Coasts of Australia. 
63 
bring rice enough for the highest classes ; the rest are 
obliged to be content with the insipid bread of the sago 
palm. It is the same for other imported commodities. 
They export in return all the cloves and mace produced in 
the settlement. These trees are monopolized by the 
government, who compel the cultivators of the soil to take 
care of them, and to deliver up all the produce under 
heavy penalties, at a rate equivalent to three halfpence a 
pound. The produce of the cloves is from 300,000 to 
400,000 lbs, yearly; of the mace about 100,000 lbs. 
Captain Stanley of the Britomart found many of 
their islands laid down absurdly wrong in their charts. 
Indeed they not only appear to acquiesce in this ig¬ 
norance themselves, but to insist upon it in others; for 
when Captain Stanley gave the master of a Dutch 
merchant vessel, who piloted him into an anchorage, a 
sketch of thei Port Essington harbour, the Dutch 
Governor, hearing of it, demanded that he should re¬ 
linquish possession at once, and upon his hesitating, took 
it away by force. 
We were delayed somewhat beyond our time at Port 
Essington by the illness of one of our number ; leaving 
on the 6th of September for Timor. We there visited our 
old friend the Resident, Mr. Gronovies, and heard from 
him the news of the ransom paid by the Chinese, with 
the intention of the English to take the Emperor of 
China prisoner if they could. We amused ourselves 
together one morning with calculating the value of Aus¬ 
tralia at a pound an acre : it came out £1,679,616,000. 
Upon our way to Timor we crossed the disputed Saliul 
shoals. In the middleof the shoal we found no bottom with 
100 fathoms, and nothing like a shoal to be seen from the 
mast-head. Nothing was to be seen in 1839, when the 
Beagle visited it, and surveyed 25 miles of the supposed 
locality, in addition to 100 miles now examined. At the 
