guarantees them yet
another source of greatness and of wealth. Note: the seals in question,
distinguished by the English under the name of sea elephants, are
sometimes 25 or 30 feet long. They attain the bulk of a large cask: and
the enormous mass of the animal seems, so to say, to be composed of
solid, or rather coagulated, oil. The quantity extracted from one seal is
prodigious. I have collected many particulars on this subject.

(11) A third fishery, even more lucrative and important, is that of the
skins of various varieties of seal which inhabit most of the islands of
Bass Strait, all the Furneaux Islands, all the islands off the eastern
coast of Van Diemen's Land, and all those on the south-west coast of New
Holland, and which probably will be found upon the archipelagos of the
eastern portion of this vast continent. The skins of these various
species of seal are much desired in China. The sale of a shipload of
these goods in that country is as rapid as it is lucrative. The ships
engaged in the business are laden on their return to Europe with that
precious merchandise of China which gold alone can extract from the
clutch of its rapacious possessors. Accordingly, one of the most
important objects of the mission of Lord Macartney* to China, (* Note 34:
Lord Macartney's embassy to China, 1792 to 1794, was, says the Cambridge
Modern History (2 718), "productive only of a somewhat better
acquaintance between the two Powers and an increased knowledge on the
part of British sailors of the navigation of Chinese waters.") that of
developing in that country a demand for some of the economic and
manufacturing products of England, so as to relieve that country of the
necessity of sending out such a mass of specie--that interesting object
which all the ostentatious display of the commercial wealth of Europe had
not been able to attain, and all the astute diplomacy of Lord Macartney
had failed to achieve--the English have recently accomplished. Masters of
the trade in these kinds of skin, they are about to become masters of the
China trade. The coin accumulated in the coffers of the Government or of
private people will no longer be sunk in the provinces of China. That
advantage is incontestably one of the greatest that they have derived
from their establishment at Port Jackson.

(12) This augmentation of distant possessions is likely to occasion a
fresh development in the British Navy. The practice of voyaging round the
world