Ixiv A N INTROD UCTORY We do not quite know whether anything can be expected from them. Landing is a very difficult matter on any part of the coast of the great continent which our charts delineate under the name New Holland. Its west coast is obstructed by an endless number of little islands which lie off it. The country near the sea is altogether sterile and bare; like a new surface which the sea has recently left above the waves, before the action of the sun and rain, and the successive accu- mulations of the dSbria of light vegetation, has had time to form a soil sufficiently solid to give the plants and trees the nourishment that nature usually gives them. Those growing on the west coast look half dead. The country offered nothing to those who visited it that was at all curious, except a kind of wood that might be useful for painteis, being redder than the sassafras of Florida, trees yielding a gum like dragon's blood, and cockle shells of a singular beauty, of which there are some so large that Dampier found an empty one weighing two quintals and a half. The natives are thoroughly brutal, stupid, inca- pable of work, and insensible to the advantages of trade.'*' This was the impression made upon the ablest geographer of his time by a careful study of all the published voyages to the country. Dampier's mark is legible in every line of the descrip- tion; and the accounts gleaned from the Dutchmen seem to have tallied with everything that he had written on the subject. The net result was that New Holland was pronounced unfit for colonisation, and New Britain was recommended as the best available field in the South Sea for the energies of French emigrants — (p. 576). New Zealand and Van Dlemen's Land were looked upon as quite out of the question, principally because they were situated so far south. The idea seems to have been that the climate in those islands would be too severe for Euro- peans — ^Mediterranean sailors would never go into higher lati- tudes than they could help — and that the natural products could not be worth the trouble of cultivation. Some reason for that impression may be seen in Dampier^s remark that countries lying in such latitudes could not be compared with ^^ the Parts that lay nearer the Line, and more directly under the Sun." English- men in his days still cultivated the superstitious belief that all the wealth of the world was concentrated in tropical countries —
- Histoire dcs Navigations, torn, ii, pp. 880-1.
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