224 GENERAL ACCOUNT OF NEW ZEALAND cuap. x 
found larger ones than any we saw, as we were never but 
once ashore among them, and that only for a short time on 
the banks of the river Thames, where we rowed for many 
miles between woods of these trees, to which we could see 
no bounds. The river Thames is indeed, in every respect, 
the most proper place we have yet seen for establishing a 
colony.’ A ship as large as ours might be carried several 
miles up the river, where she could be moored to the trees 
as safely as alongside a wharf in London river, a safe and 
sure retreat in case of an attack from the natives. Or she 
might even be laid on the mud and a bridge built to her. 
The noble timber of which there is such abundance would 
furnish plenty of materials for building either defences, 
houses, or vessels; the river would furnish plenty of fish, 
and the soil make ample returns for any European vege- 
tables, etc., sown in it. 
I have some reason to think from observations made 
upon the vegetables that the winters here. are extremely 
mild, much more so than in England; the summers we have 
found to be scarcely at all hotter, though more equally warm. 
The southern part, which is much more hilly and barren 
than the northern, I firmly believe to abound with minerals 
in a very high degree: this, however, is only conjecture. I 
had not to my great regret an opportunity of landing in any 
place where the signs of them were promising, except the 
last; nor indeed in any one, where from the ship the 
country appeared likely to produce them, which it did to 
the southward in a very high degree, as I have mentioned 
in my daily Journal. 
On every occasion when we landed in this country, we 
have seen, I had almost said, no quadrupeds originally 
natives of it. Dogs and rats, indeed, there are, the former 
1 A commencement of colonisation was made by Samuel Marsden, a 
missionary, in 1814, in the Bay of Islands. The first definite attempt to 
colonise was by the New Zealand Company in 1840, whose settlement was at 
Wellington. In the same year Captain Hobson, R.N., was sent as Lieut.- 
Governor: he landed in the Bay of Islands, and transferred his headquarters 
to the Hauraki Gulf in September, where he founded Auckland (Wharton’s 
Cook, p. 231). 
