SETTLEMENT OF NORFOLK ISLAND. 



The next chapter in our colonial history to which I ask 

 your attention, demands for our comprehension of its signifi- 

 cance that we should leave these high questions of statesman- 

 ship, and turn our view for a time to a small and solitary island, 

 separated from us by more than a thousand miles of ocean, 

 the fortunes of which have, nevertheless, been strangely inter- 

 woven with those of our own colony. 



Situated in seas where perpetual summer reigns, endowed 

 with great natural beauty, rich in the fruits of the tropics, few 

 spots in our modern world have had a history so strange, so 

 various, so horrible, and yet so romantic, as that of Norfolk 

 Island. At the present time it is the secure retreat of an easy and 

 indolent race, who are yet the descendants of the actors in one 

 of the most noted and picturesque piratical deeds recorded in 

 English annals. It is, moreover, the peaceful headquarters 

 of a Christian mission to the savage islands where the saintly 

 Patteson laid down his life. It is most familiar to us as a 

 synonym for cruelty and crime, a reminiscence of the days when 

 the distant island formed a dependency and a part of the then 

 penal settlement of Van Diemen's Land. To the majority this, 

 which is within the memory of many still living amongst us, 

 is the only known link between our colony and it — perhaps 

 the only known fact respecting its earlier history. Compara- 

 tively few are aware that — with the single exception of Sydney — 

 Norfolk Island is the oldest English colony in the South 

 Seas. Perhaps still fewer know that to that same far-off island, 

 so familiar to us in later days under another aspect, Tasmania 

 was indebted for a large proportion of her earliest colonists. 

 To this historical fact the familiar names of New Norfolk in 

 the south, and Norfolk Plains in the north of this colony 

 remain a perpetual but unappreciated memorial. 



The history of Norfolk Island and its early colonists thus 

 becomes an essential part of the history of Tasmania. The 

 history of its colonisation and settlement can be gathered from 

 scattered references in the works of Collins and other con- 

 temporary writers, but Mr. Bonwick's researches in the 

 Record Office enable me to lay before the Royal Society the 

 first authentic story of the evacuation of the island and the 

 transference of all its free settlers to the Derwent in 1808. 



And first as to its discovery. The first voyage of Captain 

 Cook, lasting from 1768 to 1771, was that in which he did his 

 most memorable work. The immediate object of the expedition 

 was the observation of the Transit of Venus at Tahiti in the 

 South Seas. But the voyage had more important results than 

 astronomical observations, valuable as these were to science. 

 In his little north-country collier of 370 tons, the Endeavour, 

 Cook rediscovered and examined the islands of New Zealand, 

 and then steering for the as yet unknown coast of New Holland, 



