circumstances, prevailed upon the captain to set him on shore; and supplies of all kinds being sent to him by his friends, he found himself in a year or two more comfortable then he had probably expected. He imported hogs, goats, domestic poultry, fruits, and vegetables, and everything appeared to thrive in quite a remarkable degree. In four years, however, the convict was removed by government; and by-and-by his place was filled by four runaway slaves, two men and two women, who had escaped from a ship. These new inhabitants soon multiplied to the number of twenty; but the vessels which now began to touch at the island to supply themselves with fresh provisions, found their competition disadvantageous; and in order to enjoy the live stock and fruits of the original Solitary without rivals, they hunted out the slave-settlers and their families till they succeeded in destroying them. Saint Helena, owing to the trade-winds, is difficult to hit upon, at least in the outward voyage; and in an epoch when all commercial advantages that were communicated were supposed to be lost, it is not surprising that the Portuguese should have kept the fact of its existence a secret from other nations, till 1588 when it was discovered by Captain Cavendish on his return from a circumnavigation of the globe. From this date the lonely rock was visited by English, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese ships indiscriminately; and when the two last nations were at war, the single anchorage it possesses was occasionally the scene of bloody conflicts. The Portuguese at length became independent of the island(repeatedly ravaged, and its stock maliciously destroyed by both belligerents)—in consequence of their numerous settlements on the south-eastern coast of the neighbouring continent; and at length they abandoned it altogether. In 1643, however, it was again stocked by some ship wrecked mariners of the same nation; and in two years after the Dutch considered it worth their while to capture and colonize it. But when this nation in 1651 planted themselves, as we have related, at the Cape, they withdrew their establishment from the little island rock; and immediately after an English homeward bound East India fleet took possession of it for the Company, who were afterwards confirmed in their occupation by a royal charter of Charles II. In 1672 the Dutch were repulsed in a new attack; but in the night of the same day they landed five hundred men, and the governor and garrison retreated to a ship in the roads. In the following year it was recaptured by Captain Munden; and six Dutch Indiamen immediately after sailing into the bay with a new governor and reinforcements on board, fell likewise into the hands of the English, whose commander had kept the Dutch flag flying for a decoy. Saint Helena was now used by the East India Company as a maritime station till 1833, when having no longer a mercantile fleet, they gave it up to the crown. The population at present amounts to about five thousand, in a circumference of twenty-eight miles. In 1815, we may add, the island received a prisoner whose name would cause it to be remembered to the last ages of the world, even if the volcanic agency which is supposed to have raised it from the sea were to sink it again to the bottom. Napoleon Buonaparte meditated on that ocean rock for six years, and then, in 1821, gave forth to the Atlantic a spirit as vast and indomitable as itself. The small island of Ascension is six hundred miles to the north-west of Saint Helena, and consists of little more than barren rocks, on which the sea breaks with great violence. Both islands are at present merely refreshing stations; but they are likewise impregnable fortresses which, in the event of a war, would become of great importance for the protection of our commerce. Having now finished our allotted task, we cannot refrain from looking back for a moment before laying down the pen. Awed as we are by the magnitude-haunted and oppressed by the power and greatness-of that Dominion, the eastern and southern portions of which have in these volumes been so inadequately described, the result of our Survey is still a conviction that not only the British Empire but the world itself is in its infancy. The great nations of what men delight to call Antiquity passed along the earth like shadows, leaving hardly a mark upon its surface; and those that still remain in the farther east-gazed upon by the modern world like spectres of the past-are crumbling away before our eyes. All things proclaim that the globe has reached a new epoch in its existence; while its immense expanses of thinly inhabited or entirely desert surface, as well as the lapse of ages and kingdoms without permanent resultswithout leaving any other memorials for mankind than a few tombs and ruins-prove that epoch to be an early one. But the new era is more promising than the past. The former world was destroyed by barbarians, who built their huts with the fragments of its palaces. Forests grow where the air once vibrated with the voice of cities, and the heretofore highways of commerce echo to the roar of wild beasts. In many places society has crumbled into its original elements, agriculturists falling back into shepherds, and shepherds into hunters and pensioners on the spontaneous bounties of nature. But the progress of mankind, though interrupted, was not destined to stop. In Europe there occurred, in the full ness of time, a collision of races from which a new form of civilization was to spring; and there the most distant tribes of mankind, called unconsciously from the east, the west, the north, and the south, flung themselves with a blind and headlong rage upon each other. The result of this collision is seen in the present age; for now is the great day of the west, in which the prophecy of the old man of the Ark is to be fulfilled,—that Japhet shall dwell in the tents of Shem! Japhet, it is true, carries a sword to slay as well as a torch to enlighten-(another proof that the world is still in its mad youth)-but if we could look back upon his cruelties through the sobering vista of ages, we should find them resemble mercy itself when compared with the gigantic crimes of his Asiatic brother. At the head of the western nations stands Great Britain, with the proudest sceptre the world ever saw, held more easily in the gentle hands of a woman than Alexander wielded that of the Greeks. The subjects of this Island Queen include one seventh part of mankind, and her territories extend over more than one seventh part of the surface of the globe. Yet the British empire, like the globe itself, is in its infancy. Its expansion has only begun. Its illumination plays only on the outer crust of the Asiatic mind, just as its dominion circles round the coasts of the Australian continent, leaving the untrodden depths of the interior a land of darkness and dreams. But the very juvenility of its power points to a destiny not the less glorious from its vagueness; and the line of new empires of which it will yet be the Mother appears, like that of the spectre-kings of Macbeth, to stretch out to the crack of doom. |