Upon these altogether inoffensive and unprovocative islanders came a series of misfortunes which in a couple of decades wiped out most of the little race, broke its spirit, and doomed it to extinction. What had they done to deserve this--the fate of the Tasmanians? They were not unteachable and repulsive like the Tasmanians. Thomas Potts, a trained observer, has minutely described one of them, a survivor of their calamitous days. He saw in the Moriori a man “robust in figure, tall of stature, not darker in colour perhaps than many a Maori, but of a dull, dusky hue, rather than of the rich brown” so common in the Maori. Prominent brows, almond eyes, and a curved, somewhat fleshy nose gave the face a Jewish cast. The eyes seemed quietly watchful--the eyes of a patient animal “not yet attacked, but preparing or prepared for defence.” Otherwise the man’s demeanour was quiet and stolid. Bishop Selwyn, too, who visited the Chathams in 1848, bears witness to the courteous and attractive bearing of the Moriori. They were not drunken, irreclaimably vicious, or especially slothful. They were simply ignorant, innocent, and kindly, and so unfitted for wicked times and a reign of cruelty. White sealers and whalers coming in friendly guise began their destruction, exterminating their seals, scaring away their sea-fowl, infecting them with loathsome diseases. Worse was to come. In the sealing schooners casual Maori seamen visited the Chathams, and saw in them a nook as pleasant and defenceless as the city of Laish. One of these wanderers on his return home painted a picture of the group to an audience of the Ngatiawa tribe in words which Mr. Shand thus renders:-- “There is an island out in the ocean not far from here to the eastward. It is full of birds--both land and sea-birds--of all kinds, some living in the peaty soil, with albatross in plenty on the outlying islands. There is abundance of sea and shell-fish; the lakes swarm with eels; and it is a land of the karaka. The inhabitants are very numerous, but they do not know how to fight, and have no weapons.” [Illustration: “TE HONGI”]