The Vagaries Of Nature
Nature seems to have her fitful, frightful, and funny moods, as well as
all her children. Now she gets up a stone bridge, the gigantic
proportions and the symmetrical development of which attract great
attention from all tourists and historians who venture into or speak of
"old Virginia." The old dame goes down far into the bowels of Mother
Earth, in Kentucky, and builds herself, silently and alone, a stupendous
under-
round palace, that laughs to scorn the puny efforts of man in
that branch of business. She gets up sugar-loaf mountains, pillars of
salt, great granite breastworks, and stone towers; hews out
figure-heads, old men's noses on the beetling cliffs of New Hampshire,
and throws up rocky palisades along the Hudson, that win wonder and
delight from the floating million. Instances out of all number might be
raked up, home and abroad, to show how the old dame has cut didoes in
the prosecution of her manifold duties. But in Australia, it would seem,
nature has taken most especial pains to appear slightly ridiculous or
very eccentric.
Old Captain Rocksalt informs us--and there is always wit, wisdom, and
truth in the old man's stories--that he made voyages to Australia many
times within the past thirty years, and having visited about all the
sea-ports of the Continent, lived and almost died in Australia, his
notes are worthy of attention. Capt. Cook discovered and named Botany
Bay, the name originating from the fact that the land was covered with
a luxurious growth of Botanical specimens. The Dutch discovered and
named Van Diemen's Land. The English at once concluded to make Botany
Bay a penal colony, and the first living freight of criminals and
soldiers sent out, was some 700 in number, in 1788; but Capt. Phillip,
the commander of the fleet, being dissatisfied with the looks of Botany
Bay, hunted up a better place, and sailed to it. When Capt. Cook was
cruising off there, one of his sailors, on the look out, cried, "Land
ho!"
Cook was over his wine and beef, in the cabin, and it took him some time
to "tumble up" on deck.
"Where the deuce is your land, eh?" bawls the old cruiser.
"Larboard beam, sir!" responds the "lookout;" and, sure enough, a long,
faint streak of land was visible from deck. The "lookout" announced a
harbor, head-lands, &c.; but the rum old captain, not being able to see
any such indication, with a chuckle, says he--
"You booby! harbor, eh? Ha, ha! well, we'll call it a port, you powder
monkey--Port Jackson!"
And faith, so the lookout, Jackson, became sponsor to the finest harbor
in all Australia; for Capt. Phillip, upon rediscovering the harbor, took
his fleet into it, and then and there began the now flourishing city of
Sydney.
Australia is an Island, lying opposite another--New Zealand. It is on
the Indian Ocean, south side, while the east opens to the Pacific.
Australia claims to contain a superficial area of over three million
square miles, part desert, rather mountainous, and all being in one of
the finest climates on the face of the earth. The air is dry, the soil
light and sandy; the high winds stir up the dust and fine sand, and make
ophthalmy the only positive ill peculiar to the country. Sheep-grazing,
wool-growing, and boiling down sheep and cattle for tallow was the great
business of the country from its earliest settlement up to 1851, when
the gold fever swept the land.
Australia was inhabited by over 100,000 natives, black cannibals of the
ugliest description; but at this day not a hundred of them remain. The
natives were exceeding stupid and useless; the first settlers, who, as
Capt. Rocksalt observes, were jail-birds and scape-gallows, were not
very dainty in dealing with the obnoxious natives; so they determined to
get rid of them as fast and easy as possible. For this purpose, they
used to gather a horde of them together, and give them poisoned bread
and rum, and so kill them off by hundreds. It was a sharp sort of
practice, but the ends seemed to justify the means.
Gold, "laying around loose," as it did, was, no doubt, discovered
years ago; but not in quantities to lead the ignorant to believe money
could be made hunting it. People may be stupid; but it requires a far
greener capacity than most of them would confess to--at least, ten years
ago--to make them believe gold could be picked up in chunks out in the
open fields.
But Australia began to be populated; by convicts first; and then by far
better people; though the very worst felons sent out often became decent
and respectable men, which is indeed a great "puff," we think, for the
healthfulness of the climate. A convict shepherd now and then used to
bring into Sydney small lumps of gold and sell them to the watch-makers,
and as he refused to say where or how he got them, it was suspicioned
that he had secreted guineas or jewelry somewhere, and occasionally
melted them for sale.
However, one day the thing broke out, nearly simultaneously, all over
Australia. Gold was lying around everywhere. The rocks, ledges, bars,
gullies, and river-banks, which were daily familiar to the eyes of
thousands, all of a sudden turned up bright and shining gold. Old Dame
Nature must have laughed in her sleeve to see the fun and uproar--the
scrabble and rush she had caused in her vast household.
"It did beat all!" exclaims the old Captain. "In forty-eight hours
Sydney was half-depopulated, Port Phillip nearly desolate, while the
interior villages or towns--Bathurst, &c., were run clean out!"
Stores were shut up, the clerks running to the mines, and the
proprietors after the clerks. Mechanics dropped work and put out;
servants left without winking, leaving people to wait on themselves;
doctors left what few patients they had, and bolted for the fields of
Ophir; lawyers packed up and cut stick, following their clients and
victims to the brighter fields of "causes" and effects. The newspapers
became so short-handed that dailies were knocked into weeklies, and the
weeklies into cocked hats, or something near it--mere eight-by-ten
"handbills."
These "discoveries" wrought as sudden as singular a revolution in men,
manners, and things. As we said before, Australia was the very apex of
singularities in the way of Dame Nature's fancy-work, long before the
gold mania broke out; but now she seemed bent on a general and
miscellaneous freak, making the staid, matter-of-fact Englishmen as full
of caprice as the land they were living in.
"Only look at it!" exclaims the Captain: "the day comes in the middle of
our nights! When we're turning in at home, they are turning out in
Australia. Summer begins in the middle of winter; and for snow storms
they get rain, thunder and lightning. About the time we are getting used
to our woollens and hot fires of the holidays, they are roasting with
heat, and going around in linen jackets and wilted dickeys. The land is
full of flowers of every hue, gay and beautiful, gorgeous and sublime to
look at, but as senseless to the smell and as inodorous as so many dried
chips. The swans are numerous, but jet black. The few animals in the
country are all provided with pockets in their 'overcoats,' or skin, in
which to stow their young ones, or provender. Some of the rivers really
appear," says the Captain, "to run up stream! I was completely taken
down," says the Captain, "by a bunch of the finest pears you ever saw.
Myself and a friend were up the country, and I sees a fine pear tree,
breaking down with as elegant-looking fruit as I ever saw.
"'Well, by ginger,' says I, 'them are about as fine pears as I've seen
these twenty years!'
"'Yes,' says my friend, who was a resident in the country; 'perhaps you
would like to try a few?'
"'That I shall,' says I; so I ups and knocks down a few, and it was a
job to get them down, I tell you; and when I had one between my teeth I
gave it a nip--see there, two teeth broke off," says the Captain,
showing us the fact; "the fine pears were mere wood!
"The country is well supplied with fine birds; but they are dumb as
beetles, sir--never heard a bird sing or whistle a note in Australia.
The trees make no shade, the leaves hang from the stems edge up, and
look just as if they had been whipped into shreds by a gale of wind; and
you rarely see a tree with a bit of bark on it.
"But what completely upset me, was the cherries, sir--fine cherries,
plenty of them, but the stones were all on the outside! The bees have
no stings, the snakes no fangs, and the eagles are all white. The north
wind is hot, the south wind cold. Our longest days are in summer; but in
Australia, sir, the shortest days come in summer, and the longest in
winter; and," says the Captain, "I can't begin to tell you how many
curious didoes nature seems to cut, in that country; but, altogether,
it's one of the queerest countries I ever did see, by ginger!"
And we have come to the conclusion--it is. If the gold continues to
"turn up" in such boulders and "nuggets" as recently reported, Australia
is bound to be the richest and most densely populated, as well as
queerest country known to man.