and robbed the enemy's ships. Nowadays these same buccaneers would stand a good chance of being dealt with as pirates.
The Dutch did less of fighting and more of exploring than the others. It was a fixed opinion among certain learned men of those and previous days that there was a very large continent in the southern seas; they argued from their knowledge of the extent of land in the Northern Hemisphere, and concluded that in order to balance the globe, there must be a corresponding area of land in the Southern Hemisphere. The Dutch sailed south and planted colonies in some of the East Indian Islands. They also skirted the northern coast of Australia, and from its extent rightly judged that they had discovered the Great South Land which seemed to them a country scarcely worth occupying. The boats' crews that put ashore found scant fresh water, few wild beasts, and no vegetable products of any value to replenish their ships' stores: and as the more ignorant people consistently believed that all unknown or newly-discovered lands were inhabited by monstrous anthropophagi, or man-eaters, no effort was made to establish colonies upon the Terra Australis until near the close of the seventeenth century. It was then made, not by the Dutch, but by the English.
England had utilised her American colonies as convict stations, but the War of Independence had taken away from her this outlet for her criminal population. Another had therefore to be found. The colonising idea in this matter was altogether subsidiary to that of convict settlement. Viscount Sydney, a clever though indolent statesman, had a map of the world put before him. and he cast his eyes over it. He knew that the situation at home was becoming desperate. Prisons were plentiful; they were also run cheaply, and were calculated to kill off all but the most able-bodied among the criminals. Still they were inconveniently crowded, and something must be done to relieve them; transportation was the great desideratum. Captain Cook had lately described the beauty and fertility of Botany Bay on the eastern coast of New Holland; the land was a no-man's-land; it was far enough away from everywhere to make it reasonably safe to conclude that the expatriated criminals could hardly, in the bounds of human possibility, return home to commit fresh crimes: Botany Bay was the place.
Captain Phillip, a naval officer, a man of no great natural gifts, but of a generous and humane disposition, was placed in charge, and founded the convict settlement in 1788. It was his hope that the convicts might be reformed and made into settlers when their sentences expired. After enough of them to do the strictly pioneering work had been liberated the authorities considered that it might be possible to introduce a free population. Captain Phillip wanted a few free immigrants introduced immediately, but he was overruled, and so it was provided that grants of land might be given to soldiers, marines, guards, and prisoners of exemplary conduct, and that the men and women still in bond might be assigned to them as servants. The convict settlement was proclaimed the colony of New South Wales, and the proclamation described it as all that portion of New Holland east of the 129th meridian of east longitude.
