms and wild fruits, and were just plain savages10, for all their smartness.
With a country as big as the United States to live and multiply in, and with no epidemic11 diseases among them till the white man came with those and his other appliances of civilization, it is quite probable that there was never a day in his history when he could muster12 100,000 of his race in all Australia. He diligently13 and deliberately14 kept population down by infanticide—largely; but mainly by certain other methods. He did not need to practise these artificialities any more after the white man came. The white man knew ways of keeping down population which were worth several of his. The white man knew ways of reducing a native population 80 percent. in 20 years. The native had never seen anything as fine as that before.
For example, there is the case of the country now called Victoria—a country eighty times as large as Rhode Island, as I have already said. By the best official guess there were 4,500 aboriginals in it when the whites came along in the middle of the ‘Thirties. Of these, 1,000 lived in Gippsland, a patch of territory the size of fifteen or sixteen Rhode Islands: they did not diminish as fast as some of the other communities; indeed, at the end of forty years there were still 200 of them left. The Geelong tribe diminished more satisfactorily: from 173 persons it faded to 34 in twenty years; at the end of another twenty the tribe numbered one person altogether. The two Melbourne tribes could muster almost 300 when the white man came; they could muster but twenty, thirty-seven years later, in 1875. In that year there were still odds15 and ends of tribes scattered16 about the colony of Victoria, but I was told that natives of full blood are very scarce now. It is said that the aboriginals continue in some force in the huge territory called Queensland.
The early whites were not used to savages. They could not understand the primary law of savage9 life: that if a man do you a wrong, his whole tribe is responsible—each individual of it—and you may take your change out of any individual of it, without bothering to seek out the guilty one. When a white killed an aboriginal, the tribe applied17 the ancient law, and killed the first white they came across. To the whites this was a monstrous18 thing. Extermination19 seemed to be the proper medicine for such creatures as this. They did not kill all the blacks, but they promptly20 killed enough of them to make their own persons safe. From the dawn of civilization down to this day the white man has always used that very precaution. Mrs. Campbell Praed lived in Queensland, as a child, in the early days, and in her “Sketches of Australian life,” we get informing pictures of the early struggles of the white and the black to reform each other.
“At first the natives retreated before the whites; and, except that they every now and then speared a beast in one of the herds23, gave little cause for uneasiness. But, as the number of squatters increased, each one taking up miles of country and bringing two or three men in his train, so that shepherds’ huts and stockmen’s camps lay far apart, and defenseless in the midst of hostile tribes, the Blacks’ depredations26 became more frequent and murder was no unusual event.
“The loneliness of the Australian bush can hardly be painted in words. Here extends mile after mile of primeval forest where perhaps foot of white man has never trod—interminable vistas27 where the eucalyptus28 trees rear their lofty trunks and spread forth29 their lanky30 limbs, from which the red gum oozes31 and hangs in fantastic pendants like crimson32 stalactites; ravines along the sides of which the long-bladed grass grows rankly; level untimbered plains alternating with undulating tracts33 of pasture, here and there broken by a stony34 ridge35, steep gully, or dried-up creek36. All wild, vast and desolate37; all the same monotonous38 gray coloring, except where the wattle, when in blossom, shows patches of feathery gold, or a belt of scrub lies green, glossy39, and impenetrable as Indian jungle.
“The solitude40 seems intensified41 by the strange sounds of reptiles42, birds, and insects, and by the absence of larger creatures; of which in the day-time, the only audible signs are the stampede of a herd24 of kangaroo, or the rustle43 of a wallabi, or a dingo stirring the grass as it creeps to its lair44. But there are the whirring of locusts45, the demoniac chuckle46 of the laughing jack-ass, the screeching47 of cockatoos and parrots, the hissing48 of the frilled lizard49, and the buzzing of innumerable insects hidden under the dense50 undergrowth. And then at night, the melancholy51 wailing52 of the curlews, the dismal53 howling of dingoes, the discordant54 croaking55 of tree-frogs, might well shake the nerves of the solitary56 watcher.”
That is the theater for the drama. When you comprehend one or two other details, you will perceive how well suited for trouble it was, and how loudly it invited it. The cattlemen’s stations were scattered over that profound wilderness miles and miles apart—at each station half a dozen persons. There was a plenty of cattle, the black natives were always ill-nourished and hungry. The land belonged to them. The whites had not bought it, and couldn’t buy it; for the tribes had no chiefs, nobody in authority, nobody competent to sell and convey; and the tribes themselves had no comprehension of the idea of transferable ownership of land. The ousted57 owners were despised by the white interlopers, and this opinion was not hidden under a bushel. More promising58 materials for a tragedy could not have been collated59. Let Mrs. Praed speak:
“At Nie Nie station, one dark night, the unsuspecting hut-keeper, having, as he believed, secured himself against assault, was lying wrapped in his blankets sleeping profoundly. The Blacks crept stealthily down the chimney and battered60 in his skull61 while he slept.”
One could guess the whole drama from that little text. The curtain was up. It would not fall until the mastership of one party or the other was determined—and permanently62:
“There was treachery on both sides. The Blacks killed the Whites when they found them defenseless, and the Whites slew63 the Blacks in a wholesale64 and promiscuous65 fashion which offended against my childish sense of justice.
“They were regarded as little above the level of brutes66, and in some cases were destroyed like vermin.
“Here is an instance. A squatter25, whose station was surrounded by Blacks, whom he suspected to be hostile and from whom he feared an attack, parleyed with them from his house-door. He told them it was Christmas-time—a time at which all men, black or white, feasted; that there were flour, sugar-plums, good things in plenty in the store, and that he would make for them such a pudding as they had never dreamed of—a great pudding of which all might eat and be filled. The Blacks listened and were lost. The pudding was made and distributed. Next morning there was howling in the camp, for it had been sweetened with sugar and arsenic67!”
The white man’s spirit was right, but his method was wrong. His spirit was the spirit which the civilized68 white has always exhibited toward the savage, but the use of poison was a departure from custom. True, it was merely a technical departure, not a real one; still, it was a departure, and therefore a mistake, in my opinion. It was better, kinder, swifter, and much more humane69 than a number of the methods which have been sanctified by custom, but that does not justify70 its employment. That is, it does not wholly justify it. Its unusual nature makes it stand out and attract an amount of attention which it is not entitled to. It takes hold upon morbid71 imaginations and they work it up into a sort of exhibition of cruelty, and this smirches the good name of our civilization, whereas one of the old harsher methods would have had no such effect because usage has made those methods familiar to us and innocent. In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured72 us to it; yet a quick death by poison is loving kindness to it. In many countries we have burned the savage at the stake; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death is loving kindness to it. In more than one country we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mother with dogs and guns through the woods and swamps for an afternoon’s sport, and filled the region with happy laughter over their sprawling73 and stumbling flight, and their wild supplications for mercy; but this method we do not mind, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is loving kindness to it. In many countries we have taken the savage’s land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed74 him every day, and broken his pride, and made death his only friend, and overworked him till he dropped in his tracks; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is loving kindness to it. In the Matabeleland today—why, there we are confining ourselves to sanctified custom, we Rhodes-Beit millionaires in South Africa and Dukes in London; and nobody cares, because we are used to the old holy customs, and all we ask is that no notice—inviting new ones shall be intruded75 upon the attention of our comfortable consciences. Mrs. Praed says of the poisoner, “That squatter deserves to have his name handed down to the contempt of posterity76.”
I am sorry to hear her say that. I myself blame him for one thing, and severely77, but I stop there. I blame him for, the indiscretion of introducing a novelty which was calculated to attract attention to our civilization. There was no occasion to do that. It was his duty, and it is every loyal man’s duty to protect that heritage in every way he can; and the best way to do that is to attract attention elsewhere. The squatter’s judgment78 was bad—that is plain; but his heart was right. He is almost the only pioneering representative of civilization in history who has risen above the prejudices of his caste and his heredity and tried to introduce the element of mercy into the superior race’s dealings with the savage. His name is lost, and it is a pity; for it deserves to be handed down to posterity with homage79 and reverence80.
This paragraph is from a London journal:
“To learn what France is doing to spread the blessings81 of civilization in her distant dependencies we may turn with advantage to New Caledonia. With a view to attracting free settlers to that penal82 colony, M. Feillet, the Governor, forcibly expropriated the Kanaka cultivators from the best of their plantations83, with a derisory compensation, in spite of the protests of the Council General of the island. Such immigrants as could be induced to cross the seas thus found themselves in possession of thousands of coffee, cocoa, banana, and bread-fruit trees, the raising of which had cost the wretched natives years of toil84 whilst the latter had a few five-franc pieces to spend in the liquor stores of Noumea.”
You observe the combination? It is robbery, humiliation85, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man’s whisky. The savage’s gentle friend, the savage’s noble friend, the only magnanimous and unselfish friend the savage has ever had, was not there with the merciful swift release of his poisoned pudding.
There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.—[See Chapter on Tasmania, post.]
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1
twig
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| n.小树枝，嫩枝；v.理解 | |
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feat
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| n.功绩；武艺，技艺；adj.灵巧的，漂亮的，合适的 | |
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aboriginal
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| adj.（指动植物）土生的，原产地的，土著的 | |
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rev
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| v.发动机旋转，加快速度 | |
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darts
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| n.掷飞镖游戏；飞镖( dart的名词复数 )；急驰，飞奔v.投掷，投射( dart的第三人称单数 )；向前冲，飞奔 | |
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hiss
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| v.发出嘶嘶声；发嘘声表示不满 | |
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aboriginals
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| （某国的）公民( aboriginal的名词复数 )； 土著人特征； 土生动物（或植物） | |
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killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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epidemic
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| n.流行病；盛行；adj.流行性的，流传极广的 | |
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muster
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| v.集合，收集，鼓起，激起；n.集合，检阅，集合人员，点名册 | |
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diligently
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| ad.industriously;carefully | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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extermination
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| n.消灭，根绝 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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herds
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| 兽群( herd的名词复数 )； 牧群； 人群； 群众 | |
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herd
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| n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起 | |
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squatter
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| n.擅自占地者 | |
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depredations
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| n.劫掠，毁坏( depredation的名词复数 ) | |
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vistas
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| 长条形景色( vista的名词复数 )； 回顾； 展望； （未来可能发生的）一系列情景 | |
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eucalyptus
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| n.桉树，桉属植物 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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lanky
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| adj.瘦长的 | |
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oozes
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| v.（浓液等）慢慢地冒出，渗出( ooze的第三人称单数 )；使（液体）缓缓流出；（浓液）渗出，慢慢流出 | |
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crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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tracts
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| 大片土地( tract的名词复数 )； 地带； （体内的）道； （尤指宣扬宗教、伦理或政治的）短文 | |
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stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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monotonous
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| adj.单调的，一成不变的，使人厌倦的 | |
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glossy
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| adj.平滑的；有光泽的 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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reptiles
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| n.爬行动物，爬虫( reptile的名词复数 ) | |
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rustle
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| v.沙沙作响；偷盗(牛、马等)；n.沙沙声声 | |
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lair
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| n.野兽的巢穴；躲藏处 | |
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locusts
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| n.蝗虫( locust的名词复数 )；贪吃的人；破坏者；槐树 | |
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chuckle
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| vi.／n.轻声笑，咯咯笑 | |
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screeching
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| v.发出尖叫声( screech的现在分词 )；发出粗而刺耳的声音；高叫 | |
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hissing
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| n. 发嘶嘶声, 蔑视 动词hiss的现在分词形式 | |
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lizard
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| n.蜥蜴，壁虎 | |
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50
dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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51
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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wailing
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| v.哭叫，哀号( wail的现在分词 )；沱 | |
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dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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discordant
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| adj.不调和的 | |
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croaking
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| v.呱呱地叫( croak的现在分词 )；用粗的声音说 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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ousted
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| 驱逐( oust的过去式和过去分词 )； 革职； 罢黜； 剥夺 | |
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promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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collated
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| v.校对( collate的过去式和过去分词 )；整理；核对；整理（文件或书等） | |
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battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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skull
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| n.头骨；颅骨 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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slew
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| v.（使）旋转；n.大量，许多 | |
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wholesale
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| n.批发；adv.以批发方式；vt.批发，成批出售 | |
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promiscuous
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| adj.杂乱的，随便的 | |
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brutes
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| 兽( brute的名词复数 )； 畜生； 残酷无情的人； 兽性 | |
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arsenic
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| n.砒霜，砷；adj.砷的 | |
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civilized
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| a.有教养的，文雅的 | |
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humane
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| adj.人道的，富有同情心的 | |
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70
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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inured
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| adj.坚强的，习惯的 | |
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73
sprawling
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| adj.蔓生的，不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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74
lashed
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| adj.具睫毛的v.鞭打( lash的过去式和过去分词 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥 | |
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75
intruded
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| n.侵入的，推进的v.侵入，侵扰，打扰( intrude的过去式和过去分词 )；把…强加于 | |
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76
posterity
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| n.后裔，子孙，后代 | |
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77
severely
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| adv.严格地；严厉地；非常恶劣地 | |
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78
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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79
homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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80
reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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81
blessings
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| n.（上帝的）祝福( blessing的名词复数 )；好事；福分；因祸得福 | |
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82
penal
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| adj.刑罚的；刑法上的 | |
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83
plantations
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| n.种植园，大农场( plantation的名词复数 ) | |
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84
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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85
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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