Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/33

] desolate wilderness, although capable of producing an abundance of food for a large population, whilst so many thousands in England have hardly sufficient to subsist on from day to day, and whose labour here would soon raise them to independence and comfort, in a land whose scenery and climate are equal to the more healthy and admired parts of our own country. But the scenery of the Huon is of a still richer character—its banks are clothed with the loftiest and most valuable timber of the colony. Some of the trees we measured were a hundred and eighty feet high, and twenty-eight in circumference, and cover the ground with so dense a forest, that it requires great labour to clear it for agricultural purposes; but when once accomplished, the same rich soil, which produces such fine timber, fully repays the settler by the abundance it afterwards yields under moderately good management. One of the trees pointed out to us rather exceeded two hundred feet in height, and was thirty-eight feet in circumference about three feet from the ground. Along each shore of the inlet and river, at every two or three miles, we observed a small wooden hut or two, and a small sloop building near them; quantities of firewood, the refuse of the trees that had been cut down for the timbers and planking of the vessel, were piled in heaps ready to be shipped oif to supply firewood to Hobarton. The gratification we should otherwise have felt in contemplating the useful purposes to which these hitherto unproductive forests were