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for something to make a fire with, there was found a rotten piece of timber, which the master of the Porpoise judged to have 'been part of the stern post of a ship of about four hundred tons.' Our Author could not help entertaining a strong surmise, that this might be a fragment of one of the ships of La Pérouse, drifted hither from some other fatal spot, as yet unknown in

these seas.

Flinders and his companions were saved by means of a bank raised on a part of the reef.

The length of the bank is about one hundred and fifty fathoms, by fifty in breadth, and the general elevation three or four feet above the common level of high water; it consists of sand and pieces of coral, thrown up by the waves and eddy tides on a patch of reef five or six miles in circuit; and being nearly in the middle of the patch, the sea does no more, even in a gale, than send a light spray over the bank, sufficient, however, to prevent the growth of any other than a few diminutive salt plants.'

This is but an indifferent subject for the landscape painter; but the associated circumstances, and the perfectly marine character of the view, give a peculiar interest to the very beautiful engraving from Mr. Westall's drawing of the surface of the reef just seen with its corals, weeds, and fowls, above the rippling, and of the sand bank, with the two crews there amicably united. At a later period, on fuller information, the reef is described as twenty miles long.

They were enabled to save from the wreck, and deposite on this bank, provisions and water enough for three months at full allowance. This promised to give time for a small deputed party to make, in a six-oared cutter, a passage to Port Jackson, and return with the means of taking the people off. Meanwhile, they were to be active in building, with materials from the wreck, larger boats, as a last resource, in the event of their not having received any assistance at the end of two months, an event extremely possible from the great danger of a voyage in such a vessel as the cutter, in the winds of that season. From its importance to their safety, the Captain himself was requested to undertake the expedition; which he did, after establishing regulations under the authority of martial law, among an assemblage of persons, who, however, on the whole, had thus far behaved excellently. Happier than the expectations of either those that went, or those that remained, the boat party reached Port Jackson in twelve days; and this little episode of navigation is read with particular interest.

The reader,' says Captain F. has perhaps never gone 250 leagues at sea in an open boat, or along a strange coast inhabited by savages; but if he recollect the eighty officers and men upon Wreck-Reef Bank,

direction. It has two very considerable and but slightly separated gulfs, to which the Discoverer gave the names of Spencer's and St. Vincent's. The former, measured from a straight line drawn between its two capes, reaches a hundred and eighty five miles into the interior of the country. Ou coming suddenly to the opening into it, the whole party of adventurers were elated with the confidence that they had found something at last to relieve the dreary monotony. They made sure of its being some great dividing strait, perhaps reaching to the gulf of Carpentaria on the north of the continent, or the entrance to an inland sea, or at the least the mouth of some considerable river. Their pleasing anticipations dwindled away as they found it narrowing and shallowing, and became extinct as they approached its last swampy point, where it was about as salt as at the immediate entrance from the ocean. The anomaly and mystery of so ample a continent without rivers, had very naturally been felt to converge, as it were, to this unknown part of the coast, where it was almost presumed there would and must be something found to explain it. Great therefore was the disappointment in being repelled from these inlets back again upon the long bare stretch of an insignificant coast. A veil as old and as dark as all past time,-as old at least as the super-marine existence of the continent-had been lifted, to disclose, in effect, nothing; to prove that no more here than in any other part was any thing to be found either explanatory or magnificent.

In front of these gulfs, the accurate survey of which was a very tedious process, is a considerable island, named by the Captain, Kanguroo Island, from the numbers of that animal upon it, far exceeding auy thing previously seen. The perfect insensibility to danger on the approach of human beings, here manifested by a creature extremely timid and fugacious where those same beings inhabit, was considered as evidence of the perfect impunity, till now, of these innocent islanders, from sli neighbourhood, either habitual or occasional, of that maleficent race. They now paid very dearly for their long preceding privilege. The Author seems almost to pity them while he describes the havock. In accordance with this sentiment, and relating to the same place, is another short passage, which struck us as perhaps the most remarkable in the book, and (in spite of something in the leading idea partaking too much of a conceit bearing a strong character of real fine writing. The sea ha access into the interior of the island, where it spreads to some breadth, and contains several small islets.

'Upon two of these,' says Capt. F., we found many young peliczas unable to fly. Flocks of the old birds were sitting upon the beaches the lagoon, and it appeared that the islands were their breeding places

not only so, but, from the number of skeletons and bones there scattered, it should seem that for ages they had been selected for the closing scene of their existence. Certainly none more likely to be free from disturbance of every kind could have been chosen, than these islets of a hidden lagoon of an uninhabited island, situate upon an unknown coast, near the antipodes of Europe; nor can any thing be more consonant to the feelings, if pelicans have any, than quietly to resign their breath, surrounded by their progeny, and in the same spot where they first drew it. Alas, for the pelicans! Their golden age is past; but it has much exceeded in duration that of man.'

His attention was strongly arrested by the circumstance, on this island, of a vast number of trees lying on the ground in all directions, of nearly the same size, and in the same stage of decay. He cannot think of any conjecture toward an explanation, so probable as that of fire kindled by the friction of some dead and dried trees together in the wind. But it seems obviously improbable that fire so effectually prevailing as to bring large trees to the ground, should have left them there so much in the shape of trees as the account of them appears to imply.

Not very long after emerging from these gulfs, the Investigator was encountered by Le Geographe, one of the two French discovery ships which had been sent out under the command of Captain Baudin, for the coasts of New Holland, a good while before our Author's earnestness to be fitted out for the same destination had been gratified. The Frenchman, after having, to little geographical purpose, run along great lengths of coast on the western side, and touched at some points of Van Diemen's Land, had now advanced thus far from Bass's Strait, on the survey, according to his slight manner of surveying, of the south coast. In a sufficiently amicable interview of the two officers, the Frenchman talked largely of his discoveries, before he thought it worth while to hear any account of what had been accomplished on the south coast by the Englishman, whose name he did not bethink himself to inquire, till the question was casually suggested to him by one of Flinders's questions, just at the moment of parting. The Investigator's track was marked out to him, with the most important of the observations, and with the names which the Englishman had given to the places on a long line of coast, never, as far as can be known, before seen by any European. He little dreamed, at parting from the French ship, that the Frenchman's voyage, or the first part of it at least, drawn up by Mons. Peron, one of the scientific men of the expedition, would be splendidly got up and got out in Paris, with prodigiously pompous pretensions attached to it by the Institute, a number of years before his own was to appear, and that, under the auspices of the Institute and the Monarch, this Baudin should be given out for the grand dis

coverer of the south coast of Australia! The Englishman did not divine that French names were to displace, in every instance, those which had been affixed to the capes, bays, and islands, by the man who for the first time had descried them, and whose indefatigable industry of examination had left scarcely any thing for any subsequent navigator to descry; and that the whole stretch of land from Bass's Strait to Nuyts's Archipelago, about half the length of the south coast, and comprehending his discoveries, was to become Terre Napoléon, of which Terre Napoléon, all Europe was to be made to believe that no civilized man had touched an atom before Monsieur Baudin.

It was remarkable that Peron's work came out unaccompanied with the appropriate apparatus of charts; these were promised to follow, and how it was meant they should be obtained, became well understood in due time. When, after the lapse of many years, they did follow, they appeared to be, what they were expected to be, as to the parts of the coast delineated by himinferior imitations of his.

There is now, however, no dispute or question in existence about the whole matter, or any part of it. All the Frenchman's pretensions to discovery, on the south coast, were necessarily confined within the space between the western side of Bass's Strait and the point where he was met by the Investigator. But, even within these limits, only a small portion had been left him for a priority of examination, (if that were the proper word to apply to Baudin's manner of making a coasting voyage,) since another Englishman, Captain Grant, had preceded, by a year or two, both the voyagers, having surveyed, in 1800, the coast from Bass's Strait far on toward the place of the meeting of Le Geographe and the Investigator*. As to the comparative degrees of authority, between the respective surveys of the same tracts of coast by Flinders, and the man so impudently set up by the French Institute and Government, not as a rival but as a thief, they might be safely left to the practical decision of any nautical man in Europe. We may be perfectly sure, there is not one commander of a ship in the navy of France itself, that, in the event of having to venture close along the Australian coast, would feel a moment's hesitation which it would be the safest to depend upon, if he any where found 1 difference between the two voyagers, in the recorded or dekneated circumstances of the coast. As to delineations, indeed i is a sufficiently remarkable fact, that the French did not co

* Of this, the French expedition, and among them Peron, who subs quently composed the narration of it, were informed at Port Jacksor

1802.

struct any chart at sea; that small concern was left for Parisian manufacture.

Our Author comments in a just and manly toue on this piece of shameless baseness, in which Baudin, Peron, the Institute, and Bonaparte, all co-operated in worthy partnership. As a contrast, he was, on his own part, very scrupulous to do justice to the Frenchman, carefully retaining the names affixed by him to the points of the very short tract where he really had the claim of precedence.

Twelve weeks were most actively employed in refitting in Port Jackson, where one of the two French discovery ships was already found in harbour, and the other, with Baudin on board, and a crew in an inconceivably wretched condition, soon arrived. They experienced there every possible form of aid and hospitality.

The adventurous mariner now set out with ardour undiminished, to run up the whole eastern coast, on which there were a number of points which Cook's wider plans had not allowed time for accurately examining. These he investigated, verifying in the intervals many of Cook's observations. He took his infirm vessel along withinside the formidable series of coral isles and rocks called the Great Barrier Reefs, attempting at various chasms to find a passage through into the open sea. This critical part of the enterprise occupied him fourteen days. The detail of this long course, from Port Jackson to Torres' Strait, is purely nautical. It is just of the nature of a useful commentary on a chart. In a very few instances, a handful of black naked savages come into the account, but with little more interest than the large cockle shells, and small pugnacious crabs, mentioned in other situations. It may be observed, however, that the inhabitants of the more northern coasts, few and and utterly naked and savage as they are, rank considerably higher than the southerns, in masculine appearance, intelligence, and mastery of the sea. A useful native of Port Jackson, who . accompanied the Captain, evidently shrunk in a consciousness of comparative insignificance in the presence of a party of them that came on board. They were much the same sort of men as the before-mentioned inhabitants of Darnley's Island.

After various traverses and observations in Torres' Strait, our Author steered down the eastern side of the great Gulf of Carpentaria, to Wellesley's Islands. Here it became necessary to have a thorough examination of the condition of the ship. The result was very mortifying and alarming, with such a prospect of further and long protracted operations as the Commander had in his commission and in his design. A very large portion of the fabric was found literally and totally rotten. The conclusion of the report officially given

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