various causes, but chiefly from the panorama of it exhibited in London[1], is certainly a very pretty place, but in my opinion no more: it is, like Sydney, or rather Port Jackson, entirely deficient of back-ground, so essential to the picturesque. The panorama is exceedingly like the place, with the exception that the hills are trifling elevations in reality, while in the painting they appear very considerable; and one in particular, an island to the northward, seems quite a mountain, although I do not suppose it can be 700 feet high. I can only account for the artist having painted the bay, in preference to many other far more beautiful and extraordinary scenes to be found in the island, by the supposition, that when he was there, it was considered to be the only safe place in the country, and that he was prevented by the unfavourable reports of the people he saw from travelling much into it:—had he painted some parts of the Thames, for instance, he might have produced a picture which, without exaggeration, would have represented such a combination of the grand and beautiful in scenery as is rarely to be found in any country—a close piece of water, as large as the bay, thickly studded with islands of every variety, some merely high basaltic rocks, others beautiful low islets covered with trees and grass, and almost surrounded by beaches; while the surrounding shores are everywhere covered thickly with timber, and the hills piled over each other until they are sometimes lost in the clouds: in one place particularly, immediately behind the harbour of Waihaw (Wyhow), there are four ranges rising one behind another, the highest of which
- ↑ It may perhaps be said that the bay is a place of great resort for shipping—whalers in particular, and that this is the cause of its celebrity, not the panorama; but the island of Wahoo (one of the Sandwich) is very much more so, and has ten times the number of European residents, a paper, theatre, hotels and warehouses, and yet its name is hardly known in England—because, as yet, there has been no panorama of Wahoo.
