precise fate of these sixty-eight people who perished on the Western Australian coast was never known.
It may be of interest to mention here that in 1693 a fictitious work—the first romance on Australia, probably—was published in Paris. This book was wholly an imaginative one, and pretended to give much curious and startling information regarding the Terra Australis and its inhabitants.
CHAPTER II.
THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA
(CONTINUED).
DAMPIER—RIDDERSCHAP VAN HOLLANDT—DE VLAMING—DAMPIER—VAN DELFT—PROPOSED COLONISATION OF NUYTS LAND—ZUYSDORP—ZEEWYK AND THE ABROLHOS—ST. ALOUARN—VANCOUVER—D’ENTRECASTEAUX—GRANT—FLINDERS—NAMING OF AUSTRALIA—BAUDIN—DE FREYCINET—KING'S VOYAGES.
AND now the connection of England with Australian waters began. English maritime enterprise in the Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans had hitherto been small indeed, and beyond irregular voyages by privateers, buccaneers, and merchantmen among the East India Islands, they thought little of countries which in times to come their descendants would inhabit. Practically they had never heard of Australia, and it was not until after that worthy forerunner of English ascendancy in the Southern Hemisphere—Dampier—was, partly against his will, brought to the coast of Western Australia, that the public was made acquainted with such a large continent. Other English navigators have their names enshrined in the patriotic Temple of Recollection, but Dampier was the pioneer of their honourable association with these lands. Dampier was in some respects a hero. His adventures were many, and though a buccaneer by force of circumstance, he collected reliable and valuable information for the benefit of his country. The volumes he published on his voyage round the world contain highly instructive matter, dealing with the divers countries he visited. He describes the fauna, flora, soils, bearings, charts, and the peculiar peoples he met, besides giving other data which would be likely to assist the English Government in their naval policy, as regards these out-stations of the earth. Not only are his volumes didactic, but they are succinctly and uniformly connected, and for the lover of works of adventure he tells many strange stories of bloodshed and war and romantic situations. His references to Australia are specially useful, and, as is now known, are more reliable than could be supposed possible, considering the circumscribed limits he viewed. Taken altogether, perhaps no finer navigator could at that period have been found to establish English association with Australian shores. He was a brave man, a shrewd observer, and a painstaking worker.
It was through a romantic combination of fortuitous adventures that William Dampier landed on the Australian coast. At the beginning of 1679 he sailed on the Loyal Merchant, of London, for Jamaica with merchandise, which he there intended to sell and afterwards secure other goods for trade at Campeachy, whither he designed his voyages to extend to. But at Jamaica he relinquished the latter adventure, and purchased from some local personage a small estate in Dorsetshire, near his native county of Somerset. He now desired to return to England, but was influenced to undertake a voyage to the country of the Mosquitoes, in Central America. Boarding a vessel, he did not get further than the west end of Jamaica, where the crew forsook the ship to join a privateering expedition. Left almost alone, Dampier at last decided to go with the rest. Then followed startling travels by land and sea in the West Indies, on the mainland of South America, round Terra del Fuego, up the west coast of South America to Mexico, across the Pacific to the Ladrones, among the South Sea Islands, to China, to the western coast of Australia, and finally, after many blood-curdling escapes and dangers, he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, went up to the Azores, near Newfoundland, and from there to the south of England. During this extensive voyage, a huge undertaking even in these days of improved vessels, he was associated with several ships and many men of varied characters. Buccaneers had a precarious existence among the then mysterious far-off countries. Completely cut off by distance from their homes in Great Britain, they eat and slept and killed and robbed and moved among peoples quite different from themselves. On the 2nd October, 1684, Dampier met, at the Island of Plata, on the west coast of South America, the ship Cygnet, by which vessel he was brought to Australia. The Cygnet was fitted out by eminent London merchants to trade with the Spaniards and "Indians," as all natives were then called. Captain Swan, who commanded her, had not succeeded in his trade on the voyage, and in consort with the other privateers who took to buccaneering, he, unfortunately for himself, slew and robbed. Dampier took a position on the Cygnet. Thenceforward the buccaneers captured several ships, or "prizes," demolished towns, when demands for ransoms were not met, and committed a great deal of bloodshed. But Swan, the commander of the party, soon tired of such a doubtful life and wished to get back to England. He sedulously watched for an occasion. Dampier, although glad of the opportunity of acquiring so much useful information, also desired to sever his connection with the party and return to his native country. At Mindanao, in the East Indies, the Cygnet remained for a few weeks, and Swan and several of the officers lived principally on shore and enjoyed some hospitality from the inhabitants. Several circumstances here tended to breed discussion among the buccaneers, and while Swan desired to make a somewhat prolonged stay at Mindanao, his crew were restless for more adventures. The quarrel came to a head when, at noon on the 14th January, 1687, the ship's company, of whom Dampier was one, weighed anchor and sailed out of Mindanao, leaving there Captain Swan and about thirty-six men, besides several who had run away to live among the natives. The buccaneers sought for plunder at different islands, and in China and elsewhere had many bloody frays, and met with severe storms. All these experiences caused Dampier the more to wish to escape. The bad weather determined them to steer a course for the East Indian Ocean, by way of Timor, choosing a lonely route south so as not to meet with English and Dutch ships, of whom they were afraid. Contrary winds carried them out of their course, and they at last decided to land on New Holland, "to see what that country would afford us."
On 4th January, 1688, Dampier caught sight of the western coast of Australia, in latitude 16 degrees 50 minutes. The Cygnet approached as close as was wise to the shore, and then coasted south until a point was reached whence the land trended east and southerly. Three leagues east of this point the buccaneers came to a "pretty deep bay, with abundance of islands in it." On January 5 they anchored two miles from shore, at the north-western corner of
