Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/54

32 gradually charted, till it was mapped in outline from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Cape Leeuwin. It was not, however, till nearly the end of the century that the first Englishman landed in Australia, when Captain Dampier, commanding the "Roebuck," navigated the western and north-western coastline in 1699, and was not encouraged by what he saw there.

Sailing from the Downs in January with fifty men, and twenty months' provisions, Dampier sighted the low, even shores of Australia in August of the same year, and entered Shark's Bay, as he called it. He and his men went ashore, but sought in vain for water on that waterless coast, digging wells, but to no purpose. A hundred years later, in 1803, the continent was circumnavigated by Matthew Flinders, who suggested that "Australia" should be substituted for the Dutch name of New Holland.

Still nearly another century passed away before Western Australia begun to grow and prosper. In 1826 Major Lockyer was sent from Sydney, with troops and a party of convicts, to occupy King George's Sound on the south coast, where the Port of Albany stands to-day, and a few years later the Swan River Settlement was formed in the neighbourhood of Fremantle and Perth; but these first beginnings of the colony were