330 AUSTRALASIA. 



little more than notninal, and thousands of natives " engaged " to work in remote 

 places have perished of despair and hardships. Some German writers have 

 advocated the establishment of a convict settlement in Melanesia. The islands in 

 Dampier Strait, occupying a central position between the New Guinea coast and 

 the northern archipelagoes, have been mentioned as the most convenient locality 

 for this purpose. 



A table of the chief North Melanesian islands, with their extent and estimated 

 population, is given in the Appendix. 



II. — South Melanesia : Santa-Cruz and New Hebrides. 



These two insular chains, although evidently belonging to the same geological 

 system as the Solomons, are not disposed quite in the same direction, their longi- 

 tudinal axis running north-north-west and south-south-east. The two clusters 

 comprise some fifty isles and islets, besides countless reefs, and a few groups scat- 

 tered over the eastern waters on the highways leading to Fiji and Samoa. Alto- 

 gether Santa- Cruz and the New Hebrides, with the more remote Tikopia and 

 Anuda, have a collective area estimated at from 5,000 to 5,500 square miles, with 

 a total population approximately computed at about seventy thousand souls. 



The Santa-Cruz Archipelago was discovered in 1595 by Alonzo de Mendana, 

 during the unsuccessful expedition undertaken to rediscover the Solomon group 

 visited by him twenty-eight years previously. His companion, Queiros, when 

 exploring the same waters in 1606, was the first to sight the New Hebrides. 

 Casting anchor in a bay on the coast of Espiritu-Santo, he supposed he had 

 reached the Australian continent, and accordingly gave to this " mother of so 

 many islands " the name of Australia. It was in this island of Merena, or 

 Espiritu-Santo, that he founded the "New Jerusalem," the city whence the true 

 faith was to be spread over all the scattered lands of the Pacific Ocean. But 

 Queiros never returned to this region, which remained unvisited for a hundred 

 and fifty years till the time of Bougainville. But the very name of the " Great 

 Cyclades," given to the New Hebrides by this navigator, shows that he made no 

 systematic survey of this archipelago, which is disposed not in circles but in 

 chains. 



In 1774, six years after Bougainville, Cook visited the same group, which he 

 studied more in detail, and to which he gave the name of the Scotch Islands, which 

 has since been maintained in geographical nomenclature. After Cook's visit the 

 coasts of the central islands still remained to be surveyed, and some more remote 

 groups to be discovered. In 1789, Bligh, driven from his ship by the mutineers 

 of the Bouitt;/, and compelled to make his way across more than half of the 

 Pacific, had the good fortune to come upon the Banks Islands, lying to the 

 north of the New Hebrides. The previous year Laperouse had navigated the 

 same parts of the ocean ; but he never returned to announce his discoveries. 

 His vessel was wrecked on a shoal off Yanikoro, the southernmost member 

 of the Santa-Cruz group, though the scene of the disaster remained unknown until 



