Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1852 edition. Excerpt: ... So well founded were the objections of Phillip to Botany Bay as a point of location, that even at the present day, although only seven miles from the great city of Sydney, there are scarcely a dozen houses on its margin, whose circuit can hardly be less than twenty miles. Shortly before midday, the Agincourt passed close under the lighthouse of Port Jackson, perched upon a horizontally stratified cliff, descending plumb 300 feet into deep water; and precisely at 12 o'clock we entered "The Heads," that grand and appropriate portal of one of the noblest harbours in the world. Working against an adverse wind, under charge of a pilot, the good ship zigzagged her course along the seven miles of inland water connecting The Heads with Sydney Cove; and at 3 P.m. of an Australian mid-wintry but splendid day the anchor was dropped in that snug little haven, within a biscuit's cast of the spot where, in the year 1788, the first Governor of New South Wales pitched the tents of the first British plantation in NewHolland. In spite of the undoubted beauties of Port Jackson, its glorious expanse of smooth water, its numerous lovely islets, its sweeping bays and swelling headlands, wooded down to the water edge and crested with handsome villas, there is to the stranger's eye something singularly repulsive in the leaden tint of the gum-tree foliage, and in the dry and sterile sandstone from which it springs. The trees, indeed, have no bare branches, as in an English winter, excepting those killed by bush-fires; but the stiff hard leaves, which seem expressly formed SYDNEY. 37 to resist the chill wind and powerful sun of an Australian winter, although nominally evergreen, but little deserve the epithet. On this day there was no want of cheerful accessories...
