"Port Essington should be the penal settlement for the British possessions in the Indian seas; and every encouragement should be given to emigration from Calcutta and Madras, (in the miserable avenues of which hundreds are dying daily,) and at once a garrison should be formed, with two companies of the Ceylon regiment, with all their attendants; any of whom, by walking half a mile from the camp, would find plenty of the vegetables they had been accustomed to eat all their lives, which vegetables the English soldier (who thinks of no other resource than the commissariat) looked upon as poison.
"I had an instance of this in my own servant, (a native of Trincomalee, and of the Gentoo cast,) who, in a quarter of an hour, collected vegetables to make a curry, and therefore to him a dinner.
"At Timor as at Java, Malacca, and Penang, all the artisans are China men, who only require to know we have settlements on New Holland, to come over in great numbers, and their usefulness can only be truly estimated by those who have visited any of the above colonies."
As far as my own observations and experience go, I perfectly coincide in opinion, as to the healthiness of the climate; I was accustomed to use a great deal of exercise, even in the middle of the day, which would have been extremely hazardous in India. When Captain Laws, Captain Barker, and myself, took an excursion to Croker's Island, we were occasionally up to the middle in water, and exposed for hours to the influence of an unclouded tropical sun. We rested during the night in an open boat, subjected to the nocturnal dew; and the greatest part of next day we were again exposed to the sun; yet none of us felt the slightest ill effects from the expedition. Had we acted in the same manner in some of the other tropical cli-
