204 FOREST LIFE AND SPORT IN INDIA 
The natives are like negroes in miniature, well- 
made and athletic, and they are either tame or wild. 
The former are employed in various works about the 
Settlement; they catch turtle and collect tortoise- 
shell and sea-slugs, they gather the crop of cocoa- 
nuts and edible nests, they track the escaped 
convict and bring him back safely to durance, unless 
he prefers to end a struggle with a three-foot arrow 
through his body. They are cheerful and pleasant 
people with a passion for tobacco, but they seem to 
be dying out as a race, perhaps contaminated by the 
convicts with whom they come in contact. The 
wild Andamanese, on the other hand, keep to the 
shade of their forests, and are happiest when ignored ; 
they visit their permanent camps from time to time, 
and in their middens have been found relics of 
ancient wrecks thrown aside as of no value, for they 
are entering the Iron Age, and will do murder gladly 
for the sake of a convict’s shackle or of an elephant’s 
tethering chain. And when their camp is rushed 
with the object of bringing prisoners to Port Blair, 
in the hope that these may learn the pleasures 
of civilization, and thus voluntarily give up their 
freedom, they reply with arrows, irrespective of the 
rank or nationality of their seducers, to show that 
the proposed exchange is not to their liking. They 
will probably continue to exist as a tiny nation till 
the North Island is opened out to Western progress, 
and their final record will, maybe, consist of a few 
skulls and bones, of fish-spears and wooden drums, 
exhibited in museums to show to the curious and to 
the scientific what manner of men were those who 
could live happily where a European would die from 
