M, DE BOUGAINVILLE. 171 



cious odour informed us of the vicinity of tlus land^ 

 which formed a great grdph open to the south-east. 

 I have seldom seen a country which presented so 

 beautiful a prospect ; a low land, divided into plains 

 and groves, extended along the sea shore, and 

 afterwards rose like an amphitheatre up to the 

 mountains, whose summits were lost in the clouds. 

 There were three ranges of mountains, and the 

 highest chain was distant upwards of twenty-five 

 leagues from the shore. The melancholy condition 

 to which we were reduced* neither allowed us to 

 spend some time in visiting this beautiful country, 

 which by all appearances was rich and fertile, nor 

 to stand to the westward in search of a passage to 

 the south of New Guinea, which might open to us a 

 new and short route to the Moluccas by way of the 

 Gulph of Carpentaria. Nothing, indeed, was more 

 probable than the existence of such a passage."! 

 Bougainville, it may be mentioned, was not aware 

 of the previous discovery of Torres, which indeed 

 was not pubhshed to the world until after our 

 illustrious navigator Cook, in August, 1770, had 



* They were beginning to run short of provisions, and the 

 salt meat was so bad that the men preferred such rats as they 

 could catch. It even became necessary to prevent the crew 

 from eating the leather about the rigging and elsewhere in the 

 ship. 



f Voyage autour du Mond par la Fregate du Eoi La Boudeuse 

 et la Flute I'Etoile en 1766-1769, p. 258. See also the chart of 

 the Louisiade given there, which, however, does not correspond 

 very closely with the text. 



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