else, would entitle his name to be ranked amongst the benefactors of geography. What mind is so insensible as not to regret, that after years of hardship and captivity, the very day which presented the public with the memorial of his services and sufferings, deprived him of the possibility of reaping their reward?--E.] 6. One more discovery, for which we are indebted to Captain Carteret, as similar in some degree to that last mentioned, may properly succeed it, in this enumeration. Dampier, in sailing round what was supposed to be part of the coast of New Guinea, discovered it to belong to a separate island, to which he gave the name of New Britain. But that the land which he named New Britain should be subdivided again into two separate large islands, with many smaller intervening, is a point of geographical information, which, if ever traced by any of the earliest navigators of the South Pacific, had not been handed down to the present age: And its having been ascertained by Captain Carteret, deserves to be mentioned as a discovery, in the strictest sense of the word; a discovery of the utmost importance to navigation. St George's Channel, through which his ship found a way, between New Britain and New Ireland, from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean, to use the Captain's own words, "is a much better and shorter passage, whether from the eastward or westward, than round all the islands and lands to the northward."[28] [Footnote 28: The position of the Solomon Islands, Mendana's celebrated discovery, will no longer remain a matter in debate amongst geographers, Mr Dalrymple having, on the most satisfactory evidence, proved, that they are the cluster of islands which comprises what has since been called New Britain, New Ireland, &c. The great light thrown on that cluster by Captain Carteret's discovery, is a strong confirmation of this.--See Mr Dalrymple's Collection of Voyages, vol. i. p. 162-3.--D.]