Tasman Sailed Round A Great Portion Of The Australian Coast, Discovered What He Named Van Diemen's Land, Now Tasmania, And New Zealand.

He it was who called the whole, believing it to be one, New Holland, after the land of his birth.

Next we have Dampier, an English buccaneer - though the name sounds very like Dutch; it was probably by chance only that he and his roving crew visited these shores. Then came Wilhelm Vlaming with three ships. God save the mark to call such things ships. How the men performed the feats they did, wandering over vast and unknown oceans, visiting unknown coasts with iron-bound shores, beset with sunken reefs, subsisting on food not fit for human beings, suffering from scurvy caused by salted diet and rotten biscuit, with a short allowance of water, in torrid zones, and liable to be attacked and killed by hostile natives, it is difficult for us to conceive. They suffered all the hardships it is possible to imagine upon the sea, and for what? for fame, for glory? That their names and achievements might be handed down to us; and this seems to have been their only reward; for there was no Geographical Society's medal in those days with its motto to spur them on.

Vlaming was the discoverer of the Swan River, upon which the seaport town of Fremantle and the picturesque city of Perth, in Western Australia, now stand. This river he discovered in 1697, and he was the first who saw Dirk Hartog's tin plate.

Dampier's report of the regions he had visited caused him to be sent out again in 1710 by the British Government, and upon his return, all previous doubts, if any existed, as to the reality of the existence of this continent, were dispelled, and the position of its western shores was well established. Dampier discovered a beautiful flower of the pea family known as the Clianthus Dampierii. In 1845 Captain Sturt found the same flower on his Central Australian expedition, and it is now generally known as Sturt's Desert Pea, but it is properly named in its botanical classification, after its original discoverer.

After Dampier's discoveries, something like sixty years elapsed before Cook appeared upon the scene, and it was not until his return to England that practical results seemed likely to accrue to any nation from the far-off land. I shall not recapitulate Cook's voyages; the first fitted out by the British Government was made in 1768, but Cook did not touch upon Australia's coast until two years later, when, voyaging northwards along the eastern coast, he anchored at a spot he called Botany Bay, from the brightness and abundance of the beautiful wild flowers he found growing there. Here two natives attempted to prevent his landing, although the boats were manned with forty men. The natives threw stones and spears at the invaders, but nobody was killed. At this remote and previously unvisited spot one of the crew named Forby Sutherland, who had died on board the Endeavour, was buried, his being the first white man's grave ever dug upon Australia's shore; at least the first authenticated one - for might not the remaining one of the two unfortunate convicts left by Pelsart have dug a grave for his companion who was the first to die, no man remaining to bury the survivor?

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