At Dirk Hartog's
Road, he found, as before-mentioned, the tin plate left by that captain,
and after a careful examination of the coast so far as the North-west
Cape, left for Batavia.
Dampier now reappears on the scene in charge of the ROEBUCK--a ship sent
out by the English Government in 1699. His account of his voyage is very
minute and circumstantial, but he still retains his aversion to the
unfortunate natives, of whom he always speaks with the greatest scorn.
Some of his statements are slightly doubtful, to say the least of it, as,
for instance, one concerning the capture of a large shark, "in which we
found the head and bones of a hippopotamus, [Note, below] the hairy lips
of which were still sound and not putrified, and the jaw was also firm,
out of which we pluckt a great many teeth, two of them eight inches long
and as big as a man's thumb, small at one end and a little crooked, the
rest not above half so long."
[Note: M. Malte Brun calls him "the learned and faithful Dampier," and,
in corroboration of the hippopotamus story, mentions that Bailly, when
exploring the Swan River, "heard a bellowing much louder than that of an
ox from among the reeds on the river side, which made him suspect that a
large quadruped lay somewhere near him.
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