out of the efforts-successful when it was too late to do more than take back their bones for sumptuous burial in Melbourne-to discover the fate of these brave men and grievous sufferers. In connection with this later work the names of Alfred William Howitt, of John M'Kinlay, of William Landesborough, and of Frederick Walker, must be held in honourable remembrance. But it is not necessary here to detail their exploits. Burke and Wills were not the earliest martyrs of Australian discovery; but the story fitly ends with them.

After all, it is strange that we know so little concerning the great Australian interior. "What we know of this vast continent," says the historian, "does not go much beyond an acquaintance with the coast. One has only to look at the map to be convinced that we have as yet only obtained a very small glance into the interior. A little to the west of Central Mount Stuart an immense blank occurs; and for twelve and a half degrees of latitude and longitude there is scarcely a mark to tell us what is contained therein. There are two small tracks on the edges, but, with these exceptions, nothing whatever is known of a tract of country nearly half a million square miles in area. Mr A. Gregory described the north side of it as a desert. His brother characterized the north-west side in the same manner. Stuart, on the west side, was encountered by large tracts of spinifex grass and stately gum-trees, apparently liable to occasional floods. Eyre, on the south side, and the explorers on the west, have been baffled by the same desert. It is, in fact, a sandy table-land, elevated on the west side, about three

THE GREAT INTERIOR.

321

thousand feet above the level of the sea, and sloping down towards Lake Torrens, which is very little, if at all, raised above the surface of the ocean. From Lake Torrens and Lake Eyre it appears to rise again first in a range, and then in a series of terraces. This elevation terminates at last in the high, rugged Cordillera of the eastern coast, We may, therefore, up on each side, and

regard the continent as tilted depressed in the centre to a kind of trough. The Gulf of Carpentaria would represent the northern portion, and the deep indented part of Spencer's Gulf the southern. Since, however, the northern coast is also tilted up, the trough or depression does not extend through the continent. It is a series of salt lakes, sand drifts, and stony deserts. A great portion of it is redeemed by the fact that it receives so much drainage from the east by the various channels of the Barcoo, and from the west by waters which burst out in the form of immense thermal springs. The extent and number of the latter is almost incredible, and the depth from which they come is manifested by the great heat of their waters. Nothing could more clearly show the character of the central depression, and the slow rate at which the table-land sinks down towards it, than the existence of these springs. Of the Sandy Desert, the greater portion is thickly covered with spinifex grass; but there are drifts of sand, with no vegetation whatever upon them, extending for several miles. This is probably drifted up into masses after the decomposition of the ferruginous sandstone, The siliceous fragments left behind form those shingle plains known as the Stony Desert; they exist over a far greater tract than that

marked in the old maps of Australia as extending like an arm northwards from Lake Torrens. It would seem as if the decomposition of the rock here was owing in some measure to pressure, when the tableland on either side was uplifted. Thus we see that, after all the explorations have been made, we have adopted, with modification, the theory of the earlier colonists. It was thought in Oxley's time that the interior rivers must flow towards a central depression, and there form a kind of inland sea. Long after the abandonment of this theory we find it to be true, to a certain extent, and it is realized in Lake Eyre, the extent of which is as yet undetermined. The inland lake theory was abandoned, after Stuart's discoveries, in favour of a central desert. This, it appears, is also true in a modified sense. hope that there are such germs of truth in all the predictions about the future of Australia, and that it may realize the aspirations of those who look upon it as the seed of a vast and flourishing empire."1

Let us

1 Woods, vol. ii. pp. 509-513. Besides Mr Woods's very valu. able "History of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia,” there is a hardly less interesting "History of Discovery in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand," by Mr William Howitt. Among the many personal records of travel and adventure, Mr William Wills's account of his son's noble and melancholy history, entitled "A Successful Exploration through the Interior of Australia," is especially noteworthy.

CHAPTER XXVI.

PAKEHA NEW ZEALAND.

66

THE NEW ZEALAND ISLANDS AND THEIR INHABITANTS -FIRST INTERCOURSE WITH ENGLISHMEN THE MASSACRE OF THE CREW AND PASSENGERS OF THE BOYD IN 1809-THE MISSIONARIES AND THEIR WORK -THE PAKEHA TRADERS ARTICLES OF TRADE-TRAFFIC IN HUMAN HEADS OTHER DEBASING EMPLOYMENTS OF THE PAKEHAS PROGRESS OF ENGLISH INFLUENCES SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION

CHARACTER OF THE MAORIS. [1809-1839.]

THE

HE three islands of New Ulster, New Munster, and New Leinster, which, with a number of smaller islands, make up the colony of New Zealand, have an area of 106,200 square miles, being rather less than the dimensions of Great Britain and Ireland. The middle island occupies rather more than half of the whole; the northern island is a little smaller; the southern island, much less in size, is little more than a barren rock, about half as large as Yorkshire. The group differs widely-in climate, in scenery, and in the character of its inhabitants-from Australia and Tasmania. The aborigines of all three sections of Australasia may have been of the same stock; but in New Zealand, probably in the fifteenth century, they were exterminated or absorbed by a bolder Malayan race, which crossed over in canoes from the Polynesian region, and formed the Maori nation.

The adventures of Captain Cook and other early voyagers among the Maoris have already been referred to. Subsequent navigators carried on the irregular intercourse, and in some instances tolerably friendly relations were established between the natives and their visitors. Whaling and other ships from New South Wales halted frequently in the New Zealand ports; and now and then some of the natives went back in these ships to see for themselves the strange novelties of civilized life in Sydney. Among others, we are told, " a powerful chief named Tippahee, accompanied by his five sons, came to Port Jackson, and, on seeing the different arts and manufactures carried on by the settlers, was so affected by the conviction thus forced upon him of the barbarous state of ignorance in which his own country was shrouded, that he burst into tears and exclaimed, in the bitterness of his heart, 'New Zealand no good !'"1 When Tippahee returned to his island home, which was in the extreme north of New Ulster, in the Bay of Islands, at which the English vessels generally touched, he took with him a young Englishman named George Bruce. Bruce, the first European resident in New Zealand, married a native wife, and lived happily among her kindred for many years, doing much, it would seem, to prepare for the closer relations that were soon to spring up between the two races.

These relations were from the first marked by some ugly incidents. In December 1809, a trading-ship, the Boyd, with seventy persons on board, left Sydney for England, and, as she intended to go round by New Zealand, and there call for some spars to be 1 Martin, vol. iii. p. 118.