. . , A I '.V TR. I /-. I SI A ILL I r S TRA TED. 



i.-nu-nt to the recipient as to deprive him of the power of utterance for some time 

 afterwards. It only remains to piece out the story of his life. Buckley was a native 

 of Macclestield. when- he was horn in 1780. He enlisted in the Cheshire Militia, and 

 thence was drafted into the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, known as the King's Own. 

 He appears to have taken part in the inglorious Walcheren expedition ; and was tried, 

 convicted, and sentenced to transportation for having been concerned, it is said, in a 

 mutiny at Gibraltar. After receiving his pardon Buckley rendered important assistance 

 to Batman's party as an interpreter, and when Captain William Lonsdale was sent 

 round from Sydney to the infant settlement with a small detachment of the very regi- 

 ment to which " the wild white man " had formerly belonged, Buckley entered that 

 officer's sen-ice. But dissatisfied with the treatment he received, he quitted Port Phillip 

 in 1837 and settled down in Van Diemen's Land, where Sir John Franklin, who was 

 then Governor, provided him with suitable employment. There he married a widow with 

 one daughter, but had no children of his own. In 1852 the Government of that 

 colony bestowed a pension of twelve pounds per annum on Buckley, to which the 

 Victorian Government added ten pounds, and he lived to be seventy-six years of age, 

 his death having resulted from an accident on the 2nd of February, 1856. 



During his solitary wanderings Buckley had discovered a cavern on the sea- 

 shore, in which the lonely fugitive took up his abode, subsisting upon shell-fish, 

 and gradually acquiring those habits of taciturnity and reserve which clung to him 

 for the rest of his life. Separated for something like a twelvemonth from all human 

 intercourse his intellect became permanently enfeebled, and his organs of speech seemed 

 to be partially atrophied by disuse. When discovered by the natives, in the manner 

 described, he acquiesced with a dull resignation, if not a placid stupidity, in everything 

 they assumed or proposed concerning him, whether by word or sign. Yet this very 

 obtuseness of mind and stolidity of manner wrought with them in his favour, for they 

 accepted both as the direct consequence and clear evidence of the transmigration of 

 Komiak liiiarworis soul into the body of a white man, a process which, in their opinion, 

 implied mental and physical degeneration. The first thing which roused him from his 

 intellectual torpor was a feast, at which certain black men, killed in battle, were served 

 up as the principal dishes. Against this his emotions and his appetite alike revolted, 

 and he severed himself for a time from the tribe, taking with him two children a 

 blind boy and his sister whom he had adopted. The latter married, and the former is 

 said to have been murdered and eaten. Some time afterwards for Buckley had lost all 

 memory of dates, and the narrative of his life among the aborigines is a confused and 

 confusing one occurred his first marriage, and he appears to have derived a grim satis- 

 faction from the fact that the wife who deserted him was speared by a lover who had 

 been violently incensed by the coquetry of the sable flirt. Twice only, during the 

 lengthened period of his association with the blacks, did some faint prospect of escape 

 present itself. On the first occasion an unknown vessel entered the Heads and anchored 

 in Port Phillip. Most of the crew landed to obtain supplies of wood and water, and in 

 their absence a number of natives swam to the ship and helped themselves to whatever 

 portable articles they could lay their hands on. When the Europeans returned and 

 discovered their loss they tripped their anchor and hastily departed. Buckley endea- 



