ADDRESS. . 41 



gers they had to encounter. From them we learned the position 

 of numerous islands recently discovered by them, and not yet 

 embodied in any report. 



These are discoveries which make little or no noise in the 

 world ; there is no long story, no spirit-stirring incident, no 

 romance, attached to them ; there is but a rock, a coral reef, or 

 an island more in the midst of an ocean, where thousands already 

 exist ; and yet he who points out a rock, a reef, or an island, un- 

 known before, is a benefactor to the human race. Nor is he 

 less entitled to the appellation, who, after a careful examination, 

 is enabled to decide that a rock, an island, a reef, or a shoal, is 

 either misplaced on the chart, or has no existence. An insulated 

 rock in the midst of the waste of waters, may, while its position 

 continues unascertained, prove the cause of the most intense 

 misery ; and families deprived of parents and children, and mer- 

 chants reduced from affluence to unaccustomed poverty, may 

 ascribe their calamities to that hardly visible speck, mantled with 

 rolling waves, and half hid with the foam of the tumbling breakers. 

 Let those exult in their prosperity who are carried on joyously 

 before its gales, and have not tasted of the bitter reverses which 

 attend upon those who " go down to the sea in ships." The lesson 

 of experience they have not learned, and would they never may ; 

 but they are from this very fact, to a certain degree, incapacitated 

 from forming a just estimate of the importance of results such as 

 we would accomplish. But if any heart- stricken parent or ruined 

 merchant were to determine upon the subject now before you, how 

 decisive would be his reply, and how soon would this expedition 

 depart upon its errand of philanthropy ! 



In visiting that part of the ocean surrounded by the Society 

 Islands, New Caledonia, and Solomon's Islands indeed, the 

 whole of that extensive tract embraced under the name of Ocean- 

 ica we find the mariner in constant danger of striking his keel 

 against some point of coral rock, shooting perpendicularly upward 



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