Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/85

 SKETCH. Ixxv Port Jackson^ thence to the Gulf of Carpentaria, thence to Timor, and back to Sydney Cove, with all the excursions inland, WestaU did not see anything worth describing ? "That barren coast ^' " So few sketches of New Holland ^' ! Why, he does not even express a regret for the loss of his sketches in the wreck; nor does he take the trouble to send a list of those that were saved. Evidently, then, he did not take the slightest interest in them, and did not conceive it possible that any one else could do so. If we turn over the leaves of the Voyage to Terra Australis, written by Flinders, we can see what Westall had been about all this time. In the first volume, there is a plate showing a View from the south side of King George's Sound, where Flinders began Lis survey ; then there is another, showing the Entrance of Vovt Lincoln, taken from behind Memory Cove ; a third, in which he gives a View on the North side of Kangaroo Island ; and a fourth contains a View of Port Jackson, taken from South Head. The sketches in the second volume were taken on the north coast, and are of much the same character as the others. The Investigator was at.anchor in Sydney Cove from May to July, 1802 — over two months, so that this extraordinary artist, as he seems to us> had opportunity enough for studying the scenery there. But he did not see any beauty in it — not even in " our beautiful harbour '' ! His silence is quite as suggestive as his innuendoes. He stood on the South Head, and drew a hard outline of the port as it lay before him on a May morning, with its little islands still as Nature made them ; and he seems to have considered that one such sketch was quite enough to show people in England '* the finest harbour in the world '^ — as Phillip called it. No doubt he visited the different coves in the ship's boat, and, like Judge- Advocate Collins, was " struck with horror at the bare idea of being lost in them^' — (p. 153 n) ; they were all so much alike, then, that no man could tell one from another — timbered down to the water's edge, and with hardly a sign of habitation. Whether he went up Middle Harbour, or up the Hawkesbory — ^which Anthony TroUope, in 1871, pronounced a better piece of river scenery than either the fihine or the Upper Mississippi — we don't know. Nor have we any idea whether he Digitized by Google