316 DEATH OF MR. RICHARD CUNNINGHAM. 
gladly accepted their services as guides; and on the evening of the 
fourth day after joining company, the party, by their directions, came 
upon a tribe consisting of upwards of forty men, women, and children, 
who were bivouacking on the banks of the lake fed by the Macquarie, 
and called the Budda. As no resistance was offered by the savages, 
they were made prisoners. A few questions produced an acknowledg¬ 
ment from them, that a white man had been killed by four of the 
tribe, three of whom they delivered up, and the fourth was absent on 
the Big river. On searching the bags of the tribe, the party found a 
knife, a glove, &c., which the three blacks acknowledged they had 
taken from the white man, and which were proved to have belonged to 
the deceased. 
“ The three murderers admitted that, about six moons before, they 
met a white man on the Bogan, who came up to them, and made signs 
that he was hungry; that they gave him food; and that he encamped 
with them that night. The white man repeatedly getting up during 
the night, excited their suspicion; and under the apprehension that 
he w r ould betray them into the hands of enemies, they consulted toge¬ 
ther, and soon came to the determination to destroy him, which they 
effected the following morning, by one of them approaching him unper¬ 
ceived and striking him on the back of the head, and the others rushing 
upon him with their spears. This must have occurred about the latter 
end of April of the last year. 
“ The party afterwards proceeded to the place where the murder was 
committed, called Carindine, where the black man showed some bones, 
which he said were those of the white man they had killed, and pointed 
out a small portion of a coat, and also part of a Manilla hat. Being 
thus convinced they had reached the spot where the murder was com¬ 
mitted, the officer and his little party, with true Christian feeling, 
collected all the remains they could discover; and having, in sad 
silence, deposited them in the ground, they raised a small mound over 
them, and barked some of the nearest trees, as the only means in their 
power of marking the spot whereon a man wholly devoted to science 
had, in the earnestness with which he was prosecuting botanical 
researches, been deprived of life by the hands of mistaken savages. 
“ Thus fell, in the prime of life, Richard Cunningham, an able 
botanist, and in other respects a very talented man, whose very amiable 
and obliging disposition had, in his life-time, secured to him as much 
general esteem, as his premature death has produced an universal senti¬ 
ment of unfeigned grief, in the minds of all his friends in England, 
and of every colonist in New South Wales.” 
“ We cannot tell ” (says his surviving brother, from whose narrative 
