found larger ones than any we saw, as we were never but once ashore among them, and that only for a short time on the banks of the river Thames, where we rowed for many miles between woods of these trees, to which we could see no bounds. The river Thames is indeed, in every respect, the most proper place we have yet seen for establishing a colony.[1] A ship as large as ours might be carried several miles up the river, where she could be moored to the trees as safely as alongside a wharf in London river, a safe and sure retreat in case of an attack from the natives. Or she might even be laid on the mud and a bridge built to her. The noble timber of which there is such abundance would furnish plenty of materials for building either defences, houses, or vessels; the river would furnish plenty of fish, and the soil make ample returns for any European vegetables, etc., sown in it.
I have some reason to think from observations made upon the vegetables that the winters here are extremely mild, much more so than in England; the summers we have found to be scarcely at all hotter, though more equally warm.
The southern part, which is much more hilly and barren than the northern, I firmly believe to abound with minerals in a very high degree: this, however, is only conjecture. I had not to my great regret an opportunity of landing in any place where the signs of them were promising, except the last; nor indeed in any one, where from the ship the country appeared likely to produce them, which it did to the southward in a very high degree, as I have mentioned in my daily Journal.
On every occasion when we landed in this country, we have seen, I had almost said, no quadrupeds originally natives of it. Dogs and rats, indeed, there are, the former
- ↑ A commencement of colonisation was made by Samuel Marsden, a missionary, in 1814, in the Bay of Islands. The first definite attempt to colonise was by the New Zealand Company in 1840, whose settlement was at Wellington. In the same year Captain Hobson, R.N., was sent as Lieut.-Governor: he landed in the Bay of Islands, and transferred his headquarters to the Hauraki Gulf in September, where he founded Auckland (Wharton's Cook, p. 231).
