"Bonwick, Ling-Roth, West, and others have written the story of the Tasmanians, whose numbers have been estimated at from a few score thousand to three hundred thousand when Tasman first saw the island in 1642. The natives had wondrous bodies, a singular and extremely complex language, a rich store of myths, and were at first only friendly; but their land and its products were valuable, and this was their unpardonable crime. They were gradually crowded to a corner by a cordon which it was death to cross, and were shot like animals, the settlers by notching their gun-stocks keeping tally of the heads of those killed."