24 ADDRESS. 



but impressive fact, that when in the Pacific a short time since, 

 we met with a Prussian discovery ship ; and this, too, when that 

 nation has scarcely an hundred tons of shipping to be protected in 

 the whole Southern Ocean ! 



This is a hasty, and, from our limits, necessarily imperfect 

 review of what other nations have done and are still doing, for the 

 benefit of science and commerce in the field of discovery. That 

 these voyages have not only conferred honour, but proved gainful 

 by means of the new channels they have opened to commercial 

 intercourse, will be denied by no one who reflects for a moment 

 upon the diversity of the products of the earth's surface, and the 

 facility with which they may be turned to good account in the 

 trade between inhabitants of its more distant portions. We have 

 not been slow in appropriating to ourselves the gains of such 

 labours of foreign nations, until our commercial marine has be- 

 come so extensive, that we must now look to ourselves for its 

 protection. 



It is to be found in the most unfrequented bays of the most 

 distant and barbarous nations, on seas but partially explored, 

 where no chart indicates the hidden rock or perilous sandbank, 

 and everything depends upon a kind of instinctive, intuitive saga- 

 city and foreknowledge of approaching danger, which nothing but 

 a constant exposure to appalling hazards can ever give. To pos- 

 sess this quality, one should be, in the language of Byron, "a 

 child of the sea ;" and it is only necessary to hear one of our own 

 hardy sailors recount his adventures from boyhood upward, to 

 have the history of thousands and tens of thousands of the same 

 hardy population, brought up to lay their hands upon the mane of 

 the combing wave, and wanton in the rock-chafed billow. In 

 every part of the earth's circumference where a keel can go, our 

 countrymen are to be found, gleaning the molluscous treasures from 

 the coral reefs in equatorial climes, and even venturing into the 

 interior of benighted Africa, though not like Denham, Clapperton, 



V {*' 



