216.
"The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally one continued series of captivity to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wanderings in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from other females amongst whom she is brought a stranger by her captor; and rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance, but it is marked and scarred by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus wanders several hundred miles from the home of her infancy, being carried off successively to distant and more distant points."] Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands or friends, in addition to the dreadful life of drudgery, and privation, and hardship they always have to undergo; they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences.

No one takes the part of the weak or the injured, or ever attempts to interfere with the infliction of such severe punishments.
Few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear-wounds about the body.

I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds.

Upon this point Captain Grey remarks, vol.ii.p.

249.
The menses commence to flow among the native females at an earlier age than among Europeans, frequently beginning at about twelve; they are also subject to many irregularities in their periodical return, arising probably from the kind of life they lead and the nature of the diet upon which they live.