José Bonifacio. Padre Vieira. Maricá. Antonio Cárlos. V. de Cayru'. Magalhães. Gonzaga. Mariz. Vasconcellos. DIPLOMA. Aos Sabios de Todos os Tempos. Platão. INSTITUTO LITTERARIO OLINDENSE. Bacon. I shall only add, that if Englishmen were more frequently to exhibit a friendly feeling and deportment towards enlightened foreigners of any nation whatever, it would not unfrequently be attended with the happiest results. We are too shy, too reserved, too exclusive as a people; and the circumstance tells not only against us individually, but even against our common Protestantism, as being, in the estimation of foreigners, an anti-social and repulsive system, that discards even the common courtesies and charities of humanity. The large room in which I occupied a sofa for the night, in the Hotel Francisco, at Pernambuco, was the place of meeting of a club of Englishmen, residing in the city, who assembled in it periodically for certain purposes of their own; and I observed, not without a feeling of indignation, that it was one of the fundamental rules of the club, that no native of the country could be admitted to membership in its body. How different was the feeling of the Jewish prophet when he wrote from Jerusalem to the Jews in Babylon, "to seek the good of the land" in which they dwelt! CHAPTER VII. NATURE AND SALUBRITY OF THE CLIMATE OF COOKSLAND. Nullus in orbe sinus Baiis praelucet amoenis. HORAT. Epist. I., Ad Maecenat. 83. As Great Britain has hitherto had no Colonies in so low a latitude as Cooksland, with the exception of the West Indies, and the other inter-tropical Colonies in which every description of field-labour has hitherto been performed by people of colour, and as there has consequently been no experience in the mother-country in regard to the effects of such a climate on the constitution of the European labourer, I deemed it absolutely necessary, before undertaking the serious responsibility of recommending an extensive emigration of Europeans to that country, to be employed in the various labours of the field to which the soil and climate peculiarly invite the Colonial farmer, to have this point satisfactorily ascertained. It is generally known that the Southern Hemisphere, especially in the higher latitudes of the Temperate Zone, is much colder than the Northern. At the Auckland Islands, situated in lat. 50° S., to the southward of New Zealand, at which I touched on my first voyage to England from New South Wales, in the year 1824, I found the vegetation of very much the same character as that of the Northern Frigid Zone-the land being overgrown with moss, while the trees with which the Island was covered were all of a stunted, dwarfish appearance, throwing out numberless branches in a horizontal direction, about three feet from the ground, under which the seals from the surrounding ocean had made innumerable tracks through the forest exactly like the sheep-tracks along a hill-side in Scotland. And on being driven by northerly winds a long way to the eastward, in the South Atlantic Ocean, after doubling Cape Horn on a subsequent voyage to Europe, in the year 1830, we found the island of South Georgia, situated in latitude 54° S., surrounded with innumerable large fragments of floating ice, which had evidently been detached from the huge masses of that material which seemed, as they reflected from a distance the beams of the morning sun, to flank the whole line of the inhospitable shore, the lofty mountains of the interior of the island being covered with eternal snow. It must doubtless have been the same island of which Dr. Forster, one of the companions of Captain Cook, on his last voyage round the world, speaks in the following terms:-" When we came towards the 54° of S. latitude, we found a small island of about eighty leagues in circumference, the thermometer continuing at about 30°, 32°, and 34° in its neighbourhood, in the midst of summer; though isles have in general a milder climate than continents, we found, however, all this country entirely covered with immense loads of snow, the bottoms of its bays were choked up with solid masses of ice, of 60 or 80 feet above water." "The ingenious M. de Buffon says, 'The navigators pretend that the continent of the Austral lands is much colder than that of the Arctic Pole; but there is not the least appearance that this opinion is well-founded, and probably it has been adopted by voyagers on no other account than because they found ice in a latitude where it is seldom or ever to be met with in our North ern Seas; but that may be produced by some peculiar causes. If we compare the meteorological observations made at Falkland Islands, at about 51° S. latitude, and communicated by Alexander Dalrymple, Esq. in his Collection of Voyages chiefly to the Southern Atlantie Ocean, with such as are every where made in Europe in corresponding degrees of latitude of the Northern Hemisphere; if we consider that in Tierra del Fuego, StatenLand, and South Georgia, from 54° to 56° South latitude, and in Sandwich Land, in about 58° and 59° South latitude, the whole land is covered with eternal snow, to the shores of the sea, in the months of December and January, corresponding to our June and July; every unprejudiced reader will find it necessary to allow the temperature of the Southern Hemisphere to be remarkably colder than that of the Northern, and no one will, I believe, for the future venture to question this curious fact in the Natural History of our Globe." "Having maturely considered every circumstance, I find that, with other causes founded on the apparent motion of the sun, the absence of land in the higher latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere creates this material difference in the temperature of the air, between the corresponding degrees of latitude in the Arctic and the Antarctic Hemispheres." "Nor can we omit the well-known circumstance, that the sun moves eight days longer in the Northern than in the Southern Signs of the Zodiac. This makes the winter eight days longer, and their summer eight days shorter, which altogether must cool the Southern Hemisphere by a 2213th, or very nearly by a 23d part more than the Arctic regions." "The repeated approaches of our ship to the Antarctic circle was often announced by the fall of snow, sleet, and hail; but the first year, in 1772, we had snow very early in the latitude of 51° on December 11th. In the course of the following years, we never had *Buffon's Natural History, I. p. 312. snow, except when we came into the neighbourhood of that circle. However it must be observed, that this happened during the height of summer: what weather then must not the winter season afford? We were happy enough to meet with no land to the Southward, which might have seduced us to spend a cold season somewhere on it, and to experience the rigours of an Antarctic winter."* Now, although this distinguished philosopher may have been in error in assuming that "the absence of land in the higher latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere" is the cause of the greater degree of cold in that Hemisphere-especially as recent discoveries have proclaimed the existence of an extensive Continent in these high Southern latitudes-the fact is unquestionable, and that fact may not unreasonably be supposed to imply a lower mean temperature throughout the entire Continent of Australia, than would be experienced in any similar extent of land included within the corresponding parallels of latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. This unaccountable influence indeed appears to be felt even in the Torrid Zone, where also the temperature is often much lower in the corresponding latitudes of the Southern than in those of the Northern Hemisphere. In a Precis of the results of the voyage of the discovery-ship Beagle, Captain Wickham, R.N., and afterwards Captain Stokes, R.N., drawn up by Captain P. P. King, R.N., and published in the Sydney Herald of Feb. 10, 1843, it is observed that "The next important feature of the Beagle's voyage was the discovery of two considerable rivers at the bottom of the Gulf of Carpentaria, flowing through a fine country in a southeasterly direction for sixty miles, navigable for thirteen miles for vessels of thirteen feet draught, and to within five miles of where the water is fresh; the boats, how * Observations made during a Voyage round the World, &c. By JOHN REINOLD FORSTER, LL.D., London 1778, p. 86-109, passim. |