i23'o AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



miles in width, which he named St. George's Channel. Dampier describes the island as 

 " generally high mountainous land mixed with large valleys, which, as well as the 

 mountains, appeared very fertile, and in most places that we saw the trees are very 

 large, tall and thick." This short description may be taken as a fairly accurate one. 

 The west coast generally consists of a mountain range rising in most places abruptly 

 from the beach, with very few shores or fringing reefs. These ranges have jagged and 

 broken peaks, and are intersected by deep gullies or ravines, which seem to terminate 

 in many instances far inland, at the centre of the range, at the base of steep peaks 

 on which the marks of land-slips are plainly visible. The mountains are all well wooded, 

 and the whole of the coast-line is well watered by numerous small streams and rivers, 

 the beds of most of them showing that in the rainy season large bodies of water find 

 their way down them to the sea. On the eastern side the ranges do not rise so 

 abruptly from the coast ; the soil is often of a stiff, clayey nature, and comparatively 

 large tracts of open thickly-grassed country may be seen. There are no volcanoes on 

 New Ireland, but they abound on New Britain and its outlying islands. The ejected 

 matter consists almost entirely of pumice, no lava stream having been so far observed. 



Though by some people the honour of the discovery of New Britain has been given 

 to the Spaniards, there is no account obtainable of any such discovery. After Magelhaens 

 in 1519, the principal attempts to explore the then unknown Pacific appear to have been 

 made by Cortes. His first little fleet of four vessels was burnt in the dock-yard before 

 completion. In 1529, he received the appointment of Captain-General of New Spain and 

 of the coasts of the South Seas, but his enterprises seem to have been wholly confined 

 to the shores of the Pacific, and especially in the Gulf of California. 



In 1564, Lope Garcia de Castro, who was the Viceroy in Peru, sent out two 

 ships to find out the land from which Solomon caused gold and ivory to be brought 

 to Jerusalem. His nephew, Alvaro Mendana de Neyra, then twenty-six years old, was 

 in command. . Hernando Gallego was pilot ; Pedro de Ortego was in command of the 

 troops, and Pedro Fernandez de Quiros was one of the officers. The expedition sailed 

 from Callao in 1567, and eighty days aftenvards discovered the Solomon Group. On 

 Mendafia's second voyage, in 1595, he discovered Santa Cruz and died there. De Quiros 

 and Torres also visited the Solomons and the New Hebrides, and sighted Australia and 

 New Guinea ; but the earliest distinct notice of the discovery of any of the New 

 Britain- Islands is to be found in the account of Le Maire and Schouten's Voyages 

 in Dalrymple's " Collection." 



The temperature ranges from ninety degrees to seventy degrees, very rarely falling 

 so low as seventy-four ; the average temperature all the year round is about eighty 

 degrees. The atmosphere is very humid, and the dew-fall very great. The effects of this 

 damp enervating heat are soon apparent ; and most of the foreign residents suffer, sooner 

 or later, from attacks of intermittent fever. It has, however, been found that in the case 

 of those who have a strong vigorous constitution which enables them to withstand the 

 prostrating effects of the first few years, the attacks of fever become much less frequent, 

 and some indeed enjoy almost perfect immunity from them. The natives assert that 

 the monsoons were formerly much more violent than they are now ; both the natives 

 and the white men in Eastern Polynesia assert the same of the trade-winds there. From 



