party of men ashore and cut down the cocoa-nut trees
for the sake of the fruit. This I peremptorily refused, as equally
unjust and cruel. The natives had attacked us merely for landing upon
their coast, when we attempted to take nothing away, and it was
therefore morally certain that they would have made a vigorous effort to
defend their property if it had been invaded, in which case many of them
must have fallen a sacrifice to our attempt, and perhaps also some of
our own people. I should have regretted the necessity of such a measure,
if I had been in want of the necessaries of life, and certainly it would
have been highly criminal when nothing was to be obtained but two or
three hundred of green cocoa-nuts, which would at most have procured us
a mere transient gratification.[100] I might indeed have proceeded
farther along the coast to the northward and westward, in search of a
place where the ship might have lain so near the shore as to cover the
people with her guns when they landed; but this would have obviated only
part of the mischief, and though it might have secured us, would
probably in the very act have been fatal to the natives. Besides, we had
reason to think that before such a place would have been found, we
should have been carried so far to the westward as to have been obliged
to go to Batavia, on the north side of Java, which I did not think so
safe a passage as to the south of Java, through the Streights of Sunday:
The ship also was so leaky, that I doubted whether it would not be
necessary to heave her down at Batavia, which was another reason for
making the best of our way to that place, especially as no discovery
could be expected in seas which had already been navigated, and where
every coast had been laid down by the Dutch geographers. The Spaniards,
indeed, as well as the Dutch, seem to have circumnavigated all the
islands in New Guinea, as almost every place that is distinguished in
the chart has a name in both languages. The charts with which I compared
such part of the coast as I visited, are bound up with a French work,
entitled, "Histoire des Navigationes aux Terres Australes," which was
published in 1756, and I found them tolerably exact; yet I know not by
whom, or when they were taken: And though New Holland and New Guinea are
in them represented as two distinct countries, the very history in which
they are bound up, leaves it in doubt.[101] I pretend, however, to no
more merit in this par