Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/236

 geographical knowledge of mankind, and widely promoted the peaceful arts of commerce and navigation.

Among the earliest of these was the one, under government auspices, made by William Dampier, who had already become famous, towards the close of the seventeenth century as one of the most daring of the buccaneers, in various marauding and piratical expeditions, but who, on a speculative voyage of his own to the Pacific, had obtained so much valuable information respecting the Eastern archipelago, Celebes, Timor, the north coast of New Holland, and the Nicobar Islands, that when he reached England in 1691, the fame he had acquired induced the government to send him in 1699 to explore more particularly New Holland and New Zealand.

It appears from Dampier's able and amusing account of this voyage that though the government, with an unaccountable parsimony, had only placed at his disposal the Roebuck, an old and worn-out vessel, he successfully completed the object they had in view, but was obliged to abandon his ship at Ascension on his way home, it being no longer possible to keep her afloat. Having made the coast of New Holland in latitude 26° south, he shaped his course to the north, where he fell in with an archipelago of islands stretching over 20° of latitude, from which he