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Page 1
Advance, Australia! The scattered handfuls of people have become a
nation, one with us in race, and character, and worthiness of aim. These
little volumes will, in course of time, include many aids to a knowledge
of the shaping of the nations. There will be later records of Australia
than these which tell of 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.
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 been lost upon the coast. But this story did not
satisfy the inquisitive, because not attended with circumstances
necessary to establish its credit; and therefore they suggested that,
instead of taking away the obscurity by relating the truth, this story
was invented in order to hide it more effectually. This suspicion gained
ground the more when it was known that the Dutch East India Company from
Batavia had made some attempts to conquer a part of the Southern
continent, and had been repulsed with loss, of which, however, we have no
distinct or perfect relation, and all that hath hitherto been collected
in reference to this subject, may be reduced to two voyages. All that we
know concerning the following piece is, that it was collected from the
Dutch journal of the voyage, and having said thus much by way of
introduction, we now proceed to the translation of this short history.
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