of prosecuting onward his favourite and thus far successful enterprise. But the slight marine of the colony afforded no sufficient means. The only expedient that remained to him, was to take his passage for England, with some of his officers and crew, in a small vessel named the Porpoise, in order to present to the Admiralty the results of his exertions, and solicit another ship for the accomplishment of what remained. But a different allotment awaited hin.

After running to the northward for about a week, on a track in which they had expected to be quite clear of the grand plague of southern navigation, the coral reefs, they were one evening suddenly alarmed with breakers a-head. Almost immediately the vessel was carried among them and struck, followed very speedily in the same fate by a ship in company, the Cato, while a third and large vessel, an extra East Indiaman, commanded by Captain Palmer, very narrowly escaped both the reef, and a dreadful collision with the Cato in crossing before the latter struck. The two crews were saved to see the morning, when they very naturally expected to see also Captain Palmer coming to their relief, which bis situation relatively to the reef allowed him to do with perfect safety. When they saw him steering away till the ship disappeared, they waited for his re-appearance, as hardly believing it possible that an English commander could abandon his fellow-mariners in such a situation. But they waited in vain. He had coolly gone on his way, to report in the East Indies that he had seen them al perish, while an indignant officer of his ship was compelled to leave it for declaring the truth. No one on earth knows where his voyage ended: the Bridgewater sailed for Europe from Bombay, and was heard of no more. How dreadful,' say Captain Flinders, must have been his reflections at the time be 'ship was going down!' His conduct was the more infamous, as was a manœuvre critically made by the Cato, while in the tre mendous predicament of driving toward the reef, that saved ba from the meeting and concussion that would have been in a probability fatal.

With the exception of three persons, the two wrecked cre were saved, and the greater part of the lading of the Porpo including the results, so eminently valuable to hydrograpy of our Author's long and hazardous labours, while every thr in the Cato, but the men, was lost. Every thing in both sh the men included, would have perished, leaving but some se monumental relics, to serve as a kind of deadly welcome : some future victims sent to meet their doom on the same had not the Porpoise, contrary to the Cato, heeled to the re to use the technical phrase, presenting the bottom and side the breakers. And it was a remarkable fact, that in the sea

6

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.

I be 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,

and how important was our arrival to their safety, and to the saving of the charts, journals, and papers of the Investigator's voyage, he may have some idea of the pleasure we felt, but particularly myself, at entering our destined port.'

With the least possible delay, a ship bound to China was engaged to convey thither from the reef the people and stores, excepting such persons as might prefer returning to the colony, whom a small vessel was sent in company to receive and bring away; and excepting also a small complement of men for a schooner, named the Cumberland, less than a Gravesend passage boat, being only of twenty-nine tons, in which the Captain, upon very erroneous testimony of her good qualities, had decided, after considerable hesitation, to proceed by the shortest course, through Torres' Strait, for Europe. Six weeks after leaving the place of the wreck, he was received there with rapture, and contrary to the general apprehension, from the obvious hazards of his enterprise in the boat, that he would never be seen there again. Every person and thing was disposed of with the utmost celerity; the three vessels parted for their various destinations; and we must now in a very few sentences, indicate the sequel as relative to our Author.

The hazardous navigation of Torres' Strait, in a wretched vessel, was made additionally hazardous and inconceivably tiresome, by his earnest wish to lessen, by his investigation, the danger to those who may have to follow him through this frightful maze of reefs. He had projected running all the way from Timor, at one stretch, to the Cape of Good Hope. But the alarming condition of the schooner compelled him, in evil hour, to put in, for repair, at Mauritius, in perfect assurance of the effect of his French passport, even had the two nations been at war; but his last information from Europe was that they were at peace. He was not much surprised to find the war had been renewed, but greatly so that his passport, the perfectly well known nature of his employment, and the quite beneficent liberality which the contemporary French voyagers of discovery had experienced from the English, should not avail to prevent the seizure of himelf, his vessel, and all his papers. He had to encounter in General De Caen, recently appointed captain-general of the French settlements beyond the Cape of Good Hope, a ruffian whom it was a disgrace to any government to employ, but whom his government rendered itself most infamous by abetting in his detestable conduct toward Captain Flinders. If there be one man who can regret, as if it were a hardship and an injustice, the present detention in an island of the southern ocean, of the then Imperial Master and approver of this miscreant De Caen, let him read our Author's narrative of his between six and seven years imprisonment at Mauritius.

This protracted villainy it is not perhaps possible to assign with any precision in the respective shares to the several co-operating causes. The Captain attributes it chiefly to the personal malice of De Caen, whose anger and revenge were excited by a high spirited and unbending conduct in the first days of his communications with this detestable tool in office. Much may, perhaps, be ascribed to such a cause; but we can have no doubt, after what has been seen of the manner in which the French Government arrogated for Baudin the discoveries of Flinders, that that Government had a chief hand and interest in his iniquitous detention, especially when it is considered that he was plundered of some of the documents of his voyage, and that it was privately told him (though he seems to have doubted it) that his charts, put under seal in the government office of the island, were taken out and copied.

Our Author's detail of the vexations he endured, of his vain applications and representations, of his glimmerings of hope sometimes excited, to be followed by the indignation, and then the despondency of disappointment, of his literary and scientific occupations, his various social intercourse, and the long succession of his painful feelings, will be read with much interest, and much indignation, especially against the unfeeling and most unprincipled tyrant whom De Caen perhaps directly obeyed, but certainly did not displease, in the whole proceeding.

The Appendix contains a systematic compendium of the Botany of Terra Australis, by Mr. Brown, naturalist to the voyage, who remained in New South Wales, with Mr. Bauer the natural history painter, eighteen months after the Commander's departure for Europe, in the expectation of his returning with another ship to complete his examination of the coast. Mr. Brown says that his materials for a Flora of Terra Australis amount to about 4200 species.

There is also an important paper by the Captain,' On the 'errors of the compass arising from attractions within the ship, ' and others from the magnetism of land, with precautions for obviating their effects in marine surveying.' A long and most patient series of observations and reflections on the perplexing differences in the quantity of variation as indicated at the very same spot, and nearly the same time, upon a change in the direction of the ship's head, or a change of the situation of the compass in the ship, led him to a solution, in the influence upon the needle, of the magnetic state of the iron in the ship,-an influence varying according as that magnetic iron was by the changing positions of the ship, placed more or less in or out of coincidence with the meridian of the earth's magnetism.

The charts of the atlas are on a large scale, and well engraved. In point of correctness, we have no doubt, that the

very least that may be said of them is, that they are equal to the best existing hydrographical delineations of distant regions.

There are a number of slight but spirited large etchings of singular plants, from the drawings of Mr. Bauer, whose eminent excellence in his department is so well known.

Besides nine beautifully engraved landscapes, from the drawings of Mr. W. Westall, there are put on two large double sheets, nearly thirty long well engraved stripes of coast, in the same manner as in Vancouver's atlas. A number of years since, there were published, from Mr. Westall's drawings taken in this voyage, nine beautiful plates, as part of an intended series, under the title of foreign scenery, the discontinuation of which we have always regretted.

Art. VI. Sermons on the most important Doctrines of the Gospel; comprehending the Privileges and Duties connected with the Belief of those Doctrines. By J. Thornton, 2 Vols. 12mo. pp. 537. 1818. HAVING already, on several occasions, given our recommendation to Mr. Thornton's very useful publications, we need now do little more than announce the present volumes, which exhibit the same unpretending but not trivial excellencies which distinguished their precursors. Mr. Thornton's Sermons are characteristically pastoral, and therefore they are neither controversial, nor inflated by a misplaced attempt to be fine. We might, indeed, suggest to Mr. Thornton, whether, in published sermons, a manner somewhat less generalizing on some points, both of doctrine and of practice, and a style of thought, we do not mean less natural or more laboured, but yet perhaps more painfully elicited, would not excite, usefully, greater attention in the reader, and leave a more distinct and definite impression on the memory. A minister whose eminent seriousness of spirit and consistency of conversation, give to every word which he utters among his own people its full impression and effect, may be induced to rely too far upon the impression and effect of the very same words, when perused unaccompanied with the incalculable auxiliary of personal character. The preacher who is known to be himself in a high degree under the influence of the motives he urges upon his hearers, needs only repeat a passage of the sacred volume, attended with some natural and obvious comment, to awaken the most lively and favourable feelings in the minds of his accustomed audience; the eloquence, the suasion are tacit, the words employed are known to be less than the intention of the speaker, and felt to be less than the sentiment of the hearer; but, to the stranger, to the reader, the text and the comment are only worth so much as the bare words contain.