captain among them. He was a young brisk man, not very tall, nor so personable as some of the rest, though more active and courageous. He was painted (which none of the rest were at all) with a circle of white paste or pigment (a sort of lime, as we thought) about his eyes, and a white streak down his nose from his forehead to the tip of it, and his breast and some part of his arms were also made white with the same paint; not for beauty or ornament, one would think, but as some wild Indian warriors are said to do, he seemed thereby to design the looking more terrible; this his painting adding very much to his natural deformity; for they all of them were of the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people that ever I saw, though I have seen great variety of savages."
These natives also blinked as if much troubled by flies. Dampier believed that there was some strait between his then location and Rosemary Island, which went eastward through the continent, though, as he was in great need of water, he did not essay to discover it. His men were able to get some brackish water from the deepest wells on the following day, but the flies, as on his previous voyage, were very troublesome. The land was also of a similar character; and, finally, after observing the herbage, trees, flowers, fowl, fish, and animals, including "two or three beasts like hungry wolves, lean, like so many skeletons," in the beginning of September he set sail for Timor. His observations with regard to the coast, his soundings, and general information, have been proved remarkably reliable, and though the voyage was not a successful one, so far as discovering rich countries went, he placed before the Admiralty charts and maps which have since been found highly useful. On the return voyage to England the Roebuck was wrecked at the Island of Ascension, west of Africa, but the redoubtable navigator came through all his perils in safety, and in 1703 published a volume dealing with this voyage. His descriptions of the barren coasts and half-starved inhabitants were not likely to encourage the English Government to send out more navigators, and thus no more voyages were made to Australia by English mariners, until the famous exploits of Captain Cook late in the eighteenth century.
The continued unpromising reports of Dutch navigators, and the probable belief of the authorities of the East India Company that New Holland was a huge, hopeless, hungry block of continent, caused them to send but one more expedition to specially explore the coast. This was in 1705, when Martin Van Delft, with the vessels Vossenbosch, Wayer, and Nova Hollandia left Batavia, and then Timor, and visited portions of the north-west coast. He carefully examined the coast, looked over the neighbouring land in search of some indication of wealth, and had communication with the natives. "The coast," he said, "was marked by sandbanks and reefs, the country was without attractive features, and the natives were foul and treacherous." After Van Delft hospitably entertained the aboriginals on board his ship, and fed them well, and gave them many presents, they attacked a boat-load of sailors putting off the ship, and wounded two of them. Not yet did the Dutch know whether Australia was a series of islands or a continent, and Van Delft expressed the opinion that, because of the untrustworthy character of the people he met, the South Land was made up of islands, in which natives are always more unreliable.
A final effort to make some use of Australia was made in 1718 by Hans Jean Pierre Purry, of Neufchatel, who published a work proposing the establishment of a settlement at Nuyts Land, in the South-western corner of Western Australia. The proposal was "submitted to the Governor-General, Van Swoll, at Batavia, but was discountenanced. It subsequently met the same fate when laid by its author before the directors of the Dutch East India Company at Amsterdam." The West India Company was next tried with a like result.
Then the Scylla of the Western Australian coast again caused distress among unfortunate mariners. In 1711 a Dutch ship, the Zuysdorp, is reported to have been wrecked on the Abrolhos. Four vessels were believed up to this date to have suffered shipwreck there. These were the Batavia in 1629, the De Vergulde Draeck in 1656 (improbable), the Ridderschap van Hollandt (problematical) in 1693, and the Zuysdorp in 1711. From 1720 to 1730 many disasters befell the East India Company, which had done so much towards the discovery of the Terra Australis. Several ships were wrecked and many men lost, and the affairs of the company were somewhat crippled thereby. Among the vessels was the Zeeland (ship), the Zeewyk (Jan Steyns, captain), which on the 9th June, 1727, struck an Abrolhos reef. The Zeewyk contained much specie intended for the pay of the civil service on the islands. After some days the people were got on a neighbouring island. The upper steersman and a crew went away in a boat to try and reach a settlement, but were never again heard of. Eighty-two of the crew and the captain were saved by means of a boat constructed, during nine months of weary waiting, out of the wreck fragments and named the Sloepie. Taking with them ten chests of recovered treasure, valued at 315,836 1-8 florins, these men reached Batavia after undergoing many hardships. There the captain was arrested and accused of bringing about the wreck by keeping too near these dangerous rocks.
In 1840 Captain Stokes discovered many wreck-relics at Houtman's Abrolhos. With Captain Wickham he landed on the largest island in the North-west of Pelsart Group. There he found a brass gun of about three pounds calibre, and an iron swivel with vermilion paint still adhering to it, but the muzzle of the cannon was nearly corroded away. Captain Stokes named this Gun Island, and the passage between the Easter and Pelsart's groups of islands he called Zeewyk Channel. There were other relics which caused him to believe that more than one vessel had been wrecked on Gun Island, particularly coins bearing widely separated dates. Among the momentoes of long past tragic occurrences was a coin dated about 1707, and of those which almost certainly came from the Zeewyk, was a coin dated 1720, what appeared the beam of a ship with an iron bolt through it, glass bottles, small clay pipes, and numerous other survivals of days that are gone. The bottles when found were set in rows, as if for collecting water, and were partly buried in sand. The glaze had been eaten away by a white substance. On an adjoining islet Stokes surmised the people had built their boat. About thirty years ago, Captain John Septimus Roe, first Surveyor-General of Western Australia, visited the islands and found relics of the Zeewyk, and Sir John Forrest, in 1882, also obtained some clay pipes and other articles from there. In 1883 Mr. Charles Edward Broadhurst obtained a lease of the Abrolhos for guano purposes, and he and his son, Mr. F. C. Broadhurst, have since secured a valuable collection of relics. On Gun Island the latter gentleman was astonished to observe the site where the people from the wrecked Zeewyk made their camp. It was near to the ship, and there Mr. Broadhurst found the traces of two distinct camps, which nearly a century and a half had not obliterated. Indentations were still apparent in the ground made by the feet of the company while moving, in the form of a half circle, round the camps. Captain Stokes saw the bones of seals which had evidently been killed for subsistence, and these Mr. Broadhurst also found. Nature, in thoughtfulness, had not rudely obliterated these traces of such remarkable occurrences, and in the neighbourhood, amid sad memories, Mr. Broadhurst's quest disclosed a varied selection of articles. Some of them, in his opinion, were apparently prized articles carried in the pockets of the castaways, who, when appreciating their desperate, hopeless position, tossed
