Early Australian Voyages | Page 4

the old Dutch explorers, and of the first real
awakening of England to a knowledge of Australia by Dampier's
voyage.
The great Australian continent is 2,500 miles long from east to west,
and 1,960 miles in its greatest breadth. Its climates are therefore various.
The northern half lies chiefly within the tropics, and at Melbourne
snow is seldom seen except upon the hills. The separation of Australia
by wide seas from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, gives it animals
and plants peculiarly its own. It has been said that of 5,710 plants
discovered, 5,440 are peculiar to that continent. The kangaroo also is
proper to Australia, and there are other animals of like kind. Of 58
species of quadruped found in Australia, 46 were peculiar to it. Sheep
and cattle that abound there now were introduced from Europe. From
eight merino sheep introduced in 1793 by a settler named McArthur,
there has been multiplication into millions, and the food-store of the
Old World begins to be replenished by Australian mutton.
The unexplored interior has given a happy hunting-ground to satisfy the
British spirit of adventure and research; but large waterless tracts, that
baffle man's ingenuity, have put man's powers of endurance to sore

trial.
The mountains of Australia are all of the oldest rocks, in which there
are either no fossil traces of past life, or the traces are of life in the most
ancient forms. Resemblance of the Australian cordilleras to the Ural
range, which he had especially been studying, caused Sir Roderick
Murchison, in 1844, to predict that gold would be found in Australia.
The first finding of gold--the beginning of the history of the Australian
gold-fields--was in February, 1851, near Bathurst and Wellington, and
to-day looks back to the morning of yesterday in the name of Ophir,
given to the Bathurst gold-diggings.
Gold, wool, mutton, wine, fruits, and what more Australia can now add
to the commonwealth of the English-speaking people, Englishmen at
home have been learning this year in the great Indian and Colonial
Exhibition, which is to stand always as evidence of the numerous
resources of the Empire, as aid to the full knowledge of them, and
through that to their wide diffusion. We are a long way now from the
wrecked ship of Captain Francis Pelsart, with which the histories in this
volume begin.
John Pinkerton was born at Edinburgh in February, 1758, and died in
Paris in March, 1826, aged sixty-eight. He was the best classical
scholar at the Lanark grammar school; but his father, refusing to send
him to a university, bound him to Scottish law. He had a strong will,
fortified in some respects by a weak judgment. He wrote clever verse;
at the age of twenty-two he went to London to support himself by
literature, began by publishing "Rimes" of his own, and then Scottish
Ballads, all issued as ancient, but of which he afterwards admitted that
fourteen out of the seventy-three were wholly written by himself. John
Pinkerton, whom Sir Walter Scott described as "a man of considerable
learning, and some severity as well as acuteness of disposition," made
clear conscience on the matter in 1786, when he published two volumes
of genuine old Scottish Poems from the MS. collections of Sir Richard
Maitland. He had added to his credit as an antiquary by an Essay on
Medals, and then applied his studies to ancient Scottish History,
producing learned books, in which he bitterly abused the Celts. It was
in 1802 that Pinkerton left England for Paris, where he supported
himself by indefatigable industry as a writer during the last twenty-four
years of his life. One of the most useful of his many works was that

General Collection of the best and most interesting Voyages and
Travels of the World, which appeared in seventeen quarto volumes,
with maps and engravings, in the years 1808-1814. Pinkerton abridged
and digested most of the travellers' records given in this series, but
always studied to retain the travellers' own words, and his occasional
comments have a value of their own.
H.M.

EARLY AUSTRALIAN VOYAGES. VOYAGE OF FRANCIS
PELSART TO AUSTRALASIA. 1628-29.

It has appeared very strange to some very able judges of voyages, that
the Dutch should make so great account of the southern countries as to
cause the map of them to be laid down in the pavement of the Stadt
House at Amsterdam, and yet publish no descriptions of them. This
mystery was a good deal heightened by one of the ships that first
touched on Carpenter's Land, bringing home a considerable quantity of
gold, spices, and other rich goods; in order to clear up which, it was
said that these were not the product of the country, but were fished out
of the wreck of a large ship that had