At nine o’clock on the morning of the third day from the time occupied in the last chapter, a hand stationed on the look-out in the fore-top sent a roar from the sky:

“Land right ahead!”

In half an hour’s time it was to be seen from the deck, a mere blue vision stretching eel-shaped, upon the horizon.

Australia! the great and wealthy continent of which there were men then living whose fathers could recall the time when this vast tract of land had no place in the world’s knowledge of the Pacific.

Of all sensations, the first glimpse of the land towards which a ship has been steering for weeks and weeks, with seldom even so much as a passing sail to relieve the monotony of the ocean, is the most thrilling. The oldest seaman will desert his bunk or hammock to make for the forecastle and have a look at the dim cloud. The pale-faced steward, seldom seen on deck, sneaks from his berth in the steerage redolent of lukewarm soup and resonant with the ceaseless clattering of crockery, to peer over the bulwarks at the far-off coast. If there be passengers on board, you are sensible of an uneasy movement among them, strangely suggestive of mingled excitement and reluctance, as though they were at once eager and loath to quit their floating home, the familiar cabin in which so many hours have been passed, the white decks which have become to them what the pavement in front of your house is to you. The ship is endeared to them, and the hold she has upon them is felt now that they shall shortly leave her. How nobly she has struggled with the waves and the wind! What grandeur she assumes when thought of with respect to the immense universe of water she has traversed in safety! But a few weeks ago, one might say, she was in English waters, and now she is breasting the waves of the antipodes, raising her graceful canvas to the heavens with almost conscious elegance, as though exulting in the knowledge of the feat she has performed—a feat of which no repetition can ever diminish the wonder, the courage, and the triumph.

And now the land loomed large and bold upon the horizon, a gray and iron coast, inhospitable enough to scare away all rash adventurers, one might think, in search of new homes and brighter fortunes.

What was Captain Duff about! Did he mean to run his ship bow on to those granite-coloured cliffs stretching to right and left, with their swart base marginated with a line of crawling foam? Screw your eyes up attentively, and you will see two breaks in the shore. The bowsprit of the “Jessie Maxwell” heads for the break on the right. Slowly the coast grows clearer. That break on the left is but a deceptive hollow, with a vast block of rock lying in the blue, shark-studded water, upon which, many years later, a noble ship called the “Dunbar” shall be wrecked, and, of a great crowd of human beings, but one man saved.

And now behold the miracle of the seaman’s art!

For weeks and weeks, counting from the English summer, the “Jessie Maxwell” has been surrounded by the ocean, directed through light and darkness, through bright sunshine and howling tempests charged with sleet and spray, by no more than a little needle, but gifted with a steadfastness of intelligence more unerring than the loftiest that humanity is endowed with. For weeks and weeks this little needle points and the helmsman obeys, and onwards the ship sails through hundreds of miles of water, until one morning those on board awake and look ahead, and lo! there is the land, with the ship’s head pointing accurately towards the little cleft in the coast through which the great Bay of Sydney is to be entered.

This bay is a vision of beauty. No hint of its existence is given until you have sailed into it. The effect produced by the contrast between the rugged, iron, sterile coast beheld from the sea, and the loveliness of deep blue water and summer islands richly wooded, and green hills sloping to the water’s edge, and sandy creeks, with the heavy bush to the right, and the tropical splendour of vegetation that meets the eye upon the outlying land—all which form the noble bay into which you pass through the narrowest and most repellent of headlands—is not to be described. One might think that Nature had stooped to the human device of a pantomimic surprise, and reared the bleak Australian coast in this latitude for no other reason than to give effect to the grand transformation scene she exhibits behind it.

To the eyes of Holdsworth, wearied by the eternal glancing or leaping of the sea, how sweet and refreshing were the green shores, the houses peeping out here and there upon the outskirts of the bush, the trees overhanging the margin of the islands like living things never weary of admiring their own shapes! Here and there a boat rowed from shore to shore. Small coasters lay at anchor, their sails clewed up but not furled, and the men lounging drowsily aboard of them. Hark to the humming of the locusts!—comparable to nothing so much as the murmurs of a sleepy congregation reciting the responses in church.

Anon the city of Sydney opened; at its foot a great semicircular basin of water, with the masts of many vessels standing out against the farther houses, and the green hills backing all. How picturesque from a distance the combined colours of the streaming flags, the white-fronted houses, the green of the hills, and the heavenly azure of the sky! All the way on the left ran the houses into the country beyond, and close at hand were shaggy abutments of wooded land, with deep shady recesses through which the sunlight sparkled on the emerald ground, with many boats upon the water to give variety and life to the picture. Far, far away, almost like an echo from the old world, the strains of a band playing a hearty English melody could be heard.

No thoughtful man can behold such a colony as this without finding something at once pathetic and inspiring in the spectacle. A great rugged continent, lying hidden in the distant Pacific main, is encountered by human enterprise; and in a few years we witness towns and cities thronging its seaboard, and all along the surf-beaten shores is heard the hum of industry. We mark the inalienable love of home, of the mother-country, in a thousand tokens, and find the measureless ocean bridged by sympathy and memory, and Old England renewed in such forms as make us scarcely conscious of our distance from it; though sometimes thought itself, when the thousand leagues of waters that flow between are remembered, seems almost powerless to present our beloved home to us as something real, so vague, so dim, so inaccessibly remote has it become since we left its shores. Signs of remembered things are about us. We think of the home love which gave that name to that street; which reared yonder house in the likeness of one in the far-off land, that enshrines the emigrant’s most precious memories of childhood; which parcelled out yonder garden in the fashion of the little tract of land in the distant country, whose soil is sacred to the mind as the favoured retreat of a beloved parent. The very nomenclature by which the colonist dignifies some mean spot or small building by the name of a noble city or a spacious edifice in the old home, is full of pathos, since it can signify no more than a deep-rooted affection (not to be weakened nor divorced by the harshest recollection of the impracticable struggle for bread which drove whole families across the sea) for England, and a tender impulse to give permanent form to memories which survive through many generations, and create loyalty and patriotism among a people who owe nothing to the country and the sovereign whom they reverence, and would at any moment serve. British faces are around us; British accents sound in our ears; and on all sides we behold signs of that British courage, audacity, and genius, which grow sublime under our gathering appreciation of the difficulties which have been conquered and the triumphs which have been achieved.