"On the 10th, at daybreak," says he, "the land was discovered, bearing from east to North-West.

Long before dawn a delicious odour informed us of the vicinity of this land, which formed a great gulf open to the south-east.

I have seldom seen a country which presented so beautiful a prospect; a low land, divided into plains and groves, extended along the seashore, and afterwards rose like an amphitheatre up to the mountains, whose summits were lost in the clouds.

There were three ranges of mountains, and the highest chain was distant upwards of twenty-five leagues from the shore.

The melancholy condition to which we were reduced* neither allowed us to spend some time in visiting this beautiful country, which by all appearances was rich and fertile, nor to stand to the westward in search of a passage to the south of New Guinea, which might open to us a new and short route to the Moluccas by way of the Gulf of Carpentaria.