“If it were not,” writes Dampier, “for that sort of pleasure which results from the Discovery even of the barrenest spot upon the Globe, this coast of New Holland would not have charmed me much.” There is little of the enthusiasm of the explorer in this avowal; all through his career, in fact, Dampier exhibits himself as a man of caprices easily diverted from his first intentions, quickly sickened by failure, though never discomfited by the harshest sufferings or by the most formidable difficulties, so long as he can keep himself in spirits by the assurance of some approach to good fortune attending the issue of his adventure. Probably he was now willing to believe of New Holland, despite the wise conjectures with which he vitalised his early scheme, that all that remained to be seen was no better than what he was now viewing. Or, the length of time his voyage had already occupied had provided him with plenty of leisure for the contemplation of his prospects, and he was beginning to think that he had been misled by his original impulse, and that there was neither dignity nor profit to be got out of a toilsome survey of an obscure, remote, inhospitable coast. One sometimes likes to think of the return amongst us of such a man as this. If one could summon the dead from their sleep of centuries that they might behold the issue of the labours of the generations whose processions filled the time between their Then and our Now, it would be such old navigators as Dampier whom one would best like to arouse. Think of Cabot and Cartier going a tour through the United States, of Columbus taking ship by an ocean mail-steamer to the West Indies, of Bartholomew Diaz listening to the eloquence of South African legislators in the House of Assembly at Cape Town, of Mark de Niza at San Francisco, of Tasman at Hobart Town! As we watch Dampier digging for water amid the sand-hills of the Western Australian seaboard, the reality of the living present becomes a wonder even to us who are familiar with it. The shining cities, the flourishing towns, the radiant congregation of ships flying the flags of twenty different nationalities, every fruitful, every busy condition of commerce, manufacture, science, art, literature, entering into and stimulating the life of the highest form of human civilisation, are as miracles and as dreams to us standing in imagination by the side of the lean figure of this buccaneer, quaintly apparelled in the boots, belt, and broad hat of his old calling, and gazing with him upon a land whose silence is broken only by the cries of unfamiliar creatures, by the murmur of the wind among the leaves of a nameless vegetation, and by the solemn wash of the ocean surge arching in thunder upon a shore that, to the minds of hundreds and thousands away in far-off Europe, is as unreal and illusive as the islands of Plato and More. What heart would have come to our stout navigator with but the briefest of all possible