A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People — page 115: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

112 A QUFER RACE. dey. ‘T'o let them roam about the country was equally impolitic; they would be a chronic trouble and a perma- nent danger. ‘There was only one other alternative, and that wasadopted. ‘hey were enslaved. Fane had many ideas advanced; but the age in which he lived was neither a sentimental nor a humanitarian age. He not only thought there was no wrong in slavery, but that the best use to which the prisoners could be put was to reduce them to servitude. So they were bound in twos and threes and distributed among their captors, and slavery became one of the permanent insti- tutions of the island. The invaders, as Fane afterward ascertained, came from an island about a hundred miles east of Fair Island. and when he first saw them their appearance excited his unbounded surprise. Some were black, others copper- colored or red; but the greater part had the same spotted skins as the Caliban crew of Field’s boat—were, in fact, their ancestors. How. African negroes had found their way so far west was a matter of conjecture; they were probably, as Hane surmised, the descendants of a cargo of revolted slaves, who, after killing their captors, had landed on the island and intermarried with the natives. Speaking for myself, 1am unable to assign any cause for the peculiar hue of these people, or to decide whether it was the outcome of some subtle evolutionary process, or & mere caprice of atavism. As the mixture of aborigines with Englishmen on the one hand, and negroes on the other, produced analogous results, the piebaldism of their progeny may be attributable either to soil or climate, or possibly to some racial peculiarity. I have heard of tribes in Central America presenting similar characteristics, and it is a well-known fact that the issue of a black and white, or a mulatto and a white, are not always of the samme type. ‘Their children are occasionally born with black limbs and a white face, or vice versa, and I know of no reason why the offspring of mixed races should not have variegated skins rather than skins of one uniform color throughout. Miscegenation has produced even stranger results. | But as lam simply relating my own personal advent- ures, if 1s no part of my purpose to suggest explanations 7 , Geom C JOO cS (