Page:Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land.djvu/37

 colonists themselves for the steady deportment and the unwearying efforts they have so courageously displayed throughout their colonial career, would be to enter on subjects quite foreign to the physical description of the two countries. The origin of the colonies has been touched upon, because that origin is to be ascribed to the hydrographical knowledge which the government of the mother country possessed regarding the capabilities of the eastern coast of New Holland: some of the events, also, connected with the progress of the colony have been just adverted to, because the importance they have assumed in respect to commerce and industry has operated most powerfully and beneficially in causing a completion of surveys by sea and land, the history of which is now laid before the reader.

The first page of this history commences with the voyage of Captain Cook. With those anterior to his, whether undertaken by Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch navigators, science has little to do. They were all jealous and avaricious, and kept their discoveries secret, seeking, and some of them indeed finding, their reward in self-aggrandisement: thus leaving behind names which only perpetuate their own or their country's illiberality. Cook also transmitted his name to posterity, but it was by virtue of the benefits he conferred upon the aborigines of the different islands which he visited, and by those also which his voyages, through the medium of the press, secured to geography, natural history, navigation, and commerce. With him may be said to have dawned the first glimpses of positive knowledge which the civilised world obtained