Page:History of Adelaide and vicinity.djvu/29

The Forerunners Early governors had enough to do in prison work, in internal administration, and in the exploration of the region adjacent to the principal settlement, to take up all their time. The examination of the interior, together with the survey of the; more remote coastline, was therefore largely dependent on the enterprise of energetic settlers and officers. In this manner a good deal of the country east of the Blue Mountains, and the eastern and southern coastline, was examined before the eighteenth century closed.

A new impulse towards colonisation now arose. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century Elnglish statesmen feared that France was casting hungry eyes on New Holland. People had begun to realise that this country was fit for something more than a receptacle for the human rubbish of the old world. Points of vantage were hastily seized and occupied in the north, south, and west, and England formally took possession of the entire continent.

As regards the navigation of South Australian waters, the earliest records come from Holland. The Dutch of that day were a nation of sailors, and there were great men among them. In January, 1627, Pieter Nuyts, in the ship Guide Veepaert (Golden Sea Horse) — a rude craft that to-day would in all possibility be converted at sight into a coal hulk—accidentally sighted land somewhere in the Great Australian Bight, and compiled an admirable chart of the coast as far as the islands of St. Peter and St. Erancis in Nuyts Archipelago. In the following year the commander of the Vianen, also by accident, made the same coast. The report of these two navigators as to what they saw did not entice them or others to specially return thither. In succeeding generations, Dutch, Erench, and English mariners navigated their small, picturesque, and capable craft along the west, north, and east coasts, but none evinced even a remote desire to examine anything lying inside the sea shore. Captain George Vancouver, Rear-Admiral Bruny D'Entrecasteaux, and Lieutenant Grant each touched upon or sighted some part of the South Australian coast between 1790 and 1800, but the information they supplied was as short as the duration of their visit.

Lieutenant James Grant was the first British navigator who skirted the shores of the continent from the Leeuwin to Cape Howe. Profiting by the discoveries of Flinders, he pursued a more northerly route than his predecessors, made a landfall at a headland which he named Cape Northumberland, gave the conical mountains in the background the names of Mount Gambler and Mount Schank, and took his little vessel—the Lady Nelson, of 60 tons burden — through Bass Straits to Port Jackson, along a course, the greater part of which until then was entirely unknown.

Some time after the foundation of New South Wales, Flinders, an irrepressible and restless young naval officer generally in the company of Bass, a medical man of little less energy and fortitude— on his own initiative, explored parts of the east coast. He was an enthusiastic navigator; with him exploration was a passion. One of the men born for discovery, he could not refuse to obey the cravings of his adventurous disposition. His great opportunity — which indeed he may be said to have created — came in 1801, when the