PRINCE OF WALES' ISLAND.

Prince of Wales' Island, or Pulo Penany, is situated in the straits or Malacca, about two miles from the west coast of the Malay peninsula The India Company in 1784, came to the resolution of establishing a settlement there. The island is about seventeen miles long, by ten broad: its northern extremity runs nearly parallel with the main land, at a distance of about two miles, by which a fine channel is formed, where the largest fleet may ride in perfect safety; the height of the surrounding mountains acting as a barrier against the force of the prevailing winds In fact, the advantages attending this island, both in a political and commercial view, are obvious.

JAVA.

Java is a large island, extending in length nearly seven hundred mues, and averaging in breadth ninety; and it is separated from Sumatra by the strait of Sunda. Toward the close of the sixteenth century, Cornelius Houtman, a Dutchman, conducted four vessels to Java by the Cape of Good Hope; and his prudence procured him an interview with the princi pal king of the island; but the Portuguese created him some enemies. Having got the better in several skirmishes in which he was engaged, he returned with his small squadron to Holland, where, though he brought but little wealth, he raised much expectation. He brought away some Negroes, Chinese, and inhabitants of Malabar; a native of Malacca, a Japanese, and Abdul, a pilot of the Guzerat, a man of great abilities, and perfectly acquainted with the coasts of India.

The account given by Houtman encouraged the merchants of Amsterdam to form the plan of a settlement at Java, which, at the same time that it would throw the pepper trade into their hands, would place them also near the islands that produce the more valuable spices, and facilitate their communication with China and Japan. Admiral Van Neck was therefore sent on this important expedition with eight vessels, and arrived safe at Java, where he found the inhabitants prejudiced against his nation. They fought and negotiated by turns. At length they were permitted to trade and, in a short time, loaded four vessels with spices and linens. The ad miral, with his fleet, sailed to the Moluccas, where he learned that the natives of the country had forced the Portuguese to abandon some of the places in which they had settled, and that they only waited for a favour able opportunity of expelling them from the rest. He established factories in several of these islands, entered into a treaty with some of the kings, and returned to Europe laden with riches.

In 1602, the states-general formed the Dutch India Company. It was invested with authority to make peace or war with the eastern princes, to erect forts, maintain garrisons, and to nominate officers for the conduct o the police and the administration of justice. The company, which had no parallel in antiquity, and was the pattern of all succeeding societies of the kind, set out with great advantages; and, soon after its establishment, they fitted but for India fourteen ships and some yachts, under the command of Admiral Warwick, whom the Hollanders look upon as the founder of their commerce, and of their colonies, in the East. He buil a factory in this island, and secured it by fortifications. He had frequent engagements with the Portuguese, in which he generally came off victo rious. A sanguinary war was the consequence of these hostilities be tween the two nations, in which the Dutch were successful.

Batavia, which, from a small beginning, has become the capital of ah lie Dutch possessions in India, has one of the best and safest harbours in the world. The city is surrounded by a rampart twenty-one feet in thickness, covered on the outside with stone, and fortified with twenty-two bastions. This rampart is environed by a ditch, forty-three yards over, and full of water. The river Jucutra runs through the midst of the city, and forms fifteen canals of running water, adorned with evergreens. The inhabitants consist of Dutch, French, Portuguese, Javanese, Chinese, Malays, Negroes, and many others. Coffee, sugar and spices are produced here in great abundance: and, together, it may be said to be one of the tnost valuable colonies belonging to any European nation. The island was taken by a British force from India in 1811, and held till 1816, when it was restored to the Dutch.

BORNEO.

Borneo is one of the largest islands in the world, being fifteen hundred miles in circumference. It is seated under the equator, and occupies nearly the centre of the eastern archipelago. The west and north-east sides of it are a desert, and the east is comparatively little known- The inland parts are mountainous; and the south-east, for many leagues together, is an unwholesome morass.

The Portuguese, who first discovered Borneo, had been in the Indies thirty years before they knew anything of it more than the name and its situation, by reason of their frequently passing by its coast. At length Captain Edward Corral had orders to examine it with attention. From thence becoming acquainted with its worth, they made frequent voyages thither. They found the coast inhabited by Malayan Moors, who had certainly established themselves there by conquest; but the interior and part of the north-west coast are peopled by a savage race, believed to be the aborigines, and called Dyaks. They use long shallow canoes hollowed out of a single tree; and kill wild animals for their food, by shooting them with arrows blown through a tube. They wear very little clothing, and have all the habits and superstitions of the most savage tribes. Borneo is rich in valuable minerals, and it is the only island of the eastern archipelago where diamonds are found. The climate is similar to that of Ceylon, and those parts of the island which are under cultivation are decidedly fertile.

CELEBES.

This is a large island, under the equator; the length and breath have not been accurately computed; but the circumference, taken at a medium, is about eight hundred miles. The principal Dutch settlement is Macassar, which contains Fort Rotterdam, the residence of the governor: they hare also a fort at a place called Jampandam.

There are several independent tribes or nations of Celebes, each having their peculiar form of government. Among them the Tuwadju tribe, inhabiting the body of the island, are distinguished as an enterprising and ingenious people. Thefts, robberies, and murder are common with all the tribes. The island was taken by the British in 1814, but restored to Hol land in 1816.

THE MOLUCCAS, OR SPICE ISLANDS.

These consist of Amboyna, Ternate, Fedor, Motyr, Cilolo, and several other small islands. The Portuguese were the first Europeans who pos sessed them, but were obliged to share their advantages with the Spaniards, and at length to give up the trade almost entirely to them. These two na tions joined to oppose the Dutch in their first attempts to gain a settlement but the Dutch, assisted by the natives of the country, by degrees gained the superiority. The ancient conquerors were driven out about the year 1615, and their place supplied by others equally avaricious, though less turbulent.

As soon as the Dutch had established themselves in the Moluccas, they endeavoured to get the exclusive trade of spices into their own hands; an advantage which the nations they had just expelled were never able to procure. They skilfully availed themselves of the forts they had taken, and those they had erected, to draw the kings of Ternate and Tydor, who were masters of this archipelago, into their schemes. These princes, for a small sum of money, (little more than £3000) agreed to root out all the clove and nutmeg trees in the islands under their dominions; and a garrison of seven hundred men was appointed to secure the performance of the treaty.

At Amboyna they engrossed the whole cultivation of cloves. They allotted to the inhabitants four thousand parcels of land, on each of which they were compelled to plant one hundred and twenty-five trees, amounting, in the whole, to five hundred thousand and the collective produce averages about one million of pounds. Amboyna is about thirty-two miles long and ten broad, and is divided into two parts, a greater and a lesser peninsula: the former is called Hiton, and the latter, Letymor.

The massacre of the English at Amboyna, by the Dutch, in 1621, was attended with much cruelty. We have before observed, that the Dutch dispossessed the Portuguese of Amboyna in 1615. They did not, how ever, become masters of the island at once. The English had here five factories, and lived under the protection of the Dutch castle; holding themselves safe, in respect of the friendship existing between the two nations. But great differences arose between the English and Dutch colonists; at length a treaty was concluded, in 1619, by which the concerns of both were regulated, and certain measures agreed upon for preventing future disputes. Some short time after, the Dutch pretended that the English and Amboynese had formed a conspiracy to dispossess them of one of their forts. The plot, it was alleged, had been discovered by a Japanese and Portuguese in the English service, who were most inhumanly tortured into such confessions as their cruel inquisitors though! proper. Upon this evidence, they immediately accused the English factors of the pretended conspiracy. Some of them they imprisoned; and others they loaded with irons, and sent on board their ships; seizing at the same time all the English merchandise, with their writings and books. These acts of violence were followed by a scene of horror unexampled in the punishment of offenders. The torments to which they put the innocent factors, are too shocking to relate; and those who did not die under the agonies of pain, were consigned to the executioner. The whole of the transaction affords testimony that the Hollanders did it with no other view, than of monopolizing the trade of the Spice Islands. They acted a similar tragedy at Poleron, about the same time, where they put to the torture one hundred and sixty-two of the natives, whom they likewise charged with a pretended conspiracy. Until the French revolutionary war, then, the Dutch enjoyed in peace these invaluable islands, when Amboyna, and the other Moluccas, submitted to the English

THE BANDA, OR NUTMEG ISLES.

Tux Banda Isles is the general name of twelve small islands in the East Indian Archipelago. Two of them are uncultivated, and almost uninhabited; the other three claim the distinction of being the only islands in the world that produce the nutmeg. If we except this valuable spice, the islands of Banda are barren to a dreadful degree. The land will not produce any kind of corn, and the pith of the sago serves the natives of the country instead of bread.

This is the only settlement in the East Indian isles, that can be considered as a European colony: because it is the only one where the Europeans are proprietors of lands. The Dutch company finding that the inhabitants of Banda were savage, cruel, and treacherous, because they were impatient under their yoke, resolved to exterminate them: and their possessions were divided among the people, who procured slaves from tome of the neighbouring islands to cultivate the lands. The climate of Banda is particularly unhealthy; on which account the company attempted to transfer the culture of the nutmeg to Amboyna: but all the experiments that have been made have proved unsuccessful- The Banda Islands were discovered by the Portuguese in 1512, and colonized in 1524; but were taken by the Dutch in 1599. The English possessed themselves of them in 1610, but restored them to the Dutch in 1814

THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.

The Philippine Islands are a large group belonging to the eastern archi pelago, the principal of which is Luzon, a long, irregular, and narrow island. They were discovered by Magellan, in 1521, who called them the archipelago of St. Lazarus, as the discovery was made on that saint's day. But they were subjected, or rather part of them, to the Spaniards, by Don Louis de Velasco, in 1564, in the reign of Philip II., and derive their present name from him. The natives are supposed to be of Chinese extraction.

Manilla, the capital of the island of Luzon, and all the Philippines, is situated on the south-east part of the island, where a large river falls into the sea, and forms a noble bay, thirty leagues in compass. On the 6th of October, 1762, the English under General Draper and Admiral Cornish, took Manilla by storm, after a siege of twelve days; but, to save so fine a city from destruction, they agreed to accept a ransom, amounting to a million of pounds sterling, part of which, it is said, was never paid.

THE HISTORY OF PALESTINE,

AND, MORE PARTICULARLY OF

THE JEWS.

By the various names of Hebrews, Israelites, or Jews, were this most illustrious people of ancient times known, who dwelt in the land then

called Canaan. Contrary to the obscurity in which the origin of other nations is veiled, we have the evidence of Holy Writ for the rise, progress decline and full of the Jews. They deduced their descent from Arphax ad the son of Shem; and we have it on record that Abraham, the sixth in descent from Eber, the grandson of Arphaxad, dwelt in Assyria, but removed into Canaan or Palestine, with his family, to the intent that the true religion of God should be preserved by them, his "chosen people" amid the corruptions of the idolaters by whom they were surrounded.

The period of which we are now speaking was about two thousand years before the birth of Christ. At that time the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Syria appear to have been partly nomadic, or wandering, like the Tartars or Scythians; for we find that Abraham and his descendants sojourned in different parts of Canaan and Egypt, until the time of their protracted residence in the latter country. Abraham at his death transmitted the inheritance of the "promised land" to his son Isaac; and Isaac was succeeded in the patriarchate by his younger son Jacob, also called Israel. Jacob had twelve sons; the descendants of whom remaining distinct, constituted the twelve tribes of the Israelites in after-time. Joseph, the youngest but one of these sons, having unconsciously excited the jealousy of the rest, was sold by them as a slave, to some Arabian merchants, and carried into Egypt; there, as we read, he became known to the king, and was made his chief minister; and in a time of famine, for which his foresight had provided, he was the happy means of providing his aged father and the whole of his family an asylum in the fertile district of Goshen (b. c. 1702).

The pathetic and interesting story of "Joseph and his brethren," as narrated in the Bible, requires no comment in this place; but, we mar, perhaps, be allowed slightly to digress, in order to illustrate the case 01 Joseph's memorable rise from the condition of a slave to that of the chief ruler of Pharaoh's household. European notions of slavery very naturally picture to the mind all that is horrible, cruel, and revolting; and it would seem next to an impossibility that, by any chance, one so helpless and degraded as a slave could become an officer of trust, or—more wonderful still the chief minister and adviser of a monarch of a mighty king. dom. It is, however, remarked by Marshal Marmont, who some years ago travelled through Turkey, &c., and who evidently paid great atten tion to the condition of the people, and the customs of the countries he visited, that slaves in the East are far from being in the condition we might suppose; and it is therefore not unreasonable to believe that the kindness with which they are treated at the present day is derived from immemorial custom. He observes, "the most docile slave rejects with indignation any order that is not personally given him by his master; and he feels himself placed immeasurably above the level of a free or hired servant. He is a child of the house; and it is not unusual to see a Turk entertain so strong a predilection for a slave he has purchased, as to prefer him to his own son. He often overloads him with favors, gives him his confidence, and raises his position; and, when the master is powerful, opens to his slave the path of honour and public employment." As peaceful dwellers in the rich and fertile valleys of Goshen, the Is raelites in process of time became sufficiently numerous to excite the en vious alarm of the Egyptians; and they accordingly underwent many persecutions, until the Almighty raised up Moses as their deliverer. miracles he was empowered to work, the murmurings and backslidings of the people, their idolatrous propensities, and all other particulars relative to them while travelling through the parched and arid deserts of Arabiaform interesting portions of the sacred volume; we shall therefore pass on briefly to the death of Moses, and the delegation of power to Joshua, the acknowledged chief of the Jewish nation, B. C. 1451. Joshua was

The