CONCLUDING NOTE. 
237 
ture, might lead to these tribes becoming cultivators. 
The trepaug-fisher, Timbo, mentioned above^ was in- 
vited by the Monobar natives to reside among them for 
the sake of the superior knowledge he possessed; but 
being a fisherman, he was not well adapted for intro- 
ducing improvements in agricultnre, although even thia 
might have occurred had he become a permanent resident 
with the tribe, which the natives appear to have desired. 
Much, additional information eonceniing these inland 
tribes has been acquired since the paper given above was 
written, and I am in hopes that Colonel MacArthur, who 
returned to England in 1850, after the breaking up of 
the Port Essington Establishment (over which he had 
presided for eleven years), will furnish the world with a 
record of his experiences. Such a work would be of 
great ethnographical value, were it only to develop the 
system which enabled a party of civilised men to dwell 
for so long a period in daily intercourse with savages, 
without a single coUision having occurred; a result to 
which history does not furnish a parallel. On only one 
occasion during these eleven years was the intercourse 
attended with a loss of life on either side, and singularly 
enough this occurred while earrj'ing out the system of 
strict, but impartial justice, which had induced the 
mutual conlidence necessary to mamtain a friendly cor- 
respondence between such opposite elements. A ser- 
geant of the garrison was sent in his capacity of peace- 
officer to arrest a native who had committed a theft 
in the settlement, and had escaped to his tribe on the 
south coast of the Cobourg Peninsula. The capture was 
