Norfolk Island, so celebrated for its genial climate and unusual fruitfulness, is of volcanic origin, and contains about 14,000 acres. It lies on the 29th parallel,[51] north of New Zealand: it is nine hundred and ninety miles from Port Jackson, thirteen hundred miles from the Derwent, and until seen by Captain Cook, was probably never visited by man. Norfolk Island has twenty-eight miles of sea shore: its greatest elevation is Mount Pitt: it is a succession of hills and valleys. Its lofty cliffs, which breast the ocean, are crowned by the elegant white wood and the gigantic pine. The wild jasmine and convolvuli, which reach from tree to tree, form bowers and walks of exquisite beauty. Twice in the year the settler gathered his harvest: the lemon, the orange, and the pine, shed their fragrance in profusion, and yielded the richest fruit. Though liable to occasional storms and destructive insects, the husbandman could scarcely be said to toil. Gentle showers frequently refresh the undulating soil, and pour down rivulets to the ocean. Sea breezes cool the atmosphere, and the diseases often incident to such latitudes, are unknown; but no ships can anchor: it is a land unsuited to commerce. Thus it presented no incitement to exertion: it gave the indolent abundance without labor; it afforded a leisure, in which man is prone to degenerate and sink into the savage. Distillation from the cane produced spirits, more than usually deleterious: unacquainted with the process by which saccharine is crystalised, the settlers were unable to prepare sugar. They found the raw rum destructive, and attributed its fatal effects solely to the leaden worms![52] In 1800, the population of Norfolk Island comprehended 960 souls:[53] 3,521 acres of land were granted; divided into farms of from ten to thirty acres each. A station, where rather more refractory offenders were sent, its government varied with the character of each officer. Of the moral condition of the island nothing good could be expected, and little favorable is remembered. Always a place of banishment, even when a colony, Norfolk Island seemed destined to exhibit the extremes of natural beauty and moral deformity. The language of Holt, the Irish rebel, who spent several months there, might be better suited to a latter period, but expressed the intensity of his abhorrence, not wholly unfounded--"That barbarous island, the dwelling place of devils in human shape; the refuse of Botany Bay--the doubly damned!"[54]