Dampier describes the country hereabouts as mountainous and wooded, full of rich valleys and pleasant fresh-water brooks. He named it Port Montague, in honour of the patron to whom he had dedicated his first volume. The _Roebuck_ sailed from this place on March 22nd, and two days afterwards, in the evening, Dampier, who was indisposed and lying down in his cabin, was hastily called on deck to behold what the crew regarded as a miracle. The wonder was no more than a burning mountain, but then those were days when enchanted islands[17] were to be met with at sea, and this great flaming scene was at once a prodigy and a terror to the sun-tanned mariners, who stared at it over the rail with every superstitious instinct in them astir. Tasman had viewed it, but the honest old Batavian did not wield Dampier's pen. It was a grand sight indeed,—a large pillar of fire crimsoning the north-west blackness, rearing its blood-red blaze higher and higher for three or four minutes at a time, then sinking till it seemed to have died, then rising afresh flaming furiously. They got a better view of this volcano a little later. “At every explosion we heard a dreadful noise like thunder, and saw a flame of fire after it the most terrifying that ever I beheld.” Streams of liquid light ran down to the foreshore and overflowed the beach with incandescent lakes. The description of this burning mountain is, I think, one of the finest passages in Dampier's writings. All this while he supposed that he was still off the coast of New Guinea; but following the trend of the shore, he arrived at those straits which still bear his name, and then discovered that the little country whose seaboard he had been exploring was an island. This land he called Nova Britannia, or, as we now know it, New Britain. Happy would it have been for the reputation of Dampier if, instead of steering east through his straits, he had continued to skirt the New Guinea coast to the south-east, for by so doing he must have rounded into the Gulf of Papua, struck the channel called Torres Straits, and, catching sight of Cape York, have been encouraged to pursue his exploration of the coast of New Holland on that side of the great continent whose fruitfulness, beauty, and conveniency have courted the civilisation of Europe. It is true that the _Roebuck_ was provisioned for twenty months only, but an ardent and ambitious navigator would have made little or nothing of such a condition of his voyage as this when close aboard of him were lands filled with fruit, hogs, fowls, and fresh water. But there is no question that Dampier had long grown weary of this business. He could see nothing but honour (and little enough of that, as things went) to be got out of this journey, and as a poor man, with the heart of a buccaneer in him besides, he would appreciate the need of something more substantial than fame. Be this as it may, he had now, it being April 26th, 1700, started on his return home, intending