7-i INTRODUCTION TO THE 



6. Hitherto we have considered our voyages as 

 having benefited the discoverers. But it will be 

 asked, have they conveyed, or are they likely ever 

 to convey any benefit to the discovered ? It would 

 afford exquisite satisfaction to every benevolent mind 

 to be instructed in facts which might enable us, 

 without hesitation, to answer this question in the 

 affirmative. And yet, perhaps, we may indulge the 

 pleasing hope, that, even in this respect, our ships 

 have not sailed in vain. Other discoveries of new 

 countries have, in effect, been wars, or rather mas- 

 sacres ; nations have been no sooner found out, than 

 they have been extirpated ; and the horrid cruelties 

 of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru can never be 

 remembered, without blushing for religion and human 

 nature ; but when the recesses of the globe are inves- 

 tigated, not to enlarge private dominion, but to pro- 

 mote general knowledge ; when we visit new tribes 

 of our fellow-creatures as friends, and wish only to 

 learn that they exist, in order to bring them within 

 the pale of the offices of humanity, and to relieve 

 the wants of their imperfect state of society, by com- 

 municating to them our superior attainments ; 

 voyages of discovery, planned with such benevolent 

 views by George the Third, and executed by Cook, 

 have not, we trust, totally failed in this respect. Our 

 repeated visits, and long continued intercourse with 

 the natives of the Friendly, Society, and Sandwich 

 Islands, cannot but have darted some rays of light 

 on the infant minds of those poor people. The un- 

 common objects they have thus had opportunities of 

 observing and admiring, will naturally tend to en- 



" port d'Ysbrand Ides, les chaloupes des Tunguses," &c. &c. t. i. 

 p. 156. Had this writer known that the two continents are not 

 above thirteen leagues (instead of eight hundred) distant from each 

 other, and that, even in that narrow space of sea, there are interven- 

 ing islands, he would not have ventured to urge this argument in 

 opposition to Mr. Bell's notion of the quarter from which North 

 America received its original inhabitants. 



