The Three Colonies of Australia/Part 1/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
AUSTRALIA FROM 1520 TO 1770.
AUSTRALIA—New South Wales—Botany Bay. These are the names under which, within the memory of men of middle age, a great island-continent at the antipodes has been explored, settled, and advanced from the condition of a mere gaol, or sink, on which our surplus felonry was poured—a sheep-walk tended by nomadic burglars—to be the wealthiest offset of the British crown—a land of promise for the adventurous—a home of peace and independence for the industrious—an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and and the easiest best-paid employments are to be found; where every striving man who rears a race of industrious children may sit under the shadow of his own vine and his own fig-tree—not without work, but with little care—living on his own land, looking down the valleys to his herds, and towards the hills to his flocks, amid the humming of bees which know no winter.
Under the genial variations of the climate of Australia all the productions of southern and temperate latitudes flourish—the palm and the oak, the potato and the yam, the orange and the apple, wheat and Indian corn. Over her boundless pastures millions of sheep wander—sheep of "noble race," whose feet, according to the Spanish proverb, "turn all the earth they touch to gold;" cattle by tens of thousands, that may compare with the best of Durham, or Hereford, or Devon; and horses as swift and untiring as ever bounded over the stony deserts of Arabia. In her mountain ridges and river beds gold is gathered in greater profusion than Cortes or Pizarro—dreamed gathered without shedding one drop of blood. Peaceful seas surround—safe harbours give access to—this goodly land, which may be traversed inland for hundreds of miles on foot or horseback. No ravenous wild beasts threaten or affright the timid. The aborigines are few, and quick to learn submission.
The hard work of colonisation has been done; the road has been smoothed, and made ready; yet is there ample verge and room enough for millions to follow in the track of the thousands who have conquered and subdued the earth, and planted and reared, not only corn and cattle, but an English race, imbued with English traditions, taught by English literature, enjoying English institutions, and practising English love of order and obedience to law while cherishing the firmest attachment to liberty.
With these elements of social and political prosperity, only needing for full development a tide of population which this country can well spare, it cannot be doubted that a very few years will transform what our fathers considered the meanest, into the greatest of Britain's dependencies; and that, at a period when Continental Europe seems retrograding into deeper than medieval darkness and despotism; side by side in friendly rivalry with the great American republic, we shall realise the threat of the baffled statesman (when the rising liberties of Spain were crushed under the armies of the soon-to-be-exiled Bourbon), and "call a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old"[1]—a new field for the employment of able-bodied industry, which, overflowing from the crowded competition of Europe, may there help on the march of unrestricted commerce by digging capital out of the soil, or, at less exercise of strength, produce choice raw material for the triumphs of machinery.
For some fifteen years armies of emigrants have annually proceeded in greater or less numbers to the Australian colonies, yet it is but recently, that the general public have cared to inquire more than how bread was to be earned or how capital invested. Late discoveries have invested these dependencies with new importance in the eyes of all who follow with interest the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race. The time seems propitious for attempting not only to describe the features, the resources, and the prospects of these colonies, but to trace the series of political, social, and commercial events by which an insignificant penal settlement in the most distant quarter of the globe, supported at great cost by the parent state, has given birth to a cluster of prosperous self-supporting colonies, largely contributing, directly find indirectly, to the imperial revenues, by the production of wool and gold, by the consumption of British manufactures, and by the employment of any amount of labour that can be landed on their shores.
The name "Australia," now universally adopted to designate the whole island-continent, was suggested by the gallant, unfortunate, and ill-requited Flinders, in his "Account of a Voyage of Discovery to Terra Australis," a work from which almost all writers on Australian geography have copied their outlines of the progress of discovery, previous to the voyage of Captain Cook.
The Dutch, who first explored the whole northern coast, called it New Holland in their own language. Captain Cook, after sailing round the south-eastern coast, gave it the name of New South Wales, from a supposed resemblance to that part of Great Britain, and by that name the whole island was known in English works until other settlements were formed. But colloquially, until very recently, Botany Bay, the first landing-place of Captain Cook, was vulgarly and popularly the designation given to Australia, although no settlement was ever formed there; and it remains to this day a swampy suburb, about an hour's ride from Sydney, from which part of the water for the supply of that city is obtained, and where idlers resort, to drink, smoke, and play quoits.
Port Phillip, the name first given to the great bay on which are the ports of Geelong and Melbourne,[2] after Captain Phillip, first governor of New South Wales, has been applied to the whole province; and although, by the act of Parliament which created it a separate colony, the name of Victoria has been affixed to this region, it will be long before the old inhabitants will remember or consent to give any other name than Port Phillip to the district which Sir Thomas Mitchell endeavoured, not without reason, to designate as Australia Felix.
The act of Parliament that created the third colony fixed upon it the vague name of South Australia.
Official and parliamentary documents have superseded the original name of Swan River by Western Australia. Van Diemen's Land retains its old Dutch name, although also occasionally more conveniently known as Tasmania.
Dutch, Spanish, and English have succeeded in affixing nominal marks of their discoveries on Australia, which is almost the last country peopled by an European race; but the French, in spite of efforts of great pains and cost, have been generally superseded, although at one time they had appropriated all the discoveries of Matthew Flinders. The earliest authentic records of the discovery of any part of Australia are Spanish. The traces supposed to be found by some geographers in ancient charts of "Jave le Grand," and in a map attached to certain editions of Marco Polo's travels, are too obscure to deserve serious consideration.
That Chinese navigators knew of the existence of Northern Australia at a very remote period, is more than probable, looking at the unchanging habits of that people. They have formed a settlement on the Island of Timor, distant only 250 miles from Cape York, and are in the habit of resorting to the coast near the abandoned settlement of Port Essington, to collect a Chinese dainty, the trepang or sea slug.
Between 1520 and 1600 the Spaniards, in the course of their voyages from their South American possessions, discovered several islands of the Australian group; and in 1605 Pedro Fernandez de Quiros and Luis Vaez de Torres made a voyage of discovery in two ships. After finding land, which they named Terra del Esperito Santo, now known as the New Hebrides, the ships parted company in a gale of wind. Torres, the second in command, coasted along New Guinea, and sailed through the dangerous straits which are still the dread of the mariner in stormy seasons, and still bear his name. He passed two months in this difficult navigation, mistaking the portions of the coast of Australia which he sighted for islands. Of this voyage he transmitted a full account in a letter to the King of Spain; but, in accordance with the jealous policy of the age, the record was suppressed, and the existence of Torres Straits remained unknown until they were re-discovered by Captain Cook in 1770.
During our war with Spain we captured Manilla by storm, and in the archives of that city Mr. Alexander Dalrymple, the historiographer of the British Admiralty, discovered a copy of the letter to the King of Spain, which had been deposited there by Torres. Dalrymple, with that right feeling which should inspire all men of science, did justice to the discoverer by inscribing on the official maps issued from his department, against the intricate passage between Australia and New Guinea, "Torres Straits."
About the same time that Quiros and Torres were pursuing their investigation, the Dutch, then in the height of their maritime power, were prosecuting voyages of discovery in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From the instructions prepared for the guidance of Abel Janz Tasman previous to his voyages in 1642 and 1644 (instructions which were signed by the Governor-General Antonio Van Diemen, and four members of the council, at Batavia), in which the previous discoveries of the Dutch in New Guinea and the "Great South Land" were recited, it appears that a Dutch yacht, on a voyage of discovery in 1605-6, discovered the "South Land," mistaking it for the west side of New Guinea; that a second expedition, in 1617, met with no success; and that, in 1623, a third, consisting of the yachts Pera and Arnhem, was despatched from Amboyna, by which were discovered "the great islands of Arnhem and Spult," being, in fact, the north of Australia, which still bears the name of Arnhem's Land. Other records show that, up to 1626, the Dutch had, either accidentally or by voyages of exploration, discovered and given names to about half the coast of Australia.
Many of these names are preserved to this day, for we have not a passion for re-naming after the standard of our own language.
The Gulf of Carpentaria is still called after General Peter Carpenter, who explored it. At that period military titles were indifferently applied to commanders at sea as on land; and captains of ships then, as at present in the Russian navy, wore spurs. The names of Arnhem, Tasman, De Witt, Endrachts, and Edel, cover the whole of the coast of Northern Australia as far as Sharks' Bay.
It is curious that none of these explorations led to any permanent settlement; and that in this instance, as in many others in America, at the Cape, and in India England has reaped the fruits of Dutch industry and enterprise. That industrious people have scarcely been more fortunate than the indolent, anti-commercial Spaniard. The Dutch, of all their rich colonial possessions, retain only Java, and the Spaniards Cuba. The two new gold-fields discovered by Dutch and Spaniards, Australia and California, have fallen into the hands of an English-speaking race.
Of Tasman's voyage no account has ever been published. There was found on one of the islands forming the roadstead called Dirk Hartog's roadstead, at the entrance of Shark's Bay, in 1697, and afterwards again in 1801, a pewter plate, attached to a decayed log half sunk in earth, which bore two inscriptions in Dutch, of different dates, of which the following are translations:—
"1616. On the 25th October the ship Endracht, of Amsterdam, arrived here; first merchant, Gilles Miebais Van Luck; Captain Dirk Hartog, of Amsterdam. She sailed on the 27th of the same month for Bantam. Supercargo, Janstins; chief pilot, Peter Ecores Van Due. Year 1616."
The second inscription was—
In 1642 Tasman discovered and sailed along the coast of the Island of Van Diemen's Land, supposing it to be part of the "South Land."
In successive investigations by Captain Marrion, of the French navy, in 1772; by Captain Tobias, of the British service, in 1773; by Captain Cook, in 1777; and by the French Rear-Admiral D'Entrecasteaux, the coast line to the south and east was further explored; but the insularity of Van Diemen's Land, the harbour of Port Jackson, and the Rivers Hunter, Brisbane, and Yarra, all destined to be the outlets to important districts in future colonies, remained undiscovered.
The many hundred leagues of coast so frequently visited by the Dutch, had afforded no encouragement for the plantation of settlements similar to those which they had founded with such brilliant results in the Indian Seas.
The Commander Carstens, sent by the Dutch East India Company to explore New Holland, describes it as "barren coasts, shallow water, islands thinly peopled by cruel, poor, and brutal natives, and of very little use to the company." Tasman's Land was pronounced to be the abode of "howling evil spirits." In these discouraging reports all mariners, until the time of Captain Cook, agreed; which is not extraordinary, considering that, after the time of Columbus, maritime discoverers sought lands in which either gold was to be had for gathering, or where rich tropical fruits abounded in pleasant arbours.
In New Holland the natives were hostile and miserably poor, in the lowest state of human existence. They built no huts, wore no ornaments of gold or precious stones, cultivated no ground. Their barren, unfruitful coast, afforded no indigenous fruits for barter; neither the yam, the cocoa, nor the pineapple, the lemon, the citron, the gourd, nor indeed any other fruit grateful to European taste.
As the Spaniards were the first, so the British were the last, and (in their first attempts) the least successful, in exploring the coast of Australia.
William Dampier, one of the boldest and most scientific navigators of his age, author of a "Voyage Round the World," from which Defoe drew many hints, visited New Holland three times—on the first occasion with his companions the buccaneers; again as pilot of H. M. S. Roebuck when he spent about five weeks in ranging off and on the coast of New South Wales, a length of about 300 leagues; on the third occasion he passed through Torres Straits as pilot to Captain Woodes Rogers, in 1710, when he explored Sharks' Bay, the coasts of New Guinea, New Britain, and New Zealand.
In July, 1769, Captain James Cook, after having observed the transit of Venus at Otaheite (or Tahiti), and cruised for a month among the other Society Islands, sailed southwards in search of the continent Terra Australia Incognita, which geographers for a preceding century had calculated must exist somewhere thereabouts, as a counterpoise to the great tract of land in the northern hemisphere.
In this search he first visited the Islands of New Zealand, which had been previously discovered by Tasman in 1662; he spent six months in investigating them, and ascertained that they consisted of two large islands.
Leaving New Zealand, and sailing westward, he sighted New Holland on the 11th of April, 1770, and on the 27th anchored in the roadstead to which he afterwards gave the name of Botany Bay. On the following day he landed, with Mr. (afterwards Sir Joseph) Banks, President of the Royal Society, Dr. Solander, and a party of seamen. They were all charmed with the bright verdure of the scene, in which all natural objects—the kangaroo bounding through the open forest, the evergreen eucalypti, the grass-trees, the birds—were unlike anything they had ever seen before in the course of their voyages in various quarters of the globe.
After exploring the country for several days, during which a favourable estimate was formed of the capabilities of the district for supporting a colony,[3] and vainly endeavouring to open a communication with natives, through Tupia, a South-sea Islander, Cook sailed to the northward, passing without visiting the opening into Port Jackson: taking it for a mere boat harbour, he gave it the name of the look-out seamen who announced the indentation in the dark, lofty, basaltic cliffs which open a passage into that noble harbour.
On the 17th of May, Cook anchored in a bay to which he "gave the name of Moreton Bay; and, at a place where the land was not at that time visible, some on board, having observed that the sea looked paler than usual, were of opinion that the bottom of the bay opened into a river;" but Cook came to a contrary conclusion; it was not until 1823 that the navigable River Brisbane, which gives access to a fine pastoral country, was discovered.
Leaving Moreton Bay, Cook ran down the coast as far as Cape York, taking possession in the usual form wherever he landed. Afterwards passing between New Guinea and Australia, he proved, as Torres had before him, that they were distinct islands.
Cook landed altogether five times on this coast—first at Botany Bay, on the 28th of April, 1770; secondly on the 22nd of May, when he shot a kind of bustard weighing 17 lbs., and named the landing-place Bustard Bay; the third time on the 30th of May, at a spot which, from the absence of water, he named Thirsty Sound. The fourth time was on the 18th of June, 1770 (seven days after his vessel, the Endeavour, had struck upon a coral rock), at Endeavour River, where they refitted. It was during his stay at Endeavour River that one of his crew came running to the boat declaring that he had seen the devil, "as large as a one-gallon keg, with horns and wings, yet he crept so slowly I might have touched him if I had not been afeared." This "devil" was a grey-headed vampyre. (See Engraving on next page.)
On the 21st of August of the same year, having passed and named a point on the mainland "Cape York," Cook anchored, landed for the fifth time on an island which lies in lat. 10° 30′ S., and having ascertained that he had discovered, by ascending a hill from whence he had a clear view of forty miles, an open passage to the Indian Seas, before re-embarking took possession in the following words:—
"As I am now about to quit the eastern coast of New Holland, which I have coasted from lat. 38° to this place, and which I am confident no European has ever seen before, I once more hoist English colours; and, though I have already taken possession of several parts, I now take possession of the whole of the eastern coast, by the name of New South Wales (from its great similarity to that part of the principality), in the right of my sovereign, George the Third, King of Great Britain."
His men fired three volleys of firearms, which were answered by the same number from the guns of the ship, and by three cheers from the main shrouds, and, then re-embarking, he named the spot Possession Island.
These explorations of Cook completed the circuit of the island commenced and prosecuted from the beginning of the seventeenth century by the Spanish and Dutch, with the exception of the coast opposite Van Diemen's Land, which was reserved for the enterprise of Flinders and Bass.
Grey-headed Vampyre.
In his exploration of Australia, Cook's usual sagacity and good fortune seem to have failed him, although his contributions to our knowledge of an important navigation were of the most valuable character. He selected Botany Bay, a dangerous harbour, which must remain for many years an undrained swamp. He passed without examination Port Jackson, the site of Sydney; Moreton Bay, with its navigable river; and, concluding that Van Diemen's Land was part of the Island of Australia, and the dividing straits a deep bay, lost the opportunity of investigating the great bay of Port Phillip, on the shores of which the most flourishing colony in the British dominions is now rising. In God's good providence the discovery was reserved for a fitting time.
- ↑ George Canning.
- ↑ Melbourne stands on the Yarra Yarra River, navigable by steamers of two hundred tons, Larger vessels lie off its mouth, in Hobson'e Bay.
- ↑ The author of the narrative of Cook's first voyage says:—"It was on account of the great quantity of plants which Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander collected in this place that Lieutenant Cook was induced to give it the name of Botany Bay. In cultivating the ground there would e no obstacle from the trees, which are tall, straight, and without underwood, and stand a sufficient distance from each other."