intercourse with these distant countries will acquire, is an interest which cannot fail to strike you. Over an extent of more than 4,000 leagues, our ships of war found no station belonging to France, none where they could obtain supplies, or repair their damages. Another special motive rendered necessary an establishment upon some of the islands of this extensive sea. The whale fishery is principally carried on in the Polynesian Archipelagos. These operations are of long duration, and while they last, our ships remain exposed to the violence and exactions of the natives of those islands. We shall give to that essential branch of our merchant navy an efficient protection, by placing it in a position to appeal on the spot to the authority and power of the sovereignty of France. "The advantages of our new settlements, even now incontestable, will hereafter acquire much higher importance. They will be very great, if a plan, which at present fixes the attention of all maritime Powers, should be carried into execution. It consists in opening between Europe and the Pacific Ocean, through the Isthmus of Panama, a track much shorter than that of Cape Horn. When ever this grand result, in which all naval Powers are interested, shall have been obtained, the So ciety Islands and the Marquesas, by being nearer to France, will rank among the most important stations of the globe. The facility of this communication will necessarily give a new impetus to navigation in the Pacific Ocean, this track being, as a communication with the Indian and China Seas, if not shorter, at least safer and of more considerable commercial interest. Our new possessions, happily situated as a store-house in these long voyages, will be used as a place of resort for the navigators of all countries. In "The elements of an active commerce already exist in Oceania, but every impediment to its development must be removed. order to attain this end, the best method to adopt, is freedom of trade in its fullest extent. With the exception of arms and munitions of war, which the government will have the power to prohibit, a free entry will be afforded to all imports. These islands, with their free ports, will become entrepóts, where our vessels will dis charge their cargoes, in order to forward them as required to the coasts of Mexico, Chile, and Peru, where we already find a most important field for trade; and to those Archipelagos, which, under the combined influence of the maritime powers, are rising into civilization." CHRONICLE. DECEMBER, 1841. IRACULOUS PRESERV- rock on which the ill-fated Albion 3. MIRA immediately broke into three or four pieces; and the last which the captain knew of his men, for they kept calling to each other as long as the seas permitted their heads to be above water, was the feeling one of their hands, as they held on to the wreck under water -During an awful storm that raged throughout the night, the sloop Perseverance, Morris Evans master, of Carnarvon, with a mate, one seaman and a boy, bound from South Yarmouth to Dublin, when between the South Bishops and the Smalls, carried away her bowsprit, and immediately after, a sea-such was the dreadful state they broke on board that swept the decks, carrying away her bulwarks and chain cables, stoving her boat, and making her a complete wreck, with every sea sweeping her fore and aft. She was now driving before a furious north-wester, with her mainsail set; the captain, mate, and the man, took refuge in the cabin, up to their necks in water; but the boy, in endeavouring to follow their example, was washed overboard by a sea, and his wailing cries were instantly lost amidst the tumultuous howling of the troubled deep. At about twelve o'clock at night the vessel struck in a small cove on a part of the coast near St. Bride's, in the Jack Sound, called the Deer Park, where the cliffs are nearly in perpendicular height from 150 to 200 feet (nearly opposite to the VOL. LXXXIV. were in on the instant when the vessel struck! The captain was instantaneously washed overboard, when he grasped one of the pieces of the mainmast, and was washed with it into a cavern in the perpendicular cliffs, and it was carried away the instant that he loosened his grasp, and had got a little beyond the force of the waves. This cavern at the high spring-tide, is many feet under water. There he lay, holding on to the rocks, with the sca bursting and bubbling over him, till the next morning. This was the time of the neaptides, with a gale of wind blowing right upon the coast-when the tide recedes so little as to make it an impossibility for any one to get out of this cove save by climbing these perpendicular cliffs, or of getting out of the cavern, except B |