By this time their diet of shellfish had left them all weak and emaciated, skeletons only just alive; the anthropophagi would have nothing but bones to pick; still, the little life left in them was precious, and they resolved to sell it as dear as they could.  They watched the savages approaching; at length they could count their number.  They were only eleven all told, and were advancing slowly.  Now they saw that seven of the eleven were small, only picaninnies.  When they came nearer three out of the other four were seen to be lubras, and the eleventh individual then resolved himself into a white savage, who roared out, “Mates ahoy!”

The white man was Scott, the sealer, who had taken up is abode on the island with his harem, three Tasmanian gins and seven children.

They were the only permanent inhabitants; the cannibal blacks had disappeared, and continued to exist only in the fancies of the mariners.  Scott’s residence was opposite New Year’s Island not far from the shore; there he had built a hut and planted a garden with potatoes and other vegetables.  Flesh meat he obtained from the kangaroos and seals.  Their skins he took to Launceston in his boat, and in it he brought back supplies of flour and groceries.  He had observed dead bodies of women and men, and pieces of a wrecked vessel cast up by the sea, and had travelled along the shore with his family, looking for anything useful or valuable which the wreck might yield.  After hearing the story, and seeing the miserable plight of the castaways, he invited them to his home.  On arriving at the hut Scott and his lubras prepared for their guests a beautiful meal of kangaroo and potatoes.  This was their only food as long as they remained on King’s Island, for Scott’s only boat had got adrift, and his flour, tea, and sugar had been all consumed.  But kangaroo beef and potatoes seemed a most luxurious diet to the men and women who had been kept alive for three weeks on nothing but shellfish.

Scott and his hounds hunted the kangaroo, and supplied the colony with meat.  The liver of the kangaroo when boiled and left to grow cold is a dry substance, which, with the help of hunger and a little imagination, is said to be as good as bread.

In the month of July, 1835, heavy gales were blowing over King’s Island.  For fourteen days the schooner ‘Elizabeth’, with whalers for Port Fairy, was hove to off the coast, standing off and on, six hours one way and six hours the other.  Akers, the captain, and his mate got drunk on rum and water daily.  The cook of the ‘Industry’ was on board the ‘Elizabeth’, the man whom Captain Blogg was flogging when his crew seized him and threw him overboard.  The cook also was now pitched overboard for having given evidence against the four men who had saved him from further flogging.