For the last time we shall quote the same eminent author, and at page 205 of vol. 1. of his work, we read:—
"After proceeding some distance, we found a cave larger than the one seen this morning; of its actual size, however, I have no idea, for being pressed for time I did not attempt to explore it, having merely ascertained that it contained no paintings. I was moving on when we observed a profile of a human face and head, cut out in a sandstone rock which fronted the cave; this rock was so hard that to have removed such a large portion of it with no better tool than a knife and hatchet made of stone, such as the Australian natives generally possess, would have been a work of very great labour. The head was two feet in length, and sixteen inches in breadth in the broadest part; the depth of the profile increased gradually from the edges where it was nothing, to the centre where it was an inch and a half. The ear was rather badly placed, but otherwise the whole of the work was good, and far superior to what a savage race could be supposed capable of executing. The only proof of antiquity that it bore about it was that all the edges of the cutting were rounded and perfectly smooth, much more so than they could have been from any other cause than long exposure to atmospheric influences.
"After having made a sketch of this head I returned to the party."
Now let us examine, without prepossession or prejudice, this remarkable sculpture, THE ONLY HEAD SCULPTURED IN ROCK EVER FOUND IN AUSTRALIA.
This profile is that of an European, the purity of the lines, the perfect shape of the head, the straight and well-formed nose, the finely-cut lips, the round chin, represent the most exact type of an European head that it could be possible to imagine. Indeed, the fact alone that the natives have no means of cutting out such a sculpture in the rock, is enough to induce one to seek elsewhere for its author, and the head is certainly not that of a Malay; the type is European, and that of the purest.
We shall go no further with this discussion, which the appearance of this sculptured profile of an European head closes on our behalf better than all volumes would do, and resume it in a few words.
De Gonneville, carried away by storms into unknown seas, lands on a coast which he estimates is situated to the south of India, and the Islands of Spices, and not far from the true course to the East Indies; at the entrance of a fine river, and in a fertile country, whose inhabitants he describes. They were in all probability of Malay stock, and there is no difficulty so far to understand his female relative having married a person of that race, the remnants of which have been met with since by other travellers.
Three hundred and thirty-five years after De Gonneville's voyage, King and Grey explore in the north-west part of Australia, a country whose description well answers to that visited by De Gonneville, and NEVER SET FOOT UPON BY EUROPEANS IN THE INTERVAL. There Grey finds a river such as De Gonneville describes—a land inhabited by races that have preserved many of the customs of the "Australians" described by the Norman captain with whom, as a volunteer in the voyage, had travelled a certain Nicole Le Fevre, a man of some learning' and a kind of artist, who had pourtrayed strange beasts, etc., "utterly unknown in Christendom." In that country', at a very short distance from the coast, Grey discovers curious paintings, some strikingly resembling the pictures of saints as represented on the Church windows of the time, one of them bearing some very remarkable European letters and characters, and last of all he finds there the head of an European sculptured in the hard rock, evidently with instruments such as the natives do not possess.
What are we to conclude from these facts? That there is strong evidence that De Gonneville, who could have landed nowhere else but on Australian soil, had precisely landed on that part of the country visited by Grey, and that the paintings discovered are the work of some of his companions.
But although such evidence is strong indeed, it is not yet absolutely perfect, even for one desirous of solving the problem of fixing the exact position of the spot visited by the Norman sailor. Others, perhaps, may give a different interpretation to the figures and the characters represented above; they are, however, worthy of attracting notice, and if the result of this investigation is only to draw the attention of those who are interested in ascertaining the previous history of the country they inhabit and love, be they members of scientific societies or of colonial governments, the task undertaken will not prove a thankless one.