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Rh patient labour which the maritime sons of Holland had spent in exploring the Australian coast, nor do they ever seem to have reaped any advantage from the discovery of it. A few mutineers were set ashore in the year 1629, by one Francis Pelsart, in what would be now called the district of Champion Bay, but nothing was ever known of their subsequent fate.

The time was approaching for the introduction of French and English names on the coast-line of West Australia, and as far as I can ascertain the first English name that ever appeared there was that of Dampier, the whilom buccaneer, who was deputed by the British Government to conduct a voyage of discovery to the South Seas in the reign of William III., and who gave his own name to a cluster of little islands, called Dampier's Archipelago, that stud the coast near the sheep-farming settlement of Nichol Bay.

Shark's Bay, which lies considerably to the south of Dampier's Archipelago, does not appear to have received its descriptive name without good reason. In this bay Dampier makes mention of having caught a shark that measured eleven feet in length "with a maw like a leather sack, very thick, and so tough that a sharp knife could scarce cut it." Nor was the sack empty, and its contents, if Dampier was not mistaken in them, proved that the shark hailed from a distant port, and had wisely taken plenty of victuals on board before commencing a long voyage. The provender consisted of "the head and bones of a hippopotamus, the hairy lips of which were still sound,"—"the jaw was also firm, out of which we plucked a great many teeth, two of them eight inches long, and