JS^ew Ouinea. 35 



New Guinea — a highly promising field for settlement 

 and colonization, and how such an object might 

 be most easily and successfully effected. 



[Read on the 8th November, 1871.] 



Xew Gtjikea, with, the single exception of this island-conti- 

 nent of Australia, is the largest island on the face of the earth. 

 From its south-eastern to its north-western extremity, it is 

 upwards of thirteen hundred miles in length, its breadth from 

 north to south is from three or four hundred to six or seven 

 hundred miles. It is. fifty thousand square miles larger than 

 France, even including the recently ceded provinces of Alsace 

 and Lorraine, and it is within a hundred miles of the Australian 

 land. 



This great island was discovered by the Portuguese in the year 

 1511, and was revisited by the enterprising navigators of that 

 country in 1527 ; but Petermann, the eminent German geo- 

 gTapher of Saxe Grotha, informs us that it was known and visited 

 for the purposes of trade at a much earlier period by the Arabian 

 traders of the Indian Archipelago ; and the great empires which 

 the Portuguese found established in the western parts ot the 

 Archipelago, when they commenced their career of ruthless 

 conquest in the east, render this allegation probable enough. 



The first Englishman who visited the island, and who, I may 

 add, resided there for some time in Dorg harbour, in latitude 

 fifteen minutes south, on its north-west coast, was a Captain 

 Porrest, of the Honorable East India Company's naval service, 

 a few years before Captain Cook discovered the east coast of 

 Australia, in the year 1770. His object was to search for plants 

 of the nutmeg tree of the Moluccas in New Guinea — an object 

 in which he succeeded — and to carry back with him on his return 

 voyage, a large supply of the plants for the Company's settlement 

 of Palemban, an island on the N. E. of Borneo. Captain Porrest 

 found the natives of a friendly character, and not only disposed 

 but accustomed to trade, in particular with the Malays and the 

 Chinese to the westward; and he pourtrays one of the most 

 remarkable features in their social system, which would assimi- 

 late them with the inhabitants of the Lake dwellings in Switzer- 

 land and other countries of Europe in the pre-historic ages of 

 man. ~ But as a building of a precisely similar character to the 

 one described by Captain Porrest, on the north-west coast, has 



