t of the voyage than to have established the fact
beyond all controversy.

[Footnote 100: Delicacy of feeling, perhaps, would have preferred the
omission of what has now been recorded as to the advice of some of the
officers, to the stating it in such a manner as leaves the responsible
persons under the shade of the guiltless, or implicates the latter in
the odium of the former. The advice, at all events, might have been
stated impersonally, as a mere suggestion that would naturally present
itself to any one who considered the benefit of the crew only, without
respect to the rights and properties of the natives,--a suggestion,
however, which it required but a moment's reflection on the laws of
humanity to dissipate with reproach. Some readers, it is probable, will
be sensible, as well as the writer, of an uncomfortable emotion at the
perusal of this part of the text, exclusive entirely of disapprobation
of the matter of which it treats.--E.]

[Footnote 101: The work here mentioned was the valuable labour of
President De Brosses, and appeared at Paris, in two vols. quarto. It was
translated into English, and published at London in 1767. We shall
hereafter have occasion to cull some information from it, and to revert
to the fact of the separation of New Holland and New Guinea now alluded
to. Callender published a work at Edinburgh, in 1766, in three vols.
octavo, entitled, "Terra Australis Cognita; or Voyages to the Terra
Australis, or Southern Hemisphere, &c." It bore to be an original, but
is in fact a translation of what has now been mentioned.--E.]

As the two countries lie very near each other, and the intermediate
space is full of islands, it is reasonable to suppose that they were
both peopled from one common stock; yet no intercourse appears to have
been kept up between them; for if there had, the cocoa-nuts,
bread-fruit, plantains, and other fruits of New Guinea, which are
equally necessary for the support of life, would certainly have been
transplanted to New Holland, where no traces of them are to be found.
The author of the "Histoire des Navigationes aux Terres Australes," in
his account of La Maire's voyage, has given a vocabulary of the language
that is spoken in an island near New Britain, and we find, by comparing
that vocabulary with the words which we learnt in New Holland, that the
languages are not the same. If therefore it should appear that the
languages of New Britain and New Guinea are the same,