the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa,* though a nasty people, yet for wealth are gentlemen to these, who have no houses and skin-garments, sheep, poultry, and fruits of the earth, ostrich eggs, &c. . They have great bottle-noses, pretty full lips, and wide mouths, They are long-visaged, and of a very unpleasant aspect, having no one graceful feature in their faces." In most respects, the accounts given by Dampier prove to be perfectly correct; he was a close observer, and had he fallen upon the eastern instead of the western coast, the colonization of Australia might have commenced more than half a century earlier than it did. As it was, the voyages of the British buccaneer effected no more than those of his Dutch predecessors had done.

From that time until Cook began to unravel the mazes of the Pacific and Australian seas, New Holland was left to her bottle-nosed savages, her Indians, as they were termed down almost to our own days. In April, 1770, however, the great circumnavigator approaching, not from the north or west, as other discoverers had done, but from the east, came upon a shore which was green, fertile, well-watered, and pleasant of aspect. Anchoring in a harbor, the shores of which furnished such treasures to the collections of Mr. Joseph Banks, afterwards the world-renowned Sir Joseph, that the bay was named Botany Bay, Cook began to make acquaintance with the advantages of the neighboring country; and coasting thence northward, examined and named in succession inlet after inlet, point after point. Of the north, west, and south coasts he saw nothing, and of the eastern, south of Botany Bay, learned no details. Nor was much added to his information during his after-voyages, no other part of Australia being examined, and only so much of Tasmania as left it still, on the map, the southern extremity of its continental neighbor. So stood geography, sixty-two years since, Alexander Humboldt being at the time eighteen years of age, when the first body of convicts left England for Botany Bay. Let us see how much it amounted to. New Holland, which in those days of darkness included Van Diemen's Land, had been sailed round, and its dimensions and shape pretty well ascertained. Its western shore had been examined for a few miles

*East coast of Africa, back of Mozambique.

inward, and found thirsty and inhospitable; its eastern had been skirted, and its comparative fertility and pleasantness placed beyond doubt. The natives were known to be extremely uncivilized, but neither very warlike nor very cruel, and appeared to be by no means numerous. No fruits or vegetables of value had been discovered by the industry of Banks and his companions; and no animal worthy of notice except the kangaroo. The shores were clothed for the most part with a sombre forest of evergreens, the mass of them unknown elsewhere; coral reefs skirted the coast in many parts; water was by no means abundant upon the whole, and in the west was sadly wanting; the power of the sun was such as the torrid zone and its vicinity might reasonably be expected to feel; and though hills and mountains rose in the distance, they did not seem to possess great height, or to promise valleys or table-lands of fertility among or beyond them.

Meanwhile, England needed a new outlet for her criminal population. America would receive them no more; the labors of Howard and of the Quakers had opened the eyes of men to the horrors of European prisons; the punishment of death for trivial crimes was becoming every day more and more offensive to the hearts and consciences of the masses. In this state of things, of growing crime and a growing indisposition to use the old home remedies, how natural to go back freely to the ancient constitutional depletive of transportation ;* and what land of exile so fitting as that lately visited by Cook? So, in the early spring of 1787, a fleet of eleven sail mustered at Portsmouth to form the new colony of criminals at the south: six transports, three store ships, a frigate, and a tender; the whole conveying six hundred male and two hundred and fifty female convicts, together with some two hundred and fifty soldiers, or rather marines, and forty of their wives. Over the whole presided Capt. Arthur Phillip, of the navy, who was to be first governor of New South Wales. The fleet sailed May 13th, and reached Botany Bay from the 18th to the 20th of the following January.

It was not an uneventful time. During the passage of that fleet, "The Ohio Company," which first settled our great

* Dating from 39th Eliz., ch. iv., A. D. 1597,

Northwest, bought their lands of Congress; the ordinance that makes slavery impossible in that young empire was framed by the dying confederation; Washington and his associates fashioned the constitution under which we live ; while in Europe, the political caldron began to simmer, the parliament of Paris was "transported" for refusing to register the new taxes asked for by the court, and Phillippe Egalité took open part against the king.

Into the details of Australian history we cannot, of course, enter. But we may notice three leading sources of trouble to the early inhabitants. The first was the proportion of the criminal population; proportion we say, for it was not intended or attempted to make the colony a mere prison, a larger jail. Free emigrants, men of means, and enterprise, and character, were encouraged from the outset to seek in the new settlement a field for investment and profitable labor.* But no high tone of character, no proper spirit of industry, no decency or moral purity even, could prevail in a colony the vast mass of which consisted of the most idle and abandoned of mankind. For years, the settlers of Sydney, unmolested by the natives, were dependent upon England for the bread they eat, and more than once nearly starved to death; † while the pioneers in Ohio, who reached their camping ground not quite three months after the Australians moored in Port Jackson, raised their corn, their flax, their cotton even, spun their thread and wove their cloth, — and all in the face of the most formidable savages that the Anglo-Saxon has yet had to deal with. Nor has England learned, until within the last few years, that her system of transporting the refuse of her population will never answer, unless, even after all the reformation which can be effected before they go, they are made so small a portion of the colony to which they migrate as to receive its character, not give their character to it.

The second cause from which the young New Holland nation suffered, aye, and yet suffers, was and is the want of women. It is a subject we cannot and need not dwell on; but

* See letters of Gov. Phillip and Secretary Dundas on this subject. Lang, I. 39 to 43.

For three years, said an old settler to Mr. Lang, I lived in the constant belief that I should some day perish with hunger. Lang, I. 56.

Hildreth's Pioneer History, 392, &c.

whoever knows any thing of human nature, and especially of convict nature, knows that where masses of hardened men are collected together, and women are rare, there is not a vice which can, we will not say brutalize, for the brutes are pure and true to their natures, - but which can Yahoo mankind, that is not soon forthcoming.

The third cause of idleness, low tastes, low morals, and slow progress in the realm of Botany Bay, was the unprecedented use of rum, which became at last the colonial currency, being the only thing universally desired.* During Governor King's administration, "from 1800 to 1806," says Dr. Lang," the population of New South Wales consisted chiefly of those who sold rum, and those who drank it. Even the chief constable of Sydney, whose business it was to repress irregularity, had a license to promote it, under the Governor's hand, by the sale of rum and other ardent liquors; and although the chief jailer was not exactly permitted to convert His Majesty's jail into a grog-shop, he had a licensed house. in which he sold rum publicly on his own behalf, right opposite the jail door." We must not, however, leave it to be inferred that Governor King was so munificent in his licenses from mere love of mischief; the fact being that he was trying a sort of homeopathic experiment. He found upon his accession the leaders of society, and especially the officers of the military corps, the "New South Wales corps," which had been raised for the colony, engaged in a monopoly of spirits that was immensely profitable, though immensely pernicious; and he was trying to dry up the streams of alcohol by diminishing the profits of those who dealt therein. He had also in view the lessening of the influence of his Pretorians, who were rapidly becoming too strong for the civil power, and whom he hoped to counterbalance by the emancipists and free settlers to whom he gave the entrée of the rum traffic. He failed, however, in all points. The "New South Wales Corps " lost none of the influence which it had possessed, and rum remained, in spite of Governors and clergy, strong measures and weak, prohibitions and licenses, even more influential than the "Corps" itself. Up to 1810, said Captain Kemp of the Pretorians, at a trial in England,

* Lang, 1. 96.

† Id. I. 81.

+ Id. I. 83.

Freed convicts.

"the Governor, clergy, officers civil and military, all ranks and descriptions of people, bartered spirits." "Every description of inhabitants," said, at the same trial, John Macarthur, a leading merchant and paymaster of the "Corps," "were under the necessity of paying for the necessaries of life, for every article of consumption, in that sort of commodity which the people who had to sell were inclined to take," namely, - rum. As to the military, this very John Macarthur, and his friends of the body to which he was Paymaster, deposed the successor of Governor King, Governor Bligh, who was a strong opponent of the spirit trade. They placed him in confinement, usurped the supreme power, turned out the old officers and put in new, and for a time were masters of the colony. For this decided step, however, the commander, Major Johnston, was cashiered, and the corps ordered elsewhere.

We have said the Colony suffered from three great evils, the abundance of criminals and rum, and the scarcity of women. In a less degree it suffered then, and has, together with other colonies, suffered since, from the infamous system of nepotism,- if that word may be stretched so as to take in favoritism toward relatives and connections when practised by profane hands. The results of this system were well displayed in the events which led to the "whiskey rebellion" that overthrew Governor Bligh. That rebellion grew out of the opposition of Macarthur & Co. to the Governor; but sought an excuse in the character of the chief law officer of the Colony, Richard Atkins, Judge Advocate, and under the statutes of Parliament, President Judge. This man, the relative of some one in power at home, and therefore thus raised to authority and influence, was so utterly ignorant of law, that he had to employ the only regularly bred attorney in the colony, one who had been transported for perjury, to do his professional work; he was moreover a drunkard; had pronounced sentence of death, says Governor Bligh, when intoxicated; was irresolute, "his opinion floating and infirm,” and wholly unable to keep a secret, however weighty.* Under such circumstances, certainly not favorable, were laid the foundations of the great antarctic Anglo-Saxon Empire.

* Lang, I. 113, 134, 150, 441.