THE DISCOVERY AND OCCUPATION OF 

 PORT DALRYMPLE. 



BY JAMES BACKHOUSE WALKER. 



1. The Discovery. 



It is a feet, often forgotten, that an interval of a 

 century and a half separated the discovery of the eastern 

 coast of Australia from that of her western shores. The 

 western coast was visited by the Dutch in the early part 

 of the 17th century. It was not until the last half of the 

 18th that the eastern coast was first seen by European 

 eyes. The discovery of Southern Tasmania belongs to 

 the old period— to the days of the Dutch East India 

 Company, and of Tasman's search for the Great South 

 Land — to the days when New Holland had an evil 

 reputation as the most forbidding and inhospitable 

 country on the face of the earth. The discovery of our 

 northern coast was one of the last of the modern epoch, 

 when English navigators had laid open to the world the 

 rich promise of the fertile lands of Eastern Australia, 

 and when the first of the threat English southern colonics 

 had already been planted at. Port Jackson. 



A short sketch of the exploration of the Straits, and 

 particularly Port Dalrymple, although it may traverse 

 some ground already touched upon in former papers, 

 may prove of interest as an introduction to the story of 

 the settlement of Northern Tasmania. Such a sketch 

 will serve to bring into due prominence the achievements 

 of two men, whose names should be held in honour by 

 every Tasmanian, as practically the discoverers of our 

 island home and the pioneers who opened it for English 

 colonisation. These two men were George Bass'and 

 Matthew Flinders. 



I trust, therefore, that my readers will forgive my 

 detaining them for a time from the settlement of Port 

 -Ualrymple by a prefatory history of the events which led 

 to its discovery. 



. iue existence of a great southern continent surround- 

 ing' the antarctic pole and pushing itself northward far 

 >nto the Pacific Ocean was a fixed belief of the old 

 geographers. The hope of discovering such a continent 



