Читать книгу Rambles in Australia онлайн

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With all her natural advantages Western Australia’s development is only a matter of the last twenty years. Like most of the rest of the continent, she has an inhospitable and forbidding coast. The Dutch knew of the existence of a southern land or, “Terra Australis,” before the end of the sixteenth century, and Dutch captains sailing from the Cape to Java and the East Indies not infrequently found themselves within sight of a desolate and unknown coast, which they 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.