ordered to New South Wales on a particular service, which he could not immediately carry into execution on account of the monsoon, and the Governor, Sir Ralph Darling, advised him to employ the intervening time in examining the western coast and in making up for French deficiencies.
Captain Stirling accordingly set sail, in company with Mr. Eraser a naturalist, rounded Cape Leeuwin on the 2nd of March, 1827, and, having anchored in Gage's Roads opposite the mouth of the Swan River, proceeded to inspect the country lying behind the sandy banks that skirt the coast. The scenery, which the French had slighted or with which they had, perhaps, made no acquaintance, possessed charms for the two Englishmen, and as they could not know by intuition that much of the verdure which they saw was composed of poisonous plants, they pronounced the country to be not only romantic, as indeed it is, but rich also.
If the French, however, had beheld Western Australia through a somewhat jaundiced medium when they stigmatized it as low, sandy, barren, and dreary; with little worthy of interest either in the animal, vegetable, or mineral creation; it must be confessed, on the other hand, that Captain Stirling and Mr. Fraser surveyed the same prospect through a haze, which was as much too roseate as that of their predecessors had been tinged with yellow.
It is difficult to imagine, in reading the accounts of Western Australia which were promulgated in England on Captain Stirling's return, that it is the same country as that which is described in the 'Voyage de Découvertes'; but an unfeeling captain, ill-provisioned ships, and a great
