In the days of Plato, imagination found its way, before the
mariners, to a new world across the Atlantic, and fabled an Atlantis
where America now stands. In the days of Francis Bacon, imagination
of the English found its way to the great Southern Continent before
the Portuguese or Dutch sailors had sight of it, and it was the home
of those wise students of God and nature to whom Bacon gave his New
Atlantis. The discoveries of America date from the close of the
fifteenth century. The discoveries of Australia date only from the
beginning of the seventeenth. The discoveries of the Dutch were
little known in England before the time of Dampier's voyage, at the
close of the seventeenth century, with which this volume ends. The
name of New Holland, first given by the Dutch to the land they
discovered on the north-west coast, then extended to the continent
and was since changed to Australia.
During the eighteenth century exploration was continued by the
English. The good report of Captain Cook caused the first British
settlement to be made at Port Jackson, in 1788, not quite a hundred
years ago, and the foundations were then laid of the settlement of
New South Wales, or Sydney. It was at first a penal colony, and its
Botany Bay was a name of terror to offenders. Western Australia, or
Swan River, was first settled as a free colony in 1829, but
afterwards used also as a penal settlement; South Australia, which
has Adelaide for its capital, was first established in 1834, and
colonised in 1836; Victoria, with Melbourne for its capital, known
until 1851 as the Port Philip District, and a dependency of New
South Wales, was first colonised in 1835. It received in 1851 its
present name. Queensland, formerly known as the Moreton Bay
District, was established as late as 1859. A settlement of North
Australia was tried in 1838, and has since been abandoned. On the
other side of Bass's Straits, the island of Van Diemen's Land, was
named Tasmania, and established as a penal colony in 1803.
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.
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