coast, except when we took our last view of it with our glasses, and then we thought we saw a man with a bow and arrows, in which it is possible we might be mistaken.  We saw, however, at Botany Bay, a shield or target of an oblong shape, about three feet long, and eighteen inches broad, which was made of the bark of a tree:  This was fetched out of a hut by one of the men that opposed our landing, who, when he ran away, left it behind him, and upon taking it up, we found that it had been pierced through with a single pointed lance near the center.  These shields are certainly in frequent use among the people here; for though this was the only one that we saw in their possession, we frequently found trees from which they appeared manifestly to have been cut, the marks being easily distinguished from those that were made by cutting buckets:  Sometimes also we found the shields cut out, but not yet taken off from the tree, the edges of the bark only being a little raised by wedges, so that these people appear to have discovered that the bark of a tree becomes thicker and stronger by being suffered to remain upon the trunk after it has been cut round.

The canoes of New Holland are as mean and rude as the houses.  Those on the southern part of the coast are nothing more than a piece of bark, about twelve feet long, tied together at the ends, and kept open in the middle by small bows of wood:  Yet in a vessel of this construction we once saw three people.  In shallow water they are set forward by a pole, and in deeper by paddles, about eighteen inches long, one of which the boatman holds in each hand; mean as they are, they have many conveniencies; they draw but little water, and they are very light, so that they go upon mud banks to pick up shell-fish, the most important use to which they can be applied, better perhaps than vessels of any other construction.  We observed, that in the middle of these canoes there was a heap of sea-weed, and upon that a small fire; probably that the fish may be broiled and eaten the moment it is caught.

The canoes that we saw when we advanced farther to the northward, are not made of bark, but of the trunk of a tree hollowed, perhaps by fire.  They are about fourteen feet long, and, being very narrow, are fitted with an outrigger to prevent their oversetting.  These are worked with paddles, that are so large as to require both hands to manage one of them:  The outside is wholly unmarked by any tool, but at each end the wood is left longer at the top than at the bottom, so that there is a projection beyond the hollow part resembling the end of a plank; the sides are tolerably thin, but how the tree is felled and fashioned, we had no opportunity to learn.  The only tools that we saw among them are an adze, wretchedly made of stone, some small pieces of the same substance in form of a wedge, a wooden mallet, and some shells and fragments of coral.  For polishing their throwing-sticks, and the points of their lances, they use the leaves