A tribe I once came across some miles inland were visited by a plague of what I now feel sure must have been smallpox.

The disease, they said, had been brought down from the coast, and although numbers of the blacks died, war was not declared against any particular tribe.

As a rule, the body of the dead brave is placed upon a platform erected in the forks of trees, and his weapons neatly arranged below.

Then, as decay set in, and the body began to crumble away, the friends and chiefs would come and observe certain mystic signs, which were supposed to give information as to what tribe or individual had caused the death of the deceased.
It must have been within a month of my landing on Yamba's country, in Cambridge Gulf, that I witnessed my first cannibal feast.

One of the fighting-men had died in our camp, and after the usual observations had been taken, it was decided that he had been pointed at, and his death brought about, by a member of another tribe living some distance away.