PLANS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 359 



should found colonies which should exhibit the Dutch 

 virtues, and be exempt from the Dutch faults. " A 

 colony placed in a land analogous to that from which the 

 Dutch get their precious products, sustained by a strong 

 marine in the motherland, frequently visited by her 

 ships, often recruited both by young free citizens and by 

 criminal slaves, distributed gratuitously at first among 

 the colonists, who will not be able to buy the expensive 

 slaves of Africa, such a colony, I say, cannot fail to grow 

 and to bear fruit." For a commercial colony is fat more 

 valuable than a gold colony. It produces a greater naviga- 

 tion, and a greater population ; more wealth, and more 

 strength. 



De Drosses' discourses were written by a very patriotic The 

 French gentleman who regarded Great Britain as his 

 country's worst enemy. Yet they are now far more Brasses, 

 interesting to Englishmen than to Frenchmen. Reading 

 them, we find ourselves for the first time in touch with 

 the ideas which sent forth Cook and Banks to explore 

 the Pacific, which founded the convict colony in New South 

 Wales, and which have given the British race supremacy 

 in the Southern lands. 



And British students saw at once the interest of de Calender's 

 Brosses' argument. In 1766 John Callender published ^J^a/*s 

 the first volume of his Terra Australis Cognita the Cognita, 

 second and third volumes were published in 1768 a I7 

 work which is in the main a free translation of de Brosses, 

 with additions, omissions, and modifications, which are 

 made with the object of showing that the arguments 

 which the Frenchman addressed to his fellow-countrymen 

 have still greater force when addressed to the British. 



Though it may be true, argues Callender, that French Callender 

 de Gonneville first discovered the Austral lands, it is also grosses'* 

 true, as de Brosses' own volumes show, that " the best arguments, 

 and surest accounts of this Terra Australis are deduced 

 from our own navigators, Drake, Narborough, Cavendish, 

 Dampier, and others." And the British are far better 

 able to achieve the Empire of the South than are the 



