Blacks and Bushrangers: Adventures in Queensland

About the year ’43 there had lived for a long period in the little hamlet of Burley, in the New Forest, a clan of gipsies of the name of Stanley. Sampson, the head of the tribe, had commenced life as a knife-grinder, and by tramping the Forest summer and winter, and plying his trade in the neighbouring parishes, had collected sufficient funds to purchase a good van, an old horse, and some donkeys.

He was also known, in the Forest phraseology, as a “terrible” good man with an axe, and in those days of wooden ships there was plenty of timber to be hewn.

So Sampson always found enough to do when he chose to exert himself, but he infinitely preferred going out with the keepers after deer, and these men were not sorry for his company, for he was a wonderful tracker, and could follow up a wounded buck almost like a hound.

Though nearly fifty years of age, Sampson could still hold his own at most of the sports that took place annually in the neighbourhood. His fleetness of foot was remarkable, and though occasionally beaten by younger men whilst racing, at wrestling he had never yet found his match; and so good was he in his own county of Hampshire, that one or two of the squires proposed to send him up to London to meet some of the famous north-country men who gathered there once every year to exhibit their prowess; but when they suggested this, Sampson remarked that he was “afeard he shouldn’t do no credit to the money as they proposed to lay out on him; reckoned he warn’t man enough for them north-country folk, as knew tricks he’d never larnt, but that if any of the zquires liked to get a chimpion down to t’vorest, he’d ’av a turn with ’im.”

Sampson’s appearance denoted that of an athletic wild man of the woods.

Over six feet in height, straight as a spear, a spare figure with but little flesh on him, the muscles of arms and legs showed prominently through his buckskin jacket and breeches, whilst his dark brown eyes gleamed out from under a rabbit-skin cap; eyes that took in everything around him, and were only still when fixed with a steady gaze upon the face of any one addressing him.

Such was Sampson, the gipsy, a man who spoke little, but thought much upon matters connected with his means of livelihood.

Some years before this story opens Sampson had married the daughter of one of the small forest “squatters,” a hard-working, merry-eyed woman, who owned but little gipsy blood in her veins. She had not had much “schooling” herself, but for this very reason determined to do her best for the children born to her, and, with the help of an old schoolmaster, these were taught to read and write, and learned the elements of arithmetic.

At the period of which we write there was no church in the district of Burley, but Sampson’s wife read to her children, though with difficulty, every Sunday out of her Bible, and explained what she read. She taught them to say their prayers at her knee before going to bed in the great van. Her system was not to have the young ones’ heads crammed with much learning, but, following the advice of the old schoolmaster, to “ground” them well.

Besides this careful supervision of her children, her gentle counsels often influenced her husband, and other men of the tribe, for the better, when sometimes they were inclined to challenge the forest laws, or to throw away their money by “getting on the spree;” so that the neighbours round about came to say of the tribe, “They’re a bit ‘sobererer’ since old Sampson married.”