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.
But death, to a man who has resided at Batavia, is too familiar an object
to excite either terror or regret.
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