Page:Extracts from the letters and journals of George Fletcher Moore.djvu/19

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INTRODUCTION.
xiii

of those who have traversed it, an extensive tract of beautiful country, well adapted to either pasture or agriculture. The climate is excellent: the rigours of winter and the oppressive heats of summer being equally unknown. Snow never falls there; and frost is rarely experienced; and even in the winter, vegetation advances. In the warmest months of summer the mornings and evenings are cool, and the noon-day heat is often tempered by a cooling breeze.

The present Governor is a great favourite with the colonists, active and enterprising; regardless of bodily fatigue and inconvenience, he is well calculated to promote the interest of an infant settlement. He has sent out several parties of discovery, buoyed off the entrance to the harbour; personally surveyed the coast four degrees north of the Swan River, and to the south and east round Cape Lewin, and beyond King George's Sound; and when unfavourable rumours of the instability of the colony were circulated, and when the stock of provisions was exhausted, and no supplies were furnished from Van Diemen's Land