# Early Voyages to Terra Australis/Introduction

INTRODUCTION.
When, at a period comparatively recent in the world's history, the discovery was made that, on the face of the as yet unmeasured ocean, there existed a western continent which rivalled in extent the world already known, it became a subject of natural enquiry whether a fact of such momentous importance could for so many thousands of years have remained a secret. Nor was the enquiry entirely without response. Amid the obscurity of the past some faint foreshadowings of the great reality appeared to be traceable. The poet with his prophecy, the sage with his mythic lore, and the unlettered seaman who, with curious eye, had peered into the mysteries of the far-stretching Atlantic, had each, as it now appeared, enunciated a problem which at length had met with its solution.
In these later days, when the enquiry has assumed gigantic proportions, and the facilities of investigation ​have been simultaneously increased, much has been done towards bringing to light the evidence of various ascertained or possible visitations from the Old World to the New, which had previously remained unknown. A summary of them has already been laid before the members of the Hakluyt Society by the editor of the present volume, in his introduction to the "Select Letters of Columbus", and requires no repetition here.
Of the future results of that momentous discovery, what human intelligence can foresee the climax? Already the northern half of that vast portion of the
​globe is mainly occupied by a section of the Anglo-Saxon family, earnest and active in the development of its native energies; and among these, again, are many who look back with eager curiosity to every yet minuter particular respecting the early history of their adopted country.
A new field of colonization, second only to that of America, and constituting, as far as is at present known, the largest island in our globe, has in far more recent times been opened up by a slow and
​gradual progress to a branch of the same expansive family. A future but little inferior in importance may, without much imaginative speculation, be assigned to them, and from them likewise may be reasonably expected the most curious inquiry as to the earliest discoveries by their predecessors of a land so vast in its dimensions, so important in its characteristics, and yet so little known or reasoned upon by the numerous generations of mankind that had passed away before them.
In endeavouring to meet this demand it must be premised, that while the main object proposed in this volume is to treat of the early indications of the island now recognized as Australia, anterior to the time of Captain Cook, it is impossible to deal with the real or supposed discoveries which may have taken place prior to that date, without referring at the same time to the discovery of the adjacent island of New Guinea and of the great southern continent, of both of which what we now call Australia was in those times regarded as forming a part. The investigation is one of the most interesting character in all its stages, but beset with doubts and difficulties arising from a variety of causes. The entire period up to the time of Dampier, ranging over two centuries, presents these two phases of obscurity; that in the sixteenth century (the period of the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries) there are indications on maps of the great probability of Australia having been already discovered, but with no written documents to confirm them; while in the ​seventeenth century there is documentary evidence that its coasts were touched upon or explored by a considerable number of Dutch voyagers, but the documents immediately describing these voyages have not been found.
That, in so far as regards the Portuguese, this obscurity is mainly due to a jealous apprehension lest lands of large extent and great importance in the southern seas might fall into the hands of rival powers to their own displacement or prejudice, may not only be suspected, but seems to be affirmable from historical evidence.
It is stated by Humboldt (Histoire de la Geographie du Noiiveau Continent tom, iv, p. 70), upon the authority of the letters of Angelo Trevigiano, secretary to Domenico Pisani, ambassador from Venice to Spain, that the kings of Portugal forbad upon pain of death the exportation of any marine chart which showed the course to Calicut. We find also in Ramusio (Discorso sopra el lihro di Odoardo Barlosa, and the Sommario delle Indie Orieniali tom. i, p. 287. b) a similar prohibition implied. He says that these books "were for many years concealed and not allowed to be published, for convenient reasons that I must not now describe." He also speaks of the great difficulty he himself had in procuring a copy, and even that an imperfect one, from Lisbon. "Tanto possono," he says, "gli interessi del principe." Again, in tom. iii of the same collection, in the account of the "Discorso d'un gran Capitano del Mare Francese del luogo di Dieppa," etc., now known to be the voyage of Jean ​Parmentier to Sumatra in 1529, and in all probability written by his companion and eulogist the poet Pierre Crignon, the covetousness and exclusiveness of the Portuguese are inveighed against. "They seem," he says, "to have drunk of the dust of the heart of king Alexander, for that they seem to think that God made the sea and the land only for them, and that if they could have locked up the sea from Finisterre to Ireland it would have been done long ago," etc.
Imputations of a similar nature are thrown on the Dutch East India Company by so well informed a man as Sir William Temple, ambassador at the Hague in the reign of Charles II, and who is a very high authority on all matters concerning the republic of the United Provinces. In his "Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning," he makes the following curious statement, which we give in extenso as otherwise bearing upon the subject of which we treat. See vol. iii of Sir William Temple's Works, p. 457.
"But the defect or negligence [in the progress of discovery since the invention of the compass] seems yet to have been greater towards the south, where we know little beyond thirty-five degrees, and that only by the necessity of doubling the Cape of Good Hope in our East India voyages: yet a continent has been long since found out within fifteen degrees to the south, about the length of Java, which is marked by the name of New Holland in the maps, and to what extent none knows, either to the south, the east, or ​the west; yet the learned have been of opinion, that there must be a balance of earth on that side of the line in some proportion to what there is on the other; and that it cannot be all sea from thirty degrees to the south pole, since we have found land to above sixty-five degrees towards the north. But our navigators that way have been confined to the roads of trade, and our discoveries bounded by what we can manage to a certain degree of gain. And I have heard it said among the Dutch, that their East India Company have long since forbidden, and under the greatest penalties, any further attempts of discovering that continent, having already more trade in those parts than they can turn to account, and fearing some more populous nation of Europe might make great establishments of trade in some of those unknown regions, which might ruin or impair what they have already in the Indies."
Although the statement of so well informed and so impartial a man as Sir William might almost be considered as conclusive, the Dutch have very naturally been unwilling to abide by this severe judgment. An indignant remonstrance against the imputation that they secreted and suppressed the accounts of their early voyages, was published in August 1824, in vol. ii of the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, by Mr. J. van Wijck Roelandszoon, who attributed the origin of this charge to ignorance of the Dutch language on the part of those who made it. In vindication of his assertions he referred to the publication, in 1618, of Linschoten's voyages both to the North ​and to the East Indies, also of Schouten and Lemaire's Circumnavigation of the Globe in 1615-18, which was published in 1646. He referred to the fact that the voyages of Van Noort, l'Hermite, and Spilbergen had also been published, and stated that, generally speaking, such had been the case with all the voyages of the Dutch as early as the year 1646, and that their discoveries were exactly laid down in the 1660 edition of the maps of P. Goos.
He furthermore announced (in reply to an invitation which had been given to the learned men of Holland, to fill up the gaps in their history which had been complained of), that one of the learned societies of Holland had offered a prize for a careful essay on the discoveries of the Dutch mariners.
In publishing this remonstrance, the editor of the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages judiciously observed, that if the reproach of jealousy which applied to the Portuguese, did not apply to the Dutch, it was at least true that some sort of carelessness had prevented either the preservation or the publication of a great number of Dutch narratives, amongst which he quoted those of De Nuyts, Van Vlaming, etc., to the coasts of New Holland, We must not, however, lose sight of the fact, that Sir William Temple's charge of want ​of liberality is directed, not against the Dutch in general, but only against the East India Company; and further, that it contains two different imputations; first, that the Company forbade exploration; and secondly, that they prohibited the publication of those already made.
As to the first of these two charges it may have been just. The commercial spirit of the seventeenth century had a general character of narrowness, from which the East India Company was not exempt. The conduct here imputed to them was in accordance with the regular and wholesale destruction of spices, by which they tried to keep up the value of this commodity. Too much importance, however, ought not to be attached even to Sir William's testimony, when, as in the present case, it stands entirely alone. Every hostile statement with regard to the East India Company made in Sir William's time, may be regarded as at least likely to have been dictated by party spirit. The directors of the East India Company were so closely connected with the ruling but unpopular party presided over by the De Witts, that the enemies of the one were also the enemies of the others, and among these enemies there were a number of the most eminent men, many of them distinguished geographers.
As to the second charge, it must be allowed in justice to the Company that such secrecy as is here imputed to them is not to be traced in their general conduct. Commelyn, the compiler of the celebrated Begin ende Voortgangh, published in 1646, had ​undoubtedly access to the Company's archives, and he discloses many facts which the Company would seem much more interested to hide than what meagre knowledge they possessed of Australia; Godfried, Udemans, Dr. O. Dapper, Witsen, Valentyn, and besides these a host of map-makers and geographers, were largely indebted to the Company for geographical materials. If we may form any judgment from the dedications we find in books of the period, we must consider their encouragement of the study of their dominions as almost on a par with that afforded at the present day by the English East India Company.
The fact that many accounts of Australian voyages which the Company possessed were never published, may be accounted for in a much simpler and more honourable manner. The Dutch voyages and travels that were published were plainly intended for a large circle of readers, and were got up as cheaply as possible. Thus, though thousands and thousands of copies were sold, they have all now become scarce. A voyage which did not contain, strange adventures or striking scenes, had no chance of popularity and remained unpublished. Thus, among other instances, a picturesque account of Japan was published in the Begin ende Voortgangh, whilst the extremely important account of De Vries's voyage to the same part of the world, which is far richer in geographical materials than in interesting incidents, has remained in manuscript till recently edited by Captain Leupe, of the Dutch navy.
​It is with pleasure that we indulge the hope that the veil which has thus hung over these valuable materials is likely, before very long, to be entirely removed. The archives of the Dutch East India Company, a yet unsifted mass of thousands of volumes, and myriads of loose papers, have a short time since been handed over to the State Archives at the Hague, where the greatest liberality is shown in allowing access to the treasures they possess. Meanwhile the editor of the present volume need hardly plead any excuse for not having attempted what no foreigner, be his stay in Holland ever so long, could possibly accomplish; and he must leave to those who will take up this matter after him, the satisfaction of availing themselves of materials the importance of which he knows, and the want of which he deeply deplores.
As has been already stated, in the earlier and more indistinct periods of Australian discovery, even when some portions of the vast island had been already lighted on, it remained a doubt whether New Guinea and the newly seen lands did not form part of a great southern continent, in which tradition in the first place, and subsequent discoveries, had already established a belief.
The very existence of the belief in an extensive southern continent at those early periods presents a twofold cause of doubt. It engendered at the time the supposition that every island to the south of what was previously known, and of which the north part only had been seen, formed a portion of that continent; ​while to us who, from this distance of time, look back for evidence, the inaccurate representation of such discoveries on maps, especially in or near the longitude of Australia (for longitude could be but laxly noticed in those days) leaves the doubt whether that continent may not have been visited at the period thus represented. Hence, manifestly, it will be requisite to bear well in mind this broadly accepted belief in the existence of a great southern continent, if we would form a right judgment respecting those supposed indications of Australia which are presented on maps of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries.
Among the very early writers, the most striking quotation that the editor has lighted upon in connection with the southern continent, is that which occurs in the Astronomicon of Manilius, lib. i, lin. 234 et seq., where, after a lengthy dissertation, he says:
"Ex quo colligitur terrarum forma rotunda: Hanc circum variæ gentes hominum atque ferarum, Aeriæque colunt volucres. Pars ejus ad arctos Eminet, Austrinis pars est habitabilis oris, Sub pedibusque jacet nostris."
The latter clause of this sentence, so strikingly applying to the lands in question, has been quoted as a motto for the title-page of this volume. The date at which Manilius wrote, though not exactly ascertained, is supposed, upon the best conclusions to be drawn from the internal evidence supplied by his poem, to be of the time of Tiberius.
Aristotle also, in his Meteorologica, lib. ii, cap. 5, has ​a passage which, though by no means so distinct as the preceding, speaks of two segments of the habitable globe, one towards the north, the other towards the south pole, and which have the form of a drum. Aratus, Strabo, and Geminus have also handed down a similar opinion, that the torrid zone was occupied throughout its length by the ocean, and that the band of sea divided our continent from another, situated, as they suppose, in the southern hemisphere.
To come down, however, to a later period, the editor is enabled, through the researches of his lamented friend, the late learned and laborious Vicomte de Santarem, to show from early manuscript maps and other geographical monuments, how this belief in the existence of a great southern continent was entertained anterior to the discoveries of the Portuguese in the Pacific Ocean. In his Essai sur l'Histoire de la Cosmographie et de la Cartographie du Moyen Age, vol. i, p. 229, the Vicomte informs us that "Certain cartographers of the middle ages, still continue to represent the Antichthone in their maps of the world in accordance with their belief that, beyond the ocean of Homer, there was an inhabited country, another temperate region, called the "opposite earth," which it was impossible to reach, principally on account of the torrid zone.
"The following are the maps of the world which represent this theory:— ​"1. The map of the world in a manuscript of Macrobius, of the tenth century; 2. The map of the world, in a manuscript of the eighth century in the Turin library; 3. That of Cecco d'Ascoli, of the thirteenth century; 4. The small map of the world, in one of the manuscripts of the thirteenth century, of l'Image du Monde, by Gauthier de Metz, MS. No. 7791, Bibliothèque Impériale, Paris; 5. That of an Icelandic manuscript of the thirteenth century, taken from the Antiquitates Americanæ; 6. That in a manuscript of Marco Polo, of the fourteenth century (1350), in the Royal Library of Stockholm; 7. That on the reverse of a medal of the fifteenth century, in the Cabinet of M. Crignon de Montigny.
"The cartographers of the middle ages have admitted that as a reality which, even to the geographers of antiquity, was merely a theory."
The earliest assertion of the discovery of a land bearing a position on early maps analogous to that of Australia has been made in favour of the Chinese, who have been supposed to have been acquainted with its coasts long before the period of European navigation to the east. Thevenot, in his Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux, part i. Preface: Paris, 1663, says: "The southern land, which now forms a fifth part of the world, has been discovered at different periods. The Chinese had knowledge of it long ago, for we see that Marco Polo marks two great islands to the south-cast of Java, which it is probable that he learned from the Chinese." The statements of ​Marco Polo, which we quote from Marsden's translation, run thus:—
"Upon leaving the island of Java, and steering a course between south and south-west seven hundred miles, you fall in with two islands, the larger of which is named Sondur, and the other Kondur. Both being uninhabited, it is unnecessary to say more respecting them. Having run the distance of fifty miles from these islands, in a south-easterly direction, you reach an extensive and rich province, that forms a part of the main land, and is named Lochac. It's inhabitants are idolaters. They have a language peculiar to themselves, and are governed by their own king, who pays no tribute to any other, the situation of the country being such as to protect it from any hostile attack. Were it assailable, the Grand Khan would not have delayed to bring it under his dominion. In this country sappan or brazil wood is produced in large quantities. Gold is abundant to a degree scarcely credible; elephants are found there; and the objects of the chase, either with dogs or birds, are in plenty. From hence are exported all those porcelain shells, which, being carried to other countries, are there circulated for money, as has been already noticed. Here they cultivate a species of fruit called berchi, in size about that of a lemon, and having a delicious flavour. Besides these circumstances there is nothing further that requires mention, unless it be that the country is wild and mountainous, and is little frequented by strangers, whose visits the king discourages, in order that his treasures and other secret matters of his realm may be as little known to the rest of the world as possible.
"Departing from Lochae and keeping a southerly course for five hundred miles, you reach an island named Pentam, the coast of which is wild and uncultivated, but the woods abound with sweet scented trees. Between the province of ​Lochac and this island of Pentam, the sea, for the space of sixty miles, is not more than four fathoms in depth, which obliges those who navigate it to lift the rudders of their ships, in order that they may not touch the bottom. After sailing these sixty miles in a south-easterly direction, and then proceeding thirty miles further, you arrive at an island, in itself a kingdom, named Malaiur, which is likewise the name of its city. The people are governed by a king, and have their own peculiar language. The town is large and well built. A considerable trade is there carried on in spices and drugs, with which the place abounds. Nothing else that requires notice presents itself. Proceeding onwards from thence, we shall now speak of Java Minor."
That this description does not apply to Australia the reader of the present day may readily conclude. It has received its explanation in the judicious notes of Marsden, who shows how, from the circumstances, it is highly probably that Lochac is intended for some part of the country of Cambodia, the capital of which was named Loech, according to the authority of Gaspar de Cruz, who visited it during the reign of Sebastian, king of Portugal. See Purchas, vol. iii, p. 169. The country of Cambodia, moreover, produces the gold, the spices, and the elephants which Marco Polo attributes to Lochac. Pentam is reasonably supposed by Marsden to be Bintam, and the island and kingdom of Malaiur (Maletur, in the Basle edition of 1532, included in the Novus Orbis of Grynæus) to be the kingdom of the Malays. In the early engraved maps of the sixteenth century, however, we see the effects of this description exhibited in a form calculated to startle the inquirer ​respecting the early indications of Australia. On these maps we find laid down an extensive development of the great Terra Australis Incognita trending northward to New Guinea; with which, on some of these maps, it is made to be continuous, while on others it is divided from it; and on the northermost portion of this remarkably delineated land occur the legends: "Beach provincia aurifera." "Lucach regnum." "Maletur regnum scatens aromatibus." "Vastissimas hie esse regiones ex M. Pauli Veneti et Ludovici Vartomanni scriptis peregrinationibus liquido constat."
We have already explained from Marsden's notes the reasonable rendering of the name of Lucach or Lochac. The name of Beach, or rather Boeach, is another form of the same name, which crept into the Basle edition of Marco Polo of 1532, and was blunderingly repeated by the cartographers; while for Maletur we have the suggestion of the Burgomaster Witsen, in his Noord en Oost Tartarye, fol. 169, that it is taken from Maleto, on the north side of the island of Timor, a suggestion rendered null by the fact, apparently unknown to Witsen, that Maletur, as already stated, was but a misspelling in the Basle edition for Malaiur. The sea in which, on these early maps, this remarkable land is made to lie, is called Mare Lantchidol, another perplexing piece of misspelling upon which all the cartographers have likewise stumbled, and which finds its explanation in the Malay words Laut Kidol, or Chidol, "the South Sea. As, however, this striking protrusion to the northward of ​a portion of the Great Terra Australis Incognita on the early maps in a position so nearly corresponding with that of Australia, may not have emanated solely from the description of Marco Polo, the editor proposes to defer further allusion to these maps until they present themselves in their due chronological order among the documents and data of which he will have to speak.
The earliest discovery of Australia to which claim has been laid by any nation is that of a Frenchman, a native of Honfleur, named Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, who sailed from that port in June 1503, on a voyage to the South Seas. After doubling the Cape of Good Hope, he was assailed by a tempest which drove him on an unknown land, in which he received the most hospitable reception, and whence, after a stay of six months, he returned to France, bringing with him the son of the king of the country. The narrative is given in a judicial declaration made by him before the French Admiralty, dated the 19th of June, 1505, and first published in the Mémoires touchant l'Etablissement d'une Mission Chrétienne dans la Terre Australe, printed at Paris by Cramoisy, 1663, and dedicated to Pope Alexander VII, by an "ecclésiastique originaire de cette mesme terre." The author gives his name in no other way than by these initials, "J. P. D. C., Prêtre Indien." This priest, as well as his father and grandfather, was born in France; but his great grand-father was one of the Australians, or natives of the southern world, whom Gonneville had brought into France at ​his return from that country, and whom he afterwards married to one of his own relations there, he having embraced Christianity. The author of the account himself being animated by a strong desire of preaching the gospel in the country of his ancestors, spent his whole life in endeavouring to prevail on those who had the care of foreign missions to send him there, and to fulfil the promise the first French navigator had made, that he should visit that country again. Unfortunately Gonneville's journals, on his return, fell into the hands of the English, and were lost. The author, however, collected his materials from the traditions and loose papers of his own family, and the judicial declaration above mentioned. This account was to have been presented to the Pope, but it never was printed till it fell into the hands of the bookseller Cramoisy. The narrative is to the effect that some French merchants, being tempted by the success of the Portuguese under Vasco de Gama, determined upon sending a ship to the Indies by the same route which he had sailed. The ship was equipped at Honfleur. "The Sieur de Gonneville, who commanded her, weighed anchor in the month of June, 1503, and doubled the Cape of Good Hope, where he was assailed by a furious tempest, which made him lose his route, and abandoned him to the wearisome calm of an unknown sea." "Not knowing what course to steer, the sight of some birds coming from the south determined them to sail in that direction in the hope of finding land. They found what they desired, that is to say, a great country, ​which, in their relations, was named the Southern India, according to the custom, at that time, of applying indifferently the names of the Indies to every country newly discovered." They remained six months at this land; after which the crew of the ship refused to proceed further, and Gonneville was obliged to return to France. When near home, he was attacked by an English corsair, and plundered of every thing; so that his journals and descriptions were entirely lost. On arriving in port, he made a declaration of all that had happened in the voyage to the Admiralty, which declaration was dated July the 19th, 1505, and was signed by the principal officers of the ship.
In one part of the relation, this great southern land is said to be not far out of the direct route to the East Indies, The land of Gonneville has been supposed by some to be in a high southern latitude, and nearly on the meridian of the Cape of Good Hope; and Duval and Nolin placed it on their charts to the south-west from the Cape, in forty-eight degrees south. The President De Brosses, author of Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, Paris, 1756, 2 vols., conjectured that it was south from the Moluccas, and that it was, in fact, the first discovery of the Terra Australis, since named New Holland.
Gonneville, however, is represented as carrying on during his stay a friendly intercourse with the natives, whom he mentions as having made some advances in civilization. This account is quite incompatible with the character for treachery and ​barbarous cruelty, which we have received of the natives of North Australia from all the more recent voyagers.
Let the whole account, says Burney, be reconsidered without prepossession, and the idea that will immediately and most naturally occur is, that the Southern India discovered by Gonneville was Madagascar. De Gonneville having doubled (passed round) the Cape, was by tempests driven into calm latitudes, and so near to this land, that he was directed thither by the flight of birds. The refusal of the crew to proceed to the Eastern India, would scarcely have happened if they had been so far advanced to the east as New Holland.
A more reasonable claim than the preceding to the discovery of Australia in the early part of the sixteenth century, may be advanced by the Portuguese from the evidence of various MS. maps still extant, although the attempt made recently to attach the credit of this discovery to Magalhaens in the famous voyage of the Victoria round the world in 1520, is, as we shall endeavour to show, perfectly untenable. The claim of this honour for Spain is thus asserted in the "Compendio Geografico Estadistico de Portugal y sus posesiones ultramarinas," by Aldama Ayala, 8vo, Madrid, 1855, p. 482. "The Dutch lay claim to the discovery of the continent of Australia in the seventeenth century, although it was discovered by Fernando Magalhaens, a Portuguese, by order of the Emperor Charles V, in the year 1520, as is proved by authentic documents, such as the atlas of Fernando Vaz Dourado, made in Goa in 1570, on one of the ​maps in which is laid down the coast of Australia. The said magnificent atlas, illuminated to perfection, was formerly preserved in the Carthusian Library at Evora."
A similar claim was also made for their distinguished countryman, though the voyage was made in the service of Spain, in an almanack published at Angra, in the island of Terceira, by the government press, anno 1832, and composed, it is supposed, by the Viscount Sa' de Bandeira, the present minister of marine at Lisbon. In the examination of this subject, the editor has had the advantage of the assistance of a friend in Lisbon, who, in his researches among the remaining literary wealth of that city, has exhibited an earnestness and an amount of care and thought but too rarely witnessed in delegated investigations. The reader will not wonder that the zeal of a true lover of literature has been thrown into these researches, when he learns that they have been made by Dr. John Martin, the well-known author (for it would be wrong to call him the editor) in days now long gone by, of that most interesting and important work, "Mariner's Tonga Islands." As will be presently seen, the whole question of the possibility of the discovery of Australia having been made by the Portuguese, in the first half of the sixteenth century, is sufficiently enigmatical to call for a great extent of inquiry, and the editor's venerable and honoured friend, though now grown old in the service of science and literature, has entered into the subject with a cordiality and ardour, commensurate with the puzzling nature of the subject.
​But first with respect to the claim on behalf of Magalhaéns, as based upon the map of Vaz Dourado. The following are extracts from Dr. Martin's reports upon the map.
"On inspecting the map and examining the more southern regions, I found that the island of Timor was the most southern land laid down in lat. 10° S., which is its true situation; while further to the south all was blank, excepting certain ornamental devices as far as about latitude 17° or 18°, which was the lowest margin of the map. To the west and east the map was bordered by a scale of latitude, in single degrees; but this map did not occupy the whole sheet of vellum, for to the right of the eastern scale of latitude something else was laid down, viz., a line of coast running with a little southing from west to east, with many rivers and names of places upon it, and this notice underneath, 'Esta Costa Descubrió Fernaō de Magalhāes naturall portuges pormandado do emperador Carllos o anno 1520.'
"If the whole sheet is meant to constitute one map and referable to the same scale of latitude, then the coast in question is not where New Holland ought to be, being north of Timor and much too far to the eastward. On turning over to the next sheet (in the atlas) there is a similar line of coast laid down with precisely the same notice (above quoted) at the bottom, and evidently a continuation of the same coast and upon the same scale. I send a list of the names, which I have made out as well as I could, for they are very small and several letters are not very clear.
"The reasons why I cannot consider this coast as part of New Holland, are, 1st. It is at least one thousand five hundred miles in length, and nearly straight as a whole, though indented in its parts; 2ndly. That it is represented to have numerous rivers, which are very rare in New Holland (on the coast); 3rdly. That it is considerably distant from its true ​place to the south of Timor, which in the atlas is laid down correctly as to latitude, although, 4thly. There is plenty of room for it on the map. I have thought it might be part of the coast of South America, where Magelhaens was long detained, and that it is put down as a sort of memorandum of the great extent of coast which he discovered in the first circumnavigation of the globe. With indomitable perseverance he pushed his way through the straits that bear his name into the Pacific, and in this vast ocean he sailed about for three months and twenty days (says Pigafetta, who accompanied him and wrote an account of the voyage) without discovering anything excepting two small desert islands, until he arrived at the Phillippines. Had he really discovered so much of the coast of a great southern continent, Spain, in whose service he was, might well have boasted of the feat, and Portugal, whose native he was, might have defended the claims of the man who performed it, and not let so bold and noble a discovery (for those times) remain so long in doubt.
"Now with respect to America: if we examine carefully the list of names upon this line of coast, we shall find some that have a resemblance to those on the coast of America, along which Magelhaens pursued his course. One of these, C. de las Virgines, is found in some maps just at the entrance of the Straits of Magellan, on the eastern side. I do not see any name like Fromose, but there is the name Gaia Fromose, in or near the Straits of Magellan (in the same atlas). In the enclosed list of names we have also Terra de Gigätes or Terra de Gigantes, and may not this be the Patagonians?
​"On a closer and more minute examination of Dourado's map, and others, I think it may now be made evident that the coast said to have been discovered by Magalhaéns, in 1520, and mistaken by Sa de Bandeira and others, for part of the coast of New Holland, is no other than the northern coast of New Guinea.
"Now New Guinea, or part of it, as laid down by Dourado, appears under the name of Os Papuos, and extends to the eastward as far as the scale of latitude is marked, but beyond that scale there is about half an inch of space, and there the coast in question commences, and runs a long way towards the east, with a little southing, and has many islands bordering upon it; whether this be either a continuation or a repetition more extended of Papua, it is much in the same latitude, and runs in the same direction. Again, on referring to an old map of Mercator, I found some names upon New Guinea, similar to those on the coast in question; there I found C. de las Yirgines; I. de los Cresbos; RE.. de Bolcados; Buen Puerto, answering to C. de las Virgines; I. de los Crespos: Bullcones Puerto Bueno, as found among the names on the coast in question; but what places the matter still more beyond a doubt is, that the names in both run in the same consecutive order from west to east, upon several of the islands which border the main land.
| Names of Islands as laid down in Dourado's map along the coast said to be New Holland, in consecutive order from W. to E. | Names of Islands as laid down in Mercator's map on the coast of New Guinea, in consecutive order, W. to E. |
| I. de los Martiles I. dellos Crespos I. Duarati I. de Armo I. de Malagrate I. Dombres brancos Llabasbuda Llacuimana Bullcones (is laid down on the main land) | Y. de los Martyres Y. de Crespos Y. Dearti No such name Y. de Malagente Y. de Hombres brancos La barbade No such name Los Bulcones |
From these observations of Dr. Martin, the editor forms the following conclusions; that the tract laid down on Vaz Dourado's map as discovered by Magalhaens, is in fact a memorandum or cartographical side-note of the real discovery by Magalhaens of Terra del Fuego, and that from its adopted false position on the vellum it was subsequently applied erroneously to New Guinea by Mercator. But even if this surmise be incorrect, the only alternative that remains is that the tract laid down is New Guinea, and clearly not Australia, as assumed by the claimants to whom we have referred. The editor submits that this claim is alike untenable from the account of Magalhaens' voyage and from the evidence of the map^itself on which that claim is founded.
But we now pass to a more plausible indication of a discovery of Australia by the Portuguese in the early part of the sixteenth century, which ranges between the years of 1512 and 1542. It occurs in similar form on six maps, four of them in England and two in France, on which, immediately below Java, and separated from that island only by a
* ↑ With respect to the essay for which the learned society referred to (the Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen of Utrecht) had offered a prize, it was published in that society's Transactions in 1827, under the title of "Bennet and VanWijck's Verhandeling over de Nederlandsche Ontdekkingen." The editor, who has examined this work carefully, can state that it supplies no information in addition to that which we had already possessed.
* ↑ See Aratus, Phœnom., 537; Strabo, 1. 7, p. 130, and 1. 17; Crates apud Geminum, Elemente Astronomica, c. Ixlii, in the Uranologia, p. 31.
* ↑ This apparently Gallicized Portuguese name is here referred to by Dr. Martin in allusion to its occurrence on certain early French maps to be treated of hereafter.
​narrow strait, is drawn a large country stretching southward to the verge of the several maps. The earliest in all probability, and the most fully detailed of these maps, is the one from which we give the annexed reduction of that portion immediately under consideration. It is a large chart of the world, on a plane scale, on vellum, 8 ft. 2 in. by 3 ft. 10 in., highly ornamented, with figures, etc., and with the names in French. At the upper corner, on the left hand, is a shield of the arms of France, with the collar of St. Michael; and on the right, another shield of France and Dauphiny, quarterly. It was probably executed in the time of Francis I. of France, for his son the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II. This chart formerly belonged to Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, after whose death it was taken away by one of his servants. It was subsequently purchased by Sir Joseph Banks, Bart., and presented by him to the British Museum in 1790.
The second, in all probability, of these, is contained in an atlas drawn at Dieppe in 1547, at present in the possession of Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart., of Middle Hill, Worcestershire. It contains the name of Nicholas Vallard, of Dieppe. The editor has been unsuccessful in his efforts to gain a sight of this atlas, or even of a fac-simile lithograph made by Sir Thomas Phillipps of the map supposed to contain the representation of Australia. Hence he has been compelled to rely upon the memory of Sir Frederick Madden, who had an opportunity of examining the atlas some years since, and who recollects that though ​narrow strait, is drawn a large country stretching south-ward to the verge of the several maps. The earliest in all probability, and the most fully detailed of these maps, is the one from which we give the annexed reduction of that portion immediately under consideration. It is a large chart of the world, on a plane scale, on vellum, 8 ft. 2 in. by 3 ft. 10 in., highly ornamented, with figures, etc., and with the names in French. At the upper corner, on the left hand, is a shield of the arms of France, with the collar of St. Michael; and on the right, another shield of France and Danphiny, quarterly. It was probably executed in the time of Francis I. of France, for his son the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II. This chart formerly belonged to Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, after whose death it was taken away by one of his servants. It was subsequently purchased by Sir Joseph Banks, Bart., and presented by him to the British Museum in 1790.
The second, in all probability, of these, is contained in an atlas drawn at Dieppe in 1547, at present in the possession of Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart., of Middle Hill, Worcestershire. It contains the name of Nicholas Vallard, of Dieppe. The editor has been unsuccessful in his efforts to gain a sight of this atlas, or even of a fac-simile lithograph made by Sir Thomas Phillipps of the map supposed to contain the representation of Australia. Hence he has been compelled to rely upon the memory of Sir Frederick Madden, who had an opportunity of examining the atlas some years since, and who recollects that though ​it bore the name of Vallard and the date of 1547, it was not made by him, and that its date, though probably earlier than 1547, could be shown from internal evidence to be not earlier than 1539. A coat of arms appears in the margin of the volume, argent, on a saltire, gules, five besants, a mullet, sable, in the fess point. This may lead a future investigator to the discovery of an earlier possessor of the map than Vallard, although it should be remarked that the borders on the margin appear to be of a later date than the maps themselves. It fell into the possession of Prince Talleyrand at the beginning of this century, and attracting the attention of the celebrated geographer M. Barbié du Bocage, drew from him a notice in the Magasin Encyclopédique, douzième année, tom. iv, 107, which, though lengthy, bears so directly upon the subject of the present work, that it is proposed in simple justice both to the writer and the reader, presently to give it in full.
The third and fourth of these maps (if our other inferences as to date be correct) are contained in one volume in the British Museum; one of them is a detailed map, and the other an almost skeleton map of the world in hemispheres, with the latitudes and longitudes marked, and the names of "the lytel Java" and "the londe of Java" laid down on the great country in question. It is from this latter map that the annexed extract is given, on the same scale as the original, the octavo page being sufficiently large to admit the portion required to be shown. The only point of difference calling for special remark is, that
​in the original hemisphere the line representing the eastern coast does not reach to the bottom of the map, but terminates abruptly in the same degree of latitude as represented in the copy, though that degree is here, for convenience sake, made to coincide with the margin of the map. Indeed the special interest of this particular map is, that whereas all the others which represent this remarkable country have the coast line extended indefinitely to the southern margin; on this both the eastern and western coast lines stop abruptly at certain points, of which we are able to take cognizance by the degrees of latitude being shown on the same map. The volume containing these two important maps bears the date of 1542, and was made by one Jean Rotz, who had in the first instance intended to dedicate it to the king of France, but afterwards presented it to king Henry VIII of England. In this dedication to the king, he says that the maps are made "an plus certain et vray quil ma esté possible de faire, tant par mon experience propre, que par la certaine experience de mes amys et compagnons navigateurs;" and at the close, he expresses his hope to compose shortly a work in English, which was to be printed, to the great profit and advantage of all the navigators and seamen of this prosperous kingdom. It is to be regretted that we do not possess the work here promised, as much light might thereby have been thrown upon the mystery in which the question before us is involved. It has been suggested by Malte Brun, that the author was a Fleming, who came over to ​England with Anne of Cleves in 1540. The idea may have originated in the form of the name, but would hardly have been maintained had Malte Brun read Rotz's dedication, in which he speaks of the king of France as having been "mon souverin et naturel signeur." There can be no doubt, then, that he was a French subject.
The fifth in date, if we suppose it to have been made early in the reign of Henry II, is a map given in fac-simile by M. Jomard, in his Monuments de la Géographie, on Recueil d'Anciennes Cartes, now in progress, and is described by him as "Mappemonde peinte sur parchemin par ordre de Henri II, Roi de France."
The sixth is a map in a Portolano at the Depôt de la Guerre, Paris, drawn in 1555 by Guillaume le Testu, a pilot of Grasse, in Provence, or as others have thought a Norman. André Thevet, cosmographer to Henry II, boasts of having often sailed with him, and always styles him as "renommé pilote et singulier navigateur." The map was drawn for Admiral Coligny, to whom it is dedicated and whose name it bears. The editor has succeeded in procuring a tracing of that portion which affects the present question, and finds it to agree with the other maps of the kind in the delineation of the coast of "la Grande Java."
On the reduced tracing of the most fully detailed of these maps given at p. xxvii, are inscribed some names of bays and coasts which were noticed in the first instance by Alexander Dalrymple, the late hydrographer to the Admiralty and East India ​Company, to bear a resemblance to the names given by Captain Cook to parts of New Holland which he had himself discovered.
In his memoir concerning the Chagos and adjacent islands, 1786, p. 4, speaking of this map he says:—
"The east coast of New Holland, as we name it, is expressed with some curious circumstances of correspondence to Captain Cook's MS. What he names
| Bay of Inlets, is in the MS. called | Bay Perdue. |
| Bay of Isles | R. de beaucoup d'Isles. |
| Where the Endeavour struck | Coste dangereuse. |
So that we may say with Solomon, 'There is nothing new under the sun.'"
To the discredit of so well informed and laborious a man as Dalrymple, to whom, perhaps, next to Hakluyt, this country is the most largely indebted for its commercial prosperity, this passage was but an invidious insinuation, intended to disparage the credit of Captain Cook, of whose appointment to the command of the Endeavour he was extremely jealous. Dalrymple had earnestly desired the command of an expedition to discover the great southern continent, the existence of which he had endeavoured to prove by various philosophical arguments, which later times have shown to be not without foundation; and his observation would seem to imply that Cook, who had been so successful in his discoveries on the coast of New Holland, might have been led thereto by an acquaintance with this pre-existent map. The unworthy insinuation met with a sensible refutation, we are happy to record, from the pen of a Frenchman, ​M. Frederic Metz, in a paper printed at p. 261, vol. 47, of La Revue, on Decade Philosophique, Littéraire et Politique, Nov., 1805. For the sake of clearness, the editor avoids here giving the whole of M. Metz's paper, in which an attempt is made to disprove that New Holland was discovered at this time by the Portuguese at all, but will merely quote those passages which meet Dalrymple's insinuation. M. Metz says:—
"It had been generally believed that we were indebted to the Dutch for our acquaintance with this vast country, and that the celebrated Cook had in his first voyage discovered its eastern coast, which he named New South Wales, until the discovery was made in the British Museum of a map upon parchment, presumed to be of the sixteenth century, on which was observed a large country laid down on the site occupied by New Holland. On the eastern coast of this country places were found with the names 'Côte des Herbaiges,' 'Riviere de beaucoup d'lles,' ' Côte dangereuse,' names which present a great resemblance to those of 'Botany Bay,' 'Bay of Islands,' and 'Dangerous Coast,' given by Cook to parts of New South Wales.
"The resemblance of these names struck many persons. Mr. Dalrymple, a man of the greatest merit, but a personal enemy of Cook, whom he never forgave for having received, in preference to him, the command of the Endeavour, in the voyage made to observe the passage of Venus, and especially for having demolished, beyond of hope of recovery, his theories of the existence of the southern lands, and of the north-west passage of America: Mr. Dalrymple, I say, took occasion therefrom to insinuate in one of his works, that the discovery of the east of New Holland was due to some navigator of the sixteenth century, and that Cook had only followed in his track....
"As to the resemblance of the names—this seems to me to prove exactly the contrary of the conclusions which it has been attempted to draw from them. If Cook had been acquainted with the maps in question, and had wished to appropriate to himself the discoveries of another, will any one suppose him so short-sighted as to have preserved for his discoveries the very names which would have exposed his plagiarism, if ever the sources which he had consulted came to be known. The 'dangerous coast' was so named because there he found himself during four hours in imminent danger of shipwreck. We must suppose, then, that he exposed himself and his crew to an almost certain death in order to have a plausible excuse for applying a name similar to that which this coast had already received from the unknown and anonymous navigator who had previously discovered it. Moreover, names such as 'Bay of Islands,' 'Dangerous coast,' are well known in geography. We find a Bay of Islands in New Holland; and on the east coast of the island of Borneo there is a 'Côte des Herbages.'"
The sound sense of this reasoning, apart from all question of honour on the part of a man of the high character of Captain Cook, would seem conclusive, yet this similarity of the names has, to the editor's own knowledge, been remarked upon by persons of high standing and intelligence in this country, though without any intention of disparaging Captain Cook, as an evidence that this country was identical with Australia. The similarity of the expression, "Cote des Herbages," with the name of Botany Bay, given to a corresponding part of the coast by Captain Cook, has been particularly dwelt upon, whereas it ought to be known that this bay, ​originally called Stingray, but afterwards Botany Bay, was not so named on account of the fertility of the soil, but from the variety of plants new to the science of botany which were discovered on a soil otherwise rather unpromising. It is plain that early navigators would assign such a designation as "Côte des Herbages" to a shore remarkable for its rich growth of grass or other vegetation, rather than from the appreciation of any curious botanical discovery. Had the similarity of the names "Rivière de beaucoup d'Isles" and "Côte dangereuse" with Cook's "Bay of Isles" and the place "where the Endeavour struck," names descriptive of unquestionable realities, been advanced by Dalrymple as evidence of the high probability that the country represented on the early map was New Holland, without volunteering an insinuation against the merit of his rival, we should have accepted the reasonable suggestion with deference and just acquiescence.
That New Holland was the country thus represented, became an argument supported by a variety of reasonings by more than one of our French neighbours. Mr. Coquebert Montbret, in a memoir printed in No. 81 of the Bulletin des Sciences, 1804, quotes Dalrymple's injurious observation, and silently allows it to have its deceptive effect on the mind of the incautious reader.
The atlas now in the possession of Sir Thomas Phillipps, which, as we have stated, is probably next in date to that made for the Dauphin, fell into the possession of Prince Talleyrand at the beginning of ​this century, and attracting the attention of the celebrated geographer M. Barbié du Bocage, drew from him the following notice in the Magasin Encyclopédique, douzième année, tom. iv, 1807, which, though lengthy, bears so directly upon the subject of the present work, that it is here given in full.
This manuscript is an hydrographic atlas, drawn at Dieppe in 1547, by a person of the name of Nicholas Vallard, of Dieppe, representing the eastern and western coasts of the continent of New Holland. This atlas is not the only one upon which these coasts are laid down. There are two in England, which came from France, and which we have been made acquainted with by the English as well as by some Frenchmen. One of the two, which has been for a considerable time in the library of the British Museum, was drawn in 1542 by a person of the name of Jean Rotz or Roty, who had in the first instance drawn it, as he states in the dedication, for the king of France, but afterwards presented it to Henry VIII, king of England. The second is a large map on one single sheet of parchment, made for the Dauphin of France, whose arms it bears. It was formerly in the library of the earl of Oxford, Where Sir Joseph Banks was acquainted with it, and thence it passed to the British Museum, where it is at present. The English pretend that none of these charts were discovered till after the death of the celebrated Captain Cook, and that they had no knowledge of them when this navigator set sail. But their prior existence in well-known libraries in England may cause this assertion ​to be doubted. But even if they had made use of them to indicate to their countryman the countries which he had to visit, it would not the less follow that the skill, the prudence, and the resolution with which Captain Cook conducted his operations must always secure for him the glory of having made known in detail the countries which had hitherto been but faintly indicated.
The third manuscript atlas which represents the coasts of New Holland, is that of which we have now to treat. It is a small folio volume, consisting of fifteen hydrographical charts, on vellum, which has been recently acquired by his serene highness the Prince of Benevento. This atlas, even by the account of persons who have seen those which are in England, is the most beautiful of all the works of the kind, and for this reason deserves the most particular attention. There has since been discovered in France a fourth, which is at present in the library of the Dépôt de la Guerre, which was drawn in 1555 by a person named Guillaume le Testu, a pilot, of Grasse, in Provence, for Admiral Coligny, to whom it is dedicated, and whose arms it bears.
The English geographers, MM. Dalrymple, Major Rennell, and Pinkerton; and among the French, MM. Buache, De la Rochette, Coquebert de Montbret, and others, recognize on these atlases the eastern and western coasts of New Holland. These coasts are bounded by the same latitudes as those indicated on recent maps; and if they encroach more on longitude it is because, at the time the discovery was made, there existed but small means of fixing the boundaries in that respect. The names on all the atlases which we have just quoted, are, for the most part, in Portuguese, some of them in French; that of 1542 alone, which is in England, has some of the names in bad English. We must, therefore, come to the conclusion that these atlases have been copied from Portuguese maps, and consequently that the discovery of the continent of New Holland belongs to the Portuguese. ​This is the opinion of MM. Dalrymple, Pinkerton, De la Rochette, and several others; and I do not believe that any good reason can be alleged in refutation of an opinion so well founded.
All these atlases call this continent "Great Java", in contradistinction to the island of Java, which is to the north of it; yet it is very singular that no mention whatever is made of this country in the voyages of the time. As, however, I think I have detected from history the period at which it must have been made, I shall now endeavour to explain why the Portuguese have kept this discovery a secret. I shall then fix the period at which I presume it to have been made, and will shew how the knowledge of this country has been lost even by those who have discovered it.
The most ancient of the atlases which represent the coasts of New Holland, is that of Rotz or Roty, which is in England, and which bears the date of 1542. The discovery of New Holland, therefore, is anterior to the year 1542. At that period the Portuguese were masters of the Molucca Islands, which they had discovered in 1511, and where they had established themselves in 1512, and in one of which, Ternate, they had built a fort in 1522. They must have discovered New Holland after the Moluccas, and therefore this discovery must be limited to the period between the years 1512 and 1542.
Now, after 1516 or 1517, Spain began to dispute with Portugal the possession of the Moluccas, as being situated within the hemisphere which had been allotted to them by the bull of pope Alexander VI, dated the 4th of July, 1493. This pope, in consequence of the disputes which had arisen between the courts of Lisbon and Toledo, had arranged that all the discoveries which might be made on the globe to the east of a meridian one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands (which he seemed to think lay under the same meridian), for the space of a hundred and ​eighty degrees of longitude, should belong to the Portuguese; and that those to the westward of the same meridian, for the same space, should belong to the Spaniards. This division has been since called the line of demarcation of Pope Alexander VI. Don John II, however, who was then king of Portugal, being dissatisfied with this bull, which seemed to deprive him of considerable possessions in the west, made another arrangement in the following year with Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, by which this line was pushed further west, and definitely fixed at three hundred and seventy leagues to the westward of the Cape Verde Islands. This agreement was signed the 4th of June, 1494; and it was arranged that, in the space of ten months, persons should be sent out who were well informed in geography, to fix exactly the places through which this line should pass.
This engagement once entered upon, no more consideration was given to the sending out competent persons to the places indicated, and the two governments continued their discoveries, each on its own behalf. Under the guidance of Cabral, the Portuguese, on the 9th of March, 1500, discovered Brazil, which lay in their own hemisphere. Under the guidance of Vincent Yanez Pinzon, the Spaniards had in this same or preceding year, sailed along the whole of this coast as far as the embouchure of the Oronoco. After this time the line, without further examination, was reckoned to pass by the mouth of the Marañon, or river of the Amazons, which had been already explored, and it is in this part that it is found traced on the Spanish maps of Herrera. The Portuguese, while they took possession of Brazil, continued their discoveries towards the east, and reached the Moluccas, where they established themselves, as we have said, in 1512. The proprietorship of the spices which the possession of these islands gave them, produced such considerable profits, that it soon excited the jealousy of the Spaniards. The latter pretended that the Moluccas were in ​the hemisphere which had been allotted to them. This idea was particularly suggested to them by Magellan, who, being discontented with the treatment of king Emanuel, in having refused him an increase of allowance, took refuge about the year 1516 in Spain, and offered his services to the government of Charles V. Not only did he assert that the hemisphere belonging to the Spaniards comprised the Moluccas, but also the islands of Java and Sumatra, and a part of the Malay peninsula. In fact, from the difficulty which then existed in determining longitudes, the discoveries of the Portuguese appeared to appropriate more than one hundred and eighty degrees in this direction, so great was the amount of space given to them in their maps: nevertheless, if we examine modern maps we shall see that, measuring from the mouth of the Maranon, the Moluccas still came within the hemisphere of the Portuguese.
Cardinal Ximenes, who at that time governed Spain in the absence of Charles V., at the outset received Magellan very well, and Charles V. himself afterwards entrusted him with the command of a squadron of five vessels, which, as we know, sailed from San Lucar on the 20th of September, 1519, on a western passage in search of the Spice Islands or Moluccas. Two of the vessels of this fleet arrived on the 8th of November, 1521, at the island of Tidore, after having passed through the straits since called the Straits of Magellan. That navigator was now no more; he had been killed in one of the islands of the archipelago of St. Lazaro, since called the Philippines, and nearly all his squadron having been destroyed, one vessel only, named the Victoria, returned to Europe, with eighteen persons, all very sick, under the guidance of Sebastian del Cano, who landed on the 6th of September, 1522, at the same port of San Lucar de Barrameda, from which the fleet had set sail three years before.
Whether it was from policy, or because the currents which ​exist in the Great Pacific Ocean had carried Magellan's fleet rapidly down to the Philippines and Moluccas, those who returned from this expedition always maintained that these latter islands were in the hemisphere of the Spaniards, who consequently laid claim to traffic there. They were even on the point of sending out a new expedition thither, when king John III begged Charles V to have the question examined by competent persons, and promised to acquiesce in their decision. The two governments appointed twenty-four, or even a greater number, both Spaniards and Portuguese, well skilled in geography and navigation, who from the commencement of March 1524, met alternately in the two cities of Badajos and Elvas, on the frontiers of the two states. Three months were allowed them to decide definitely to whom these islands belonged.
These commissioners, among whom was Sebastian del Cano, who had brought back the Victoria, consumed at the outset a considerable time in consulting globes and charts, and in comparing the journals of pilots. They examined the distance between the Moluccas and the line of demarcation. They disputed much, and came to no conclusion. More than two months passed away in this manner; and they reached the latter part of May, which had been fixed as the term of the conferences.
The Spanish commissioners then settled the line of demarcation at three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, as it had been fixed in 1494; and as, on the basis of the charts which they had then before them, they made the opposite line, which was to be at the distance of a hundred and eighty degrees, pass through the Malay peninsula, they included in their own hemisphere not only the Moluccas, but also the islands of Java and Borneo, part of Sumatra, the coast of China, and part of the Malay peninsula itself. The Portuguese did not agree to this limitation, which was too disadvantageous for themselves; on the ​contrary, they went away very discontented, storming, and threatning war, which gave occasion to the jocose observation of Peter Martyr of Anghiera, a talented man, at that time the historiographer of the court of Spain, that the commissioners, after having well syllogized, concluded by being unable to decide the question except by cannon balls.
In spite of the unsuccessful issue of this negociation, the two courts did not come to a quarrel; they were on the point of forming alliances. The question of the marriage of the Infanta Catherine, the emperor's sister, with king John, which was celebrated in 1525, was being then entertained. In the following year, 1526, the emperor espoused, with great pomp, Isabella, king John's sister. Charles V, however, believing himself in the right, continued to permit his subjects to carry on commerce with the Spice Islands; and he himself fitted out fleets to dispute the possession of them with the Portuguese. Some of these vessels landed at the Moluccas in 1527 and 1528; but, as these expeditions were generally unsuccessful, and as, moreover, he was in need of money for his coronation in Italy, he listened to the proposals of king John to purchase his right to these islands. He parted with them by a secret treaty, which was signed at Saragossa the 22nd of April, 1529, for the sum, it is said, of 350,000 golden ducats, against the expressed wish of his subjects, who often, but in vain, besought him to retract it. By his refusal, it was thought that he had received much more. Thenceforth the Spaniards were not permitted to traffic with the Moluccas.
This termination of the quarrel on the part of Portugal was a justification of the claims of the Spaniards, and an acknowledgment in some sort that the Moluccas were in their hemisphere. After such an arrangement, the Portuguese could not show any discoveries made to the eastward, or even under the meridian of these islands. The greatest part of New Holland is more to the east than the Moluccas; ​hence it is to be believed that for this reason the Portuguese have kept silence respecting their discovery of it.
This discovery, as we have said, must be comprised between the years 1512 and 1542. There is, however, no mention made of it in the voyages of the time, which would sufficiently prove that the Portuguese had suppressed, or at least concealed, the account of it. But I propose to endeavour to supply this defect from the narrative of two of their historians.
Castanheda, a Portuguese author, who had been in India, tells us that in the beginning of July, 1525, the Portuguese of Ternate, one of the Moluccas, dispatched a vessel to the island of Celebes to traffic there; that this vessel on its return was driven by violent winds and currents into an open sea, between the Straits of Magellan and the Moluccas; that the Portuguese found themselves thrown more than three hundred leagues out of their route, and were several times nearly lost. One night their rudder was carried away, and they beat about till the morning, when they discovered an island thirty leagues in circumference, on which they landed, with thanks to God for affording them this asylum. The islanders gave them an excellent reception; they were of a tawny colour, but well made and good looking, both men and women. The men had long black beards. The Portuguese remained four months in this island, not only for the purpose of refitting, but because the winds were contrary for the return to the Moluccas. At length they departed, and reached Ternate on the 20th of January, 1526.
Such is the narrative of Castanheda. The Jesuit Maffei, who has given us a history of India, has supplied us with less details, but his account is not less valuable, inasmuch as he gives us the name of the captain who commanded the ship. He says: Some Portuguese of the Moluccas, having gone to the islands of Celebes to seek for gold, but not having been able to land, were driven by a fearful tempest upon an ​island, which is distant therefrom three hundred leagues, when they went ashore. The inhabitants, who were simple people, received them very well, and soon became familiar with them. They comprehended their signs, and even understood a little of the language spoken at the Moluccas. All the inhabitants were well-looking, both male and female; they were cheerful, and the men wore beards and long hair. The existence of this island was previously unknown, but in consideration of the account given of it by the captain, whose name was Gomez de Sequeira, and of the map which he drew of this island, his name was given to it.
From the details supplied to us by these two authors, it is evident that the island on which Gomez de Sequeira was thrown was to the eastward of the Moluccas, because, in returning, the Portuguese had to sail westward. Now three hundred Portuguese leagues, starting from the Moluccas or the island of Celebes, lead us to within a trifle of Endeavour Straits; we may therefore conclude that it was upon one of the rocks in this strait that Gomez de Sequeira lost his rudder, and that the island on which he landed was one of the westernmost of those which lie along its western extremity. The Portuguese did not advance far into this strait, for it is plain that they met with no obstacle in returning to the Moluccas. I think, therefore, that the island on which Gomez de Sequeira landed was one of those which were called Prince of Wales's Islands by Captain Cook, and which are inhabited, because this navigator states that he saw smoke there. What confirms me in this opinion, is the agreement of our two authors in stating that the men of Gomez de Sequeira's Island had long and black hair and beards. We still find this characteristic distinguishing the natives of New Holland from those of New Guinea, whose hair and beards are crisped. This island, therefore, was nearer to New Holland than to New Guinea, which is, in fact, the case with the Prince of Wales's Islands.
​The Portuguese having discovered in 1525 an island so near as this to New Holland, we must believe that the discovery of that continent followed very soon after that of this island. It was at that time that the controversies between the courts of Portugal and Spain were at their highest; the Portuguese, therefore, needed to be cautious respecting their new discoveries; they were obliged to conceal them carefully. It will not, therefore, be surprising that no mention was made in their works of the discovery of New Holland.
But, after having shown how much importance the Portuguese must have attached to the concealment of their discoveries, and having examined at what period the discovery of New Holland may have been made, it will be not less interesting to inquire how this discovery may have become known in France, and afterwards in England, so early as 1542. There was nothing at that time to induce the court of Portugal to disclose their discoveries to the court of France; there was nothing to bind these two courts in intimate union; on the contrary, their intercourse had for some time been rather cool. As a proof of this, the king of Portugal had in 1543 married his daughter Mary to Philip the Infant of Spain, without giving notice thereof to Francis I, who thereupon showed his vexation in his conduct towards Francis de Norough, the ambassador of Portugal, who, to avoid a rupture between the two courts, answered with considerable reserve. We cannot, therefore, presume that the court of Portugal would ever have frankly communicated its discoveries to the court of France.
For my part, if it is permitted me to offer a conjecture, I think that this information may have resulted from the faithlessness of Don Miguel de Sylva, bishop of Viseo, and secretary of La Purité, a favourite of the king of Portugal, who, according to De la Clede, left the kingdom about 1542, carrying with him some papers of importance with which ​the king had intrusted him. This historian adds, that Don John was so indignant at the treachery of his favourite, that he outlawed him by a public decree, deprived him of all his benefices, and degraded him from his nobility. He decreed the same penalties against all his followers, and forbad all his subjects to hold any intercourse whatever with him, under pain of his displeasure. The count of Portalegre, the brother of the fugitive, was even confined as prisoner in the tower of Belem for having written to him, and kept under strict guard, until the Infanta Maria, on the point of her departure to marry Philip II, the son of the emperor Charles V, begged his liberation. The king granted the request, on condition that the count should go to Arzilla to fight against the Moors, and earn by his services the forgiveness of his fault.
The severity which the king Don John exhibited on this occasion, sufficiently shows the value which he attached to the papers which had been taken away. It is evident that they were of the greatest importance. They were secret papers; and may they not have been those which gave information of the discoveries of the Portuguese? Our atlases, therefore, may have been copied from these stolen documents; and it only remains for us to discover what has become of the originals.
Now, although the theories to which these maps ​have given rise have been so complacently accepted by successive geographical writers, the subject has never yet been minutely investigated by any English writer, nor, indeed, have the foregoing arguments of the French been ever before brought together into a focus. The editor, therefore, first proposes to answer the hypothesis of M. Barbié du Bocage respecting the voyage he adduces of Gomez de Sequeira, and then, finally, to deal with the general question of the suggestive evidence of the maps.
With respect to Gomez de Sequeira's voyage, it is certainly surprising that M. Barbié du Bocage should have contented himself with referring to Castanheda and Maffei for a slight and loose description of this voyage, when it was equally competent to him to have resorted to the more ample description of Barros, the most distinguished of all the early Portuguese historians, who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, and who has devoted a whole chapter to the minute description of the voyage in question. (See Dec. 3, liv. x, cap. 5.) So full and ample is Barros' narrative that, with a modern map before us, we can track Sequeira's course with a nicety which, so far as the main question is concerned, is not interrupted even by the accidents of the storm and the unshipping of his rudder. Let the reader for a moment consult any modern map of the Moluccas and neighbouring islands, and he will find that the island of Celebes, to which Sequeira directed his course from Ternate, presents the northernmost of the three horns of its oddly-shaped outline at a distance of about sixty leagues from ​Ternate. This is the distance which Barros states that he had to sail in order to reach that island. Had he sailed to the nearest of the two other points his voyage would have been, instead of sixty leagues, more than twice that distance; whereas the very nearness of the island was a leading inducement for undertaking the voyage, as the object was to relieve the immediate necessities of the settlement at Ternate. Upon landing at the point thus shown to be the northernmost one, the fact of his having carried with him stuffs for barter being discovered by the natives, converted the friendly feeling with which they had at first received him into hostility, as, having heard of some previous acts of greediness on the part of the Portuguese, they immediately concluded that the visit was not made in a spirit of friendship, but from selfish and ulterior motives. Hence Sequeira and his party were compelled to make their escape in haste, and proceeded to four or five other small islands in the neighbourhood, at which they met with a like reception. The map will show these plainly to the north of Celebes. Resolving after these rebuffs to return to Ternate, they encountered a terrific storm, which drove them, to the best of their calculation, three hundred leagues, into an open sea, with not a single island in sight, but constantly towards the east. At length one night they struck upon an island and unshipped their rudder. They met with a most friendly reception from the natives, who are described as of a light, rather than a dark, colour, and clothed. The island is stated to have been large, and the natives ​pointed to a mountain to the westward in which they said there was gold. The Portuguese remained in the island four months, until the monsoon enabled them to return to Ternate.
Now, had Sequeira been driven by the storm towards Endeavour Strait, as presumed by M. Barbié du Bocage, a glance at the map will show us that his course would have been south-east instead of east, and that not through an open sea in which no island could be seen, but one bestudded with islands. In fact, so definite is the whole account as given in detail by Barros, that, as we have shown, his course under the driving of the tempest may be palpably traced in accordance therewith on modern maps as due east to the north of the Moluccas, and through an open sea, and is clearly at variance with the inference of M. Barbié du Bocage, who seems not to have consulted Barros at all upon the subject. To what island, the reader will ask, was Sequeira driven? Let the modern map be consulted, and the course described will bring us to the island Tobi, otherwise known as Lord North's Island. A course so clearly defined is in itself a very strong point in the question, even though we may have to show some discrepancies between the description of the island on which Sequeira was thrown and that which we have in recent times received of Lord North's Island. Let the reader, however, in connexion with Barros' description of the course, take the following remarkable statement, as quoted in the 6th volume of the Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition, by H. Hale, in ​which, under the article "Tobi, or Lord North's Island," at p. 78, the following account is given, and he will perhaps not dissent from the editor in thinking it possible that this was the island on which Sequeira was driven.
"Tobi, or Lord North's Island, is situated in about lat. 3° 2' N., and long. 131° 4' E. It is a small low islet, about three miles in circumference, with a population of between three and four hundred souls. Our information concerning it is derived from an American, by name Horace Holden, who, with eleven companions, after suffering shipwreck, reached the island in a boat, and was taken captive by the natives. He was detained by them two years, from December 6th, 1832, to November 27th, 1834, when he made his escape and returned to America, where he published in a small volume [which is in the British Museum], an interesting narrative of his adventures and sufferings, with a description of the island and its inhabitants.
"The complexion of the natives, says Holden in his narrative, is a light copper colour, much lighter than that of the Malays or Pelew Islanders, which last, however, they resemble in the breadth of their faces, high cheek bones, and broad flattened noses. Here we observe what has been before remarked of the Polynesian tribes, that the lightest complexion is found among those who are nearest the equator.
"According to the native traditions a personage, by name Pita-Ka't (or Peeter Kart), of copper colour like ​themselves, 'Came, many years ago, from the Island of Ternate, one of the Moluccas, and gave them their religion and such simple arts as they possessed. It is probably to him that we are to attribute some peculiarities in their mode of worship, such as their temple, with rude images to represent their divinity. The natives wear the Polynesian girdle of barb cloth.
"The houses of the natives are built with small trees and rods, and thatched with leaves. They have two stories, a ground floor and a loft, which is entered by a hole or scuttle through the horizontal partition or upper floor.
"For ornament they sometimes wear in their ears, which are always bored, a folded leaf, and around their necks a necklace made of the shell of the cocoa-nut and a small white sea shell."
With reference to the cruelties detailed in Holden's narrative, Mr. Hale goes on to say:
"It should be mentioned that the release of the four Americans who survived (two of whom got free a short time after their capture), was voluntary on the part of the natives, a fact which shows that the feelings of humanity were not altogether extinct in their hearts. Indeed, although the sufferings of the captives were very great, it did not appear that they were worse, relatively to the condition in which the natives themselves lived, than they would have been on any other island of the Pacific. Men who were actually dying of starvation, like the people of Tobi, could not be expected to exercise that kindness towards others which nature refused to them."
of the paragraph as to "the images to represent their divinity" unreasonable as coming from a native of that country. It is more probable that, from the lapse of time, a mistake was made in the repetition of the name by a savage, and that a Portuguese, and not a Dutchman, suggested the use of images to represent a divinity.
Having thus shown the surmises which have been suggested by geographers of good repute with respect to the main question of the discovery of Australia in the early part of the sixteenth century, and explained, as he hopes satisfactorily, the errors into which they have fallen in their attempts at explanation, the editor will now lay before the reader his own reasons for concluding that Australia is the country which these maps describe.
The first question that will naturally arise is—how far does the country thus represented, correspond in latitude, longitude, and outline with the recognized surveys of Australia as delineated in modern maps? And if the discrepancies exposed by the comparison do not forbid the supposition that Australia is the country reprseented on the early maps, the inquiry will then suggest itself—how, with any satisfactory show of reason, may these discrepancies be accounted for? To both these questions, the editor believes that he can give acceptable answers.
And first as respects latitude. In all of these maps, the latitude of the north of Java, which is the first certain starting point, is correct. The south coast of Java, or "the lytil Java," though separated from ​"Java la Grande," or the "Londe of Java," by a narrow channel, as shown in the maps here given, has no names which indicate any pretension to a survey. There is enough proximity between the two to suggest alike the possibility of a connection or of a separation of the two countries. In the absence of so many words, the maps show as plainly as possible that it was as yet an unsettled question. With this fact, therefore, before us, implying, as it does, both conscientiousness in the statements on the maps, and the confession of an imperfect survey of the whole of the coasts supposed to be laid down, we have no difficulty in giving credence to the pretension that the great southern land there represented was, with all its errors, a reality and not a fiction. In all fairness, therefore, we pass the question of junction between the little and the great Java, as a point virtually declared to be unsettled, and supposing the latter to be Australia, test our supposition by inquiring as to the correctness of the latitude in which the coast line terminates on the western side. Here again we find exact correctness. In the one (Rotz's map), the line ceases altogether at 35°, the real south-western point of Australia, and in the other at the same point all description ceases, and a meaningless line is drawn to the margin of the map, implying that no further exploration had been made. On the eastern side, we have in every respect greater inaccuracy; but for the present we deal only with the question of latitude. For the sake of convenience, our reduction of Rotz's map is made to terminate at ​the point where the eastern coast line of "the londe of Java terminates," namely in the sixtieth degree, a parallel far exceeding in its southing even the southernmost point of Tasmania, which is in 43° 35'; but if we look to the Dauphin map, we find that about ten degrees of the southernmost portion of the line is indefinite, and it must not be forgotten that for the Portuguese this was the remotest point for investigation, and consequently the least likely to be definite. There is, however, strong reason for supposing that the eastern side of Tasmania was included within this coast line.
With respect to longitude, it may be advanced that with all the discrepancies observable in the maps here presented, there is no other country but Australia lying between the same parallels, and of the same extent, between the east coast of Africa and the west coast of America, and that Australia does in reality lie between the same meridians as the great mass of the country here laid down. In Rotz's map we have the longitude reckoned from the Cape Verde islands, the degrees running eastward from 1 to 360. The extreme western point of "the Londe of Java" is in about 126° (102 E. from Greenwich), whereas the westernmost point of Australia is in about 113° E. from Greenwich. The extreme eastern points of "the Londe of Java" is in about 207° (or 183° E. from Greenwich). The extreme eastern point however is on a peak of huge extent, which is a manifest blunder or exaggeration. The longitude of the easternmost side, excluding this ​peak, is in about 187° (or 163° E. from Greenwich), whereas the easternmost point of Australia is in something less than 154° E. from Greenwich. The difficulty of ascertaining the longitude in those days is well known, and the discoveries which these maps represent were, in all probability, made on a variety of occasions, and had a continuous line given to them on maps, not so much as an exact, but as an approximative guide to subsequent explorers. It were hard indeed, therefore, if sufficient concession were not made to the pioneers of maritime exploration, for the reconciliation of these comparatively and light discrepancies, when inaccuracies as striking are observable in surveys made as late as in the eighteenth century.
Thus in taking a general survey of the outline of this immense country, we have this one striking fact presented to us, that the western side is comprised between exactly the same parallels as the corresponding side of Australia, allowance being made for the conjunction of Java, while the eastern side presents the same characteristic as the eastern side of Australia in being by far the longest.
We now proceed to a more minute examination of the contour of the coasts. It is to be observed that on the north of the Great Java, as shown in all of these manuscript maps which have met the editor's eye, occurs the word "Sumbava,"—a fact which, he thinks, has never been noticed by any writer upon these interesting documents. Here is another instance of the discovery of the north of ​an island of which the south has remained unexplored. The peak of the Great Java, on which this name "Sumbava" is laid down, falls into the right position of the now well-known island of Sumbava, with the smaller islands of Bali and Lombok, lying between it and Java, and with Flores and Timor duly described to the eastward. The reason of this south coast of these islands remaining so long unexplored may be found in the description of Java by Barros, the Portuguese historian, who wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century. He says: "The natives of Sunda, in dissecting Java, speak of it as separated by the river Chiamo from the island of Sunda on the west, and on the east by a strait from the island of Bali; as having Madura on the north, and on the south an undiscovered sea; and they think that whoever shall proceed beyond these straits, will be hurried away by strong currents, so as never to be able to return, and for this reason they never attempt to navigate it, in the same manner as the Moors on the eastern coast of Africa do not venture to pass the Cape of Currents." The earliest mention that the editor has noticed of a passage to the south of Java, is in the account of the "Four Hollanders' Ships' Voyage, being the First Voyage of the Dutch to the East Indies." See Oxford Collection of Voyages, vol. ii, p. 417. Under date of the 14th March, 1597, it is said: "The wind blew still south-east, sometimes more southward and sometimes eastward, being under 14°, and a good sharp gale, holding our course west south-west. There we found ​that Java is not so broad nor stretcheth itself so much southward as it is set down in the card; for, if it were, we should have passed clean through the middle of the land." Supposing, then, that the Portuguese navigators have lighted upon the west coast of Australia, and have regarded it as a possible extension to the southward of the already known island of Java; let us proceed to test the correctness of this supposition by the contour of the coast of the western side. A single glance of the eye will suffice to detect the general resemblance. It is probable that the two great indentures are Exmouth Gulf and Shark Bay, and we may fairly conclude we detect Houtman's Abrolhos in about their proper parallel of from 28° to 29° south latitude. To attempt a minute investigation of the whole coast upon data so indefinite would be of course unreasonable, but on this western side at least the similarity is sufficient, we think, on every ground to establish its identity with the west coast of Australia. On the eastern side the discrepancies are much greater. Having already spoken of the latitude and longitude, we now speak merely of the outline of the coast. In the ancient map we see no huge promontory terminating in Cape York, but let the reader recall the suggestion that the visits to these coasts were made on various occasions, and naturally less frequently to the eastern than to the western side, and let the result of these considerations be that the promontory may have been altogether unvisited or ignored, and we shall have forthwith an explanation of the form of ​the north-east coast line on the early maps. Let a line be drawn from the southernmost point of the Gulf of Carpentaria to Halifax Bay, and the form of outline we refer to is detected immediately. Nor is this conjecture without corroboration from the physical features of the country. On the ancient map we find several rivers laid down along the northeast coast. If we examine the corresponding coast in the Gulf of Carpentaria, those rivers are seen to exist; whereas from Cape York all along the coast of Australia to the twenty-second or twenty-third degree, there is not even an indication of a river emptying itself into the sea. The great number of islands and reefs laid down along the north-east coast of the early maps coincides with the Great Barrier reefs, and with the Cumberland and Northumberland islands, and a host of others which skirt this part of the shores of Australia. "Coste dangereuse," "Bay perdue," and "R. de beaucoup d'Isles," are names which we readily concede to be appropriate to portions of such a coast. The name of "Coste des Herbaiges," of which we have already spoken as having been erroneously supposed by many geographers to apply to Botany Bay, was probably given to that part of the coast where the first symptoms of fertility were observed in passing southward, the more northern portions of the shore being for the most part dry and barren. That it is an error to connect the name with Botany Bay has already been shown, at p. xxxiv, and the editor must not fail to state that the unanswerable reason there adduced was ​derived from a judicious observation made to him by the late distinguished Dr. Brown, who not only, as Humboldt has described him, was "Botanices facile princeps," but himself acquainted with the locality of which he spoke.
The remainder of the coast southward is too irregularly laid down both as to latitude and longitude, and consequently as to correctness of conformation, to admit of any useful conjecture. It must be supposed from the conscientiousness observable in the delineation of other parts of the country, that this portion was laid down more carelessly, or with less opportunity of taking observations. It is by no means improbable, from the length of this coast line, that "Baye Neufve" is Bass's Straits; that "Gouffre" is Oyster Bay in Tasmania; and that the survey really ceased at the south of that island. That the continuity of the coast forms no ground of objection to this conjecture, may be shown by the fact that on "a general chart exhibiting the discoveries made by Captain Cook, by Lieut. H. Roberts," the coast is continuous to the south of Van Diemen's Land, Bass's Straits being then of course undiscovered.
It may also be fairly presumed that the islands in the extreme east of our extract from the Dauphin map, represent New Zealand. If the above reasons have sufficient weight in them to justify the supposition that the extensive country thus laid down on these early maps is really Australia, it becomes a question of the highest interest to ascertain, as nearly as may be, by whom, and at what date, the discovery of this country was made.
​The maps upon which the supposition of the discovery is alone founded are all French, and that they are all repetitions, with slight variations, from one source, is shown by the fact that the inaccuracies are alike in all of them. But although the maps are in French, there are indications of Portuguese in some of the names, such as Terre ennegade, a Gallicized form of "Tierra anegada," i.e., "land under water," or "sunken shoal," "Graçal," and "cap de Fromose." The question then arises, were the French or the Portuguese the discoverers? In reply, we present the following statement.
In the year 1529, a voyage was made to Sumatra, by Jean Parmentier of Dieppe, and in this voyage he died. Parmentier was a poet and a classical scholar, as well as a navigator and good hydrographer. He was accompanied in this voyage by his intimate friend the poet Pierre Crignon, who, on his return to France, published, in 1531, the poems of Parmentier, with a prologue containing his eulogium, in which he says of him, that he was "le premier François qui a entrepris à estre pilotte pour mener navires à la Terre Amérique qu'on dit Brésil, et semblablement le premier François qui a descouvert les Indes jusqu'à l'Isle de Taprobane, et, si mort ne l'eust pas prévenu, je crois qu'il eust été jusques aux Moluques." This is high authority upon this point, coming as it does from a man of education, and a shipmate and intimate of Parmentier himself. The French, then, were not in the South Seas beyond Sumatra before 1529. The date of the earliest of our quoted ​maps is not earlier than 1535, as it contains the discovery of the St. Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in that year; but even let us suppose it no earlier than that of Rotz, which bears the date of 1542, and ask, what voyages of the French in the South Seas do we find between the years of 1529 and 1542? Neither the Abbé Raynal, nor any modern French writer, nor even antiquaries, who have entered most closely into the history of early French explorations, as for example, M. Léon Guérin, the author of the Histoire Maritime de France, Paris, 1843, 8vo.; and of Les Navigateurs Français, 8vo., Paris, 1847, offer the slightest pretension that the French made voyages to those parts, in the early part or middle of the sixteenth century. Now we do know from Barros and Galvano that, at the close of 1511, Albuquerque sent from Malacca, Antonio de Breu, and Francisco Serrano, with three ships to Banda and Malacca: they passed along the east side of Sumatra to Java, and thence by Madura, Bali, Sumbava, Solor, etc., to Papua or New Guinea. From thence they went to the Moluccas and to Amboyna. See Barros, d. 3, 1. 5, c. 6, p. 131, and Galvano, translated by Hakluyt, p. 378. Here we have the very islands, forming the northern portion of the Grande Jave, at this early date; but that which is totally wanting between this and 1529, is the account of the various explorations of the eastern and western coasts of the vast country described under that name. It is certain, moreover, that France was at that time too poor, and too much embroiled in ​political anxieties, to busy itself with extensive nautical explorations. Had she so done, the whole of North America and Brazil might now have belonged to her. At the same time, however, we know that the Portuguese had establishments before 1529, in the East Indian Islands, and the existence of Portuguese names on the countries of which we speak, as thus delineated on these French maps, is in itself an acknowledgment of their discovery by the Portuguese, as assuredly the jealousy implied in the sentence quoted at p. vi of this introduction, from Pierre Crignon's Prologue, would not only have made the French most ready to lay claim to all they could in the shape of discovery, but would have prevented any gratuitous insertion of Portuguese names on such remote countries, had they themselves discovered them.
But, further, as an important part of the argument, the reader must not overlook that jealousy of the Portuguese, to which allusion has already been made (p. v), in forbidding the communication of all hydrographical information respecting their discoveries in these seas. As regards the surmises of M. Barbié du Bocage respecting the probable causes of the suppression or concealment of such documents, his carefulness and ingenuity entitle them to the best consideration; and if those documents really exist in France, or Rome, or elsewhere, it is much to be hoped that they may ere long be brought to light. His Excellency the Count de Lavradio, ambassador from Portugal to the Court of St, James's, has obligingly set ​on foot inquiries at Rome for the purpose of elucidating this subject, which have not, however, produced any successful result.
But although we have no evidence to show that the French made any original discoveries in the South Seas in the first half of the sixteenth century, we have the evidence that they were good hydrographers. Crignon describes Parmentier as "bon cosmographe et géographe," and says, "par luy ont esté composez plusieurs mapemondes en globe et en plat, et maintes cartes marines sus les quelles plusieurs ont navigué seurement." It is dangerous to draw conclusions from negatives; but it is both legitimate and desirable that we should give due weight to evidence of high probability when such fall within our notice If all the French maps we have quoted are, as has been shown, derived from one source, since they all contain the same errors; and if Parmentier, who was a good hydrographer, was the only French navigator we find mentioned as having gone so far as Sumatra before the period of the earliest of these maps; and further, if these maps exhibit Portuguese names laid down in these maps on a country beyond Parmentier's furthest point of exploration, we think the inference not unreasonable that Parmentier may have laid down, from Portuguese maps, the information which has been copied into those we have quoted, and that the descriptions round the coast, which are all (as may be plainly seen), with the exception of those which bear the stamp of Portuguese, convertible into French, have ​been naturally written by French mapmakers, in that language. We can but throw out this suggestion for quantum valeat. All positive evidence, in spite of laborious research, is wanting. The Portuguese names are but few, but there they are, and bear their stubborn evidence. The earliest Portuguese portolani which have met the editor's eye are those of Joham Freire, of 1546, and of Diego Homem, of 1558. Both these are silent on the subject. That of Lazaro Luis and of Vas Dourado, later in the century, both examined by Dr. Martin in Lisbon, are equally so. But this has been already accounted for. It is true that, in a mappemonde of the date of 1526, by one Franciscus, monachus ordinis Franciscanorum, copied into the atlas to the "Géographie du Moyen Age" of Joachim Lelewel, the great Terra Australis, extending along the south of the globe from Tierra del Fuego, is laid down with the words "Is nobis detecta existet," and "haec pars ore nondum cognita;" but this is plainly nothing more than a fanciful extension of Magellan's discovery of the north coast of Tierra del Fuego, combined with the old supposition of the existence of a great southern continent.
A similar remark occurs in the manuscript portolano of Ioan Martinez, of Messina, of the date of 1567, in the British Museum; and in the fifth map of the portolano of the same hydrographer, of the date of 1578, is laid down "Meridional discoperta novamente," with no names on it, and only shewing the north part. The extent of what is seen is twice as long as Java Major, which seems here to be ​Sumatra. It is observable that Petan and Maletur, names occurring on or near the Terra Australis of other maps of about this date, occur here, but close under Java Minor, which is a long way to the west of the "Meridional discoperta novamente."
In 1526 the Portuguese commander, Don Jorge de Meneses, in his passage from Malacca to the Moluccas, was carried by currents and through his want of information respecting the route, to the north coast of Papua, which we now know as New Guinea; and in the following year we find Don Alvaro de Saavedra, a Spaniard, and kinsman of the great Cortes, despatched from New Spain to the Moluccas, and also lighting on New Guinea, where he passed a month; but nowhere in the allusions to these voyages do we find reference to the great southern land, which is laid down with so much detail under the name of "La Grande Jave."
Our surmises, therefore, lead us to regard it as highly probable that Australia was discovered by the Portuguese between the years 1511 and 1529, and, almost to a demonstrable certainty, that it was discovered before the year 1542.
A notion may be formed of the knowledge possessed by the Spaniards in the middle of the sixteenth century, on the part of the world on which we treat, from the following extract from a work entitled, "El libro de las costumbres de todas las gentes del mundo y de las Indias." Translated and compiled by the Bachelor Francisco Themara. Antwerp, 1556. "Thirty leagues from Java the Less is Gatigara, ​nineteen degrees the other side of the equinoctial towards the south. Of the lands beyond this point nothing is known, for navigation has not been extended further, and it is impossible to proceed by land on account of the numerous lakes and lofty mountains in those parts. It is even said that there is the site of the Terrestrial Paradise." Although this was not originally written in Spanish, but was translated from Johannes Bohemus, it would scarcely have been given forth to the Spaniards had better information on such a subject existed among that people.
​In Thevet's Cosmographie Universelle, Paris, 1575, is a map with Taprobane, La Grand Jave, Petite Jave, Partie de la Terre Australe; and in tom. i, liv. 12, the following passage:
"L'art et pratique du navigage est le plus pénible et dangereux de toutes les sciences, que oncques les hommes ayent inventées, veu que l'homme s'expose á la mercy des abysmes de ce grand ocean, qui environne et abbreuve toute la terre. Davātage, avec ceste Esquille lon peult visiter presque toute ce que le monde contient en sa rotondité, soit vers la mer glaciale, ou les deux poles, et terre Australe, qui n'est encor comme ie croy descouverte, mais selon mon opinion d'aussi grande estendue que l'Asie ou l'Afrique, et laquelle un iour sera recherchée par le moyen de ce petit instrument navigatoire, quelque long voyage qui y peust estre."
In Dalrymple's Hist. Coll. of Voyages in the South Pacific Ocean, Juan Fernandez is said to have discovered the southern continent. Burney, who speaks of his discovery of the southern continent (vol. i, p. 300), refers to the memorial of Juan Luis Arias for the description. See the first article in the present collection.
It is needless here to repeat the names and sentences already described at page xvii as given on early engraved maps from Marco Polo, but it will be well to notice such peculiarities as distinguish these maps from those in manuscript, which we have already been speaking of as probably representing Australia under the name of La Grande Jave. Such notice is the more interesting as the date of these engraved ​maps is intermediate between that of the manuscript documents and the period of the authenticated discovery of Australia. In the 1587 edition of Ortelius is a map entitled "Typus Orbis Terrarum," in which New Guinea is made an island, with the words "Nova Guinea quæ an sit insula aut pars continentis Australis incertum." On the Terra Australis, here brought up far more to the north than elsewhere, and separated from New Guinea only by a strait, are the words, "Hanc continentem Australem nonnulli Magellanicam regionem ab ejus inventore nuncupant." While this sentence shows how indefinite was the idea of the extent of Australia towards the south, we think that the entire delineation, which brings the great Terra Australis so far northward in this longitude into connexion with New Guinea, goes far to show that Australia had really been discovered.
In various editions of Mercator occur copies of a map entitled, "Orbis Terræ Compendiosa descriptio quam ex magna universali Gerardi Mercatoris Rumoldus Mercator fieri curabat aº 1587," in which similar indications are given to those in the map of Ortelius just described.
In the map of Peter Plancius, given in the English edition of the voyages of Linschoten, 1598, similar indications of Australia occur, but leaving the question of the insular character of New Guinea doubtful.
In the Speculum Orbis of C. de Judæis, Antwerp, 1592, is a map entitled "Brasilia et Peruvia," on which occurs, "Chæsdia seu Australis Terra quam ​nautarum vulgus Tierra di Fuego vocant, alii Psittacorum Terram." In the map of Asia, in the same volume, a tract is laid down which, by comparison with Ortelius' map of the Pacific Ocean, is plainly New Guinea; and on both these maps, on the west coast of said tract, are the words, "Tierra baixa," which seems to tally with "Baie Basse," at about the corresponding point on the manuscript maps, and is confirmatory of the conclusion which the editor had formed, as stated on page xxvi. In the same volume is a map of the Antarctic hemisphere, in which the Terra Australis incognita is brought high up to the north in the longitude of Australia: on that part of it opposite the Cape of Good Hope is the following legend: "Lusitani bonæ spei legentes capitis promontorium, hanc terram austrum versus extare viderunt, sed nondum imploravere," a significant sentence, if allowance be made for the difficulty at that time of reckoning the longitude.
In the map to illustrate the voyages of Drake and Cavendish by Jodocus Hondius, of which a fac-simile was given in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, printed for our Society, New Guinea is made a complete island, without a word to throw a doubt on the correctness of the representation; while the Terra Australis, which is separated from New Guinea only by a strait, has an outline remarkably similar to that of the Gulf of Carpentaria. These indications give to this map an especial interest, and the more so that it is shown to be earlier than the passage of Torres through Torres' Straits in 1606, by its ​bearing the arms of Queen Elizabeth, before the unicorn of Scotland had displaced the dragon of England.
In the article "Terra Australis," in Cornelius Wytfliet's Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum, Louvain, 1598, we find the following passage:—
"The 'Australis Terra' is the most southern of all lands, and is separated from New Guinea by a narrow strait. Its shores are hitherto but little known, since after one voyage and another, that route has been deserted, and seldom is the country visited unless when sailors are driven there by storms. The 'Australis Terra' begins at two or three degrees from the equator, and is maintained by some to be of so great an extent, that if it were thoroughly explored, it would be regarded as a fifth part of the world."
The above significant statement was printed, it will be remembered, before any discovery of Australia of which we have an authentic account.
But while examining these indications of a discovery of Australia in the sixteenth century, it will be asked what explorations had been made by the Spaniards in that part of the world in the course of that century. From the period of the voyage of Don Alvaro de Saavedra to the Moluccas in 1527, already alluded to, we meet with no such active spirit of exploration on the part of the Spaniards in the South Seas. Embarrassed by his political position, and with an exhausted treasury, the emperor, in 1529, definitely renounced his pretensions to the Moluccas for a sum of money, although he retained his claim to the islands discovered by his subjects to the east of the line of demarcation now confined to ​the Portuguese. In 1542 an unsuccessful attempt to form a settlement in the Philippine Islands was made by Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, but its failure having been attributed to mismanagement, a new expedition in 1564 was despatched with the like object under Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, which was completely successful, and a Spanish colony was established at Zebu. It is not impossible that this settlement gave rise to voyages of discovery about this time by the Spaniards, of which no accounts have been published. In 1567 Alvaro de Mendana sailed from Callao on a voyage of discovery, in which he discovered the Solomon Islands and several others. There are great discrepancies in the different relations of this voyage. In 1595 he made a second voyage from Peru, in which he discovered the Marquesas, and the group afterwards named by Carteret Queen Charlotte's Islands. The object of this expedition was to found a colony on the Solomon Islands, which he had discovered in his previous voyage, but from the incorrectness of his reckoning he was unable to find them. In the island of Santa Cruz he attempted to establish a colony, but without success, and in this island he died. In this second voyage he had for his chief pilot Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, who may be regarded as the last of the distinguished mariners of Spain, and whose name claims especial notice in a work treating of the early indications of Australia, although he himself never saw the shores of that great continental island.
​The discovery of the island of Santa Cruz suggested to the mind of Quiros that the great southern continent was at length discovered, and in two memoirs addressed by him to Don L. de Velasco, viceroy of Peru, we meet with the first detailed argument upon this great geographical question, which, though he himself was not destined to demonstrate it by an actual discovery, may nevertheless be said to have been indirectly brought to a solution through his instrumentality. It is true that it is difficult in dealing with these vague surmises respecting the existence of a southern continent to draw distinctions between Australia itself and the great continent discovered in the present century, some twenty or thirty degrees to the south of that vast island. It has been already stated, p. xxxi, that Dalrymple, nearly two centuries later, earnestly advocated the same cause as De Quiros had done, and speaking of that navigator he says: "The discovery of the southern continent, whenever and by whomsoever it may be completely effected, is in justice due to this immortal name." It should be premised that there are, in fact, three points of ambiguity in connexion with the name of that navigator, which it is well at once to state, as they might mislead the judgment of the superficial reader of the history of navigation of that period as to his connexion with the discovery of Australia.
Antonio de Morga, cap. vi, p. 29, of De Morga's Sucesos en las Islas Filipinas, Mexico, 1609, 4to.; and Figueroa's Hechos de Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, quarto Marques de Cañete, Madrid, 1613, 4to., 1. 6, p. 238.
At the same time, to both Quiros and Dalrymple we are indirectly indebted for the earliest designation which attaches in any sense to the modern nomenclature connected with Australia, viz., for the name of Torres Straits. That Quiros, whether by birth a Portuguese or a Spaniard, was in the Spanish service, cannot be doubted. The viceroy of Peru had warmly entertained his projects, but looked upon its execution as beyond the limits of his own power to ​put into operation. He therefore urged to Quiros to lay his case before the Spanish monarch at Madrid, and furnished him with letters to strengthen his application. Whether Philip III was more influenced by the arguments of De Quiros, as to the discovery of a southern continent, or rather by the desire to explore the route between Spain and America by the east, in the hope of discovering wealthy islands between New Guinea and China, we need not pause to question. It is possible that both these motives had their weight, for Quiros was despatched to Peru with full orders for the carrying out of his plans, addressed to the Viceroy, the Count de Monterey; and he was amply equipped with two well-armed vessels and a corvette, with which he sailed from Callao on the 21st of December, 1605. Luis Vaez de Torres was commander of the Almirante, or second ship, in this expedition. The voyage was looked upon as one of very great importance; and Torquemada, in his account of it in the Monarquia Indiana, says that the ships were the strongest and best armed which had been seen in those seas. The object was to make a settlement at the island Santa Cruz, and from thence to search for the Tierra Austral, or southern continent.
After the discovery of several islands, Quiros came to a land which he named Australia del Espiritu Santo, supposing it to be a part of the great southern continent. At midnight of the 11th of June, 1606, while the three ships were lying at anchor in the bay which they had named San Felipe and Santiago, ​Quiros, for reasons which are not known, and without giving any signal or notice, was either driven by a storm, or sailed away from the harbour, and was separated from the other two ships.
Subsequently to the separation, Torres found that the Australia del Espiritu Santo was an island, and then continued his course westward in pursuance of the exploration. In about the month of August, 1606, he fell in with a coast in 11+$^1$⁄$_2$ degrees south lat., which he calls the beginning of New Guinea; apparently the south-eastern part of the land afterwards named Louisiade by M. de Bougainville, and now known to be a chain of islands. As he could not pass to windward of this land, Torres bore away along its south side, and himself gives the following account of his subsequent course. "We went along three hundred leagues of coast, as I have mentioned, and diminished the latitude 2+$^1$⁄$_2$ degrees, which brought us into 9 degrees. From hence we fell in with a bank of from three to nine fathoms, which extends along the coast above one hundred and eighty leagues. We went over it, along the coast, to 7+$^1$⁄$_2$ south latitude; and the end of it is in 5 degrees. We could not go further on for the many shoals and great currents, so we were obliged to sail south-west, in that depth, to 11 degrees south lat. There is all over it an archipelago of islands without number, by which we passed; and at the end of the eleventh degree the bank became shoaler. Here were very large islands, and there appeared more to the southward. They were inhabited by black people, very corpulent and ​naked. Their arms were lances, arrows, and clubs of stone ill fashioned. We could not get any of their arms. We caught, in all this land, twenty persons of different nations, that with them we might be able to give a better account to Your Majesty. They give much notice of other people, although as yet they do not make themselves well understood. We were upon this bank two months, at the end of which time we found ourselves in twenty-five fathoms, and 5 degrees south latitude, and ten leagues from the coast; and, having gone four hundred eighty leagues here, the coast goes to the north-east. I did not search it, for the bank became very shallow. So we stood to the north."
The very large islands seen by Torres in the 11th degree of south latitude, are evidently the hills of Cape York; and the two months of intricate navigation, the passage through the strait which separates Australia from New Guinea. A copy of this letter of Torres was fortunately lodged in the archives of Manilla; and it was not till that city was taken, in 1762, by the English, that the document was discovered by Dalrymple; who paid a fitting tribute to the memory of this distinguished Spanish navigator, by giving to this dangerous passage the name of Torres' Straits, which it has ever since retained. The editor has striven in vain to learn into whose hands Dalrymple's copy of this letter has fallen. He has been compelled, therefore, to reprint it from Dalrymple's translation, supplied to Admiral Burney, as inserted at the end of vol. ii of his Discoveries and Voyages in the South Sea.
​De Quiros himself reached Mexico on the 3rd of October, 1606, nine months from his departure from Callao. Strongly imbued with a sense of the importance of his discoveries, he addressed various memoirs to Philip III, advocating the desirableness of further explorations in these unknown regions; but, after years of unavailing perseverance, he died at Panama in 1614, leaving behind him a name which for merit, though not for success, was second only to that of Columbus; and with him expired the naval heroism of Spain. "Reasoning," as Dalrymple says, "from principles of science and deep reflection, he asserted the existence of a southern continent; and devoted with unwearied though contemned diligence, the remainder of his life to the prosecution of this sublime conception." In the first document printed in this collection, which is from the hand of the Fray Juan Luis Arias, is given an account of his earnest advocacy of the resuscitation of Spanish enterprise in the southern seas, and especially with reference to the great southern continent.
But while the glory of Spanish naval enterprise was thus on the wane, the very nation which Spain had bruised and persecuted was to supplant her in the career of adventure and prosperity. The war of independence had aroused the energies of those provinces of the Netherlands which had freed themselves from the Spanish yoke; while the cruelties perpetrated in those provinces which the Spaniards had succeeded in again subduing, drove an almost incredible number of families into exile. The majority of ​these settled in the northern provinces, and thus brought into them a prodigious influx of activity. Among these emigrants were a number of enterprising merchants, chiefly from Antwerp,—a town which had for many years enjoyed a most considerable, though indirect, share in the transatlantic trade of Spain and Portugal, and was well acquainted with its immense advantages. These men were naturally animated by the bitter hatred of exiles, enhanced by difference of faith and the memory of many wrongs. The idea which arose among them was, to deprive Spain of her transatlantic commerce, and thus to cripple her resources, and strengthen those of the Protestants, and by this means eventually to force the southern provinces of the Netherlands from their oppressors. This idea, at first vaguely entertained by a few, became general when the Spaniards forbad Dutch vessels to carry on any traffic with Spain. This traffic had existed in spite of the wars, and had furnished the Dutch with the principal means of carrying it on.
Being thus violently thrust out of their share in transatlantic commerce, the Dutch determined to gain it back with interest. Geography and hydrography now became the subjects of earnest study and instruction; and the period was distinguished by the appearance of such men as Ortelius, Mercator, Plancius, De Bry, Hulsius, Cluverius, etc., whom we are now bound to regard as the fathers of modern geography. Among these the most earnest in turning the resources of science into a weapon against the ​oppressors of his country, was Peter Plancius, a Calvinist clergyman, who opened a nautical and geographical school at Amsterdam for the express purpose of teaching his countrymen how to find a way to India, and the other sources whence Spain derived her strength. We do not here dwell on their efforts to find a northern route to the east. Their knowledge of the direct route to that wealthy portion of the world had become greatly increased by the appearance of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's great work. (Amst., 1595-96.) Linschoten had, for fourteen years, lived in the Portuguese possessions in the East, and had there collected a vast amount of information. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602; and in 1606 we find a vessel from Holland making the first authenticated discovery of that great south land which in our own time has been designated—at the suggestion of that worthy navigator, Matthew Flinders, to whom we are so largely indebted for our knowledge of the hydrography of that country—by the distinct and appropriate name of Australia.
Of the discoveries made by the Dutch on the coasts of Australia, our ancestors of a hundred years ago, and even the Dutch themselves, knew but little. That which was known was preserved in the Relations de divers voyages curieux of Melchisedech Thevenot (Paris, 1663-72, fol.); in the Noord en Oost Tartarye of Nicolas Witsen (Amst., 1692-1705, fol.); in Valentyn's Oud en Nieuw Oost Indien (Amst., 1724–26, fol.); and in the Inleidning tot de algemeen ​Geographie of Nicolas Struyk (Amst., 1740, 4to.). We have, however, since gained a variety of information through a document which fell into the possession of Sir Joseph Banks, and was published by Alexander Dalrymple, at that time hydrographer to the Admiralty and the East India Company, in his collection concerning Papua. This curious and interesting document is a copy of the instructions to Commodore Abel Jansz Tasman for his second voyage of discovery. That distinguished commander had already, in 1642, discovered not only the island now named after him, Tasmania (but more generally known as Van Diemen's Land, in compliment to the then governor of the Dutch East India Company at Batavia), but New Zealand also; and, passing round the east side of Australia, but without seeing it, sailed on his return voyage along the northern shores of New Guinea. In January 1644 he was despatched on his second voyage; and his instructions, signed by the Governor-General, Antonio Van Diemen, and the members of the council, are prefaced by a recital, in chronological order, of the previous discoveries of the Dutch. The document is reprinted in the present volume.
From this recital, combined with a passage from Saris, given in Purchas, vol. i, p. 385, we learn that, "On the 18th of November, 1605, the Dutch yacht, the Duyfhen (the Dove), was despatched from Bantam to explore the islands of New Guinea, and that she sailed along what was thought to be the west side of that country, to 19+$^3$⁄$_4$° of south latitude." This extensive country was found, for the greatest part, desert; ​but in some places inhabited by wild, cruel, black savages, by whom some of the crew were murdered; for which reason they could not learn anything of the land or waters, as had been desired of them; and from want of provisions, and other necessaries, they were obliged to leave the discovery unfinished. The furthest point of the land, in their maps, was called Cape Keer Weer, or "Turn Again." As Flinders observes, "the course of the Duyfhen from New Guinea was southward, along the islands on the west side of Torres' Strait, to that part of Terra Australis a little to the west and south of Cape York. But all these lands were thought to be connected, and to form the west coast of New Guinea." Thus, without being conscious of it, the commander of the Duyfhen made the first authenticated discovery of any part of the great south land about the month of March 1606; for it appears that he had returned to Banda in or before the beginning of June of that year.
The second expedition mentioned in the Dutch recital for the discovery of the great south land, was undertaken in a yacht in the year 1617, by order of the Fiscal d'Edel, "with little success," and the journals and remarks were not to be found; but various ships outward bound from Holland to the East Indies, in the course of the years 1616, 1618, 1619, and 1622, made discoveries on the west coast of the great unknown south land, from 35° to 22° south latitude, and among them the ship Eendragt (the Concord), commanded by Dirk Hartog, Hertoge, or Hartighs, of Amsterdam, fell in with land in ​about 25 degrees south, which afterwards received its name from this ship. The president, De Brosses, has fallen into the error of describing Dirk Hartog, as a native of Eendragt, adding that this coast has preserved the name of the vessel, and that of the country of its commander. The Dutch recital which mentions the voyage of the Eendragt, does not give Hartog's name, but we learn it from a MS. chart by Hessel Gerritz, of Amsterdam, 1627, referred to by Dalrymple in his collection concerning Papua, note, page 6. An important part of Hartog's discovery was Dirk Hartog's Roads, at the entrance of the sound, afterwards called by Dampier Shark's Bay, in 25°; and on Dirk Hartog's island, one of the islands forming the road, he left a tin plate, bearing the following inscription: Aº 1616 den 25sten October is hier vangecomen het schip de Endracht van Amsterdam, den Oppercoopmen Gilles Mibais van Amsterdam, den 27sten. dito t' zeijl gegaen na Bantam, den Ondercoopman Jan Stoyn, Opperstiermann Pieter Dockes van Bil Aº. 1616. Of which the following is a translation: On the 25th of October, 1616, arrived here the ship Endraght, of Amsterdam: the first merchant, Gilles Mibais Van Luyck; Captain Dirck Hartog, of Amsterdam; the 27th ditto set sail for Bantam; undermerchant, Jan Stoyn; upper steersman, Pieter Dockes, from Bil. Aº. 1616.
In 1697, this plate was found by Wilhem Van Vlaming, Captain of the Geelvink, of whose voyage we shall have to speak in due course, and was ​replaced by another on which the inscription was copied, and the following new inscription added:
1697. den 4 den Februarij is hier aengecomen het schip de Geelvinck van Amsterdam, den commandeur schipper Williem de Vlamingh van Vlielandt: Adsistent Joan van Bremen van Coppenhage; Opperstierman Michiel Blom van Estight van Bremen.
De Hoecker de Nijptang, schipper Gerrit Collaert van Amsterdam; Adsistent Theodorus Heermans van dº.; d'opper-stierman Gerrit Gerritz van Bremen.
't Galjoot t' Weseltj'e, Gesaghelher Cornelis de Viamigh van Vlielandt; stierman Coert Gerritsz van Bremen, en van hier gezeilt met ons vloot den 12 dº. voorts het Zuijtlandt te ondersoecken en gedestineert voor Batavia.
Of which the following is a translation: On the 4th of February., 1697, arrived here the ship Geelvinck, of Amsterdam: captain commandant, Wilhelm van Vlaming of Vlielandt; assistant, Jan van Bremen of Copenhagen; first pilot., Michéel Bloem van Estight of Bremen; the hooker the Nyptangh, captain Gerrit Collaert of Amsterdam; assistant, Theodorus Heermans of the same place; first pilot, Gerrit Gerritz of Bremen; then the galliot Weseltje; commander, Cornelis van Vlaming of Vlielandt; pilot, Coert Gerritzs of Bremen. Sailed from here with our fleet on the 12th, to explore the south land, and afterwards hound for Batavia.
In the account of the voyage of discovery made to the south by the corvettes, Geographe and Naturaliste, ​in the years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804, published by F. Peron, vol. i, chap. 10, p. 193, we find, that in the month of July 1801, Captain Hamelin, of the Naturaliste, resolved on sailing to the extremity of Shark's Bay; but he first dispatched three men to Dirck Hartog's island, for the purpose of signalizing the Geographe, in case it should heave in sight at the entrance of the bay. On returning from Dirck Hartog's island, the boatswain brought with them the plate of tin above described. It was about six inches diameter, and the inscriptions were described as coarsely cut. The plate was found on the north point of the island, which was named in consequence, the Cape of the Inscription; it was then half covered with sand, lying near an oaken post, on which it seemed to have been originally nailed. Having copied the inscriptions, Captain Hamelin had a new post made, and sent back the plate to be refixed on the same spot from which it had been taken; he would have looked upon it as sacrilege to have kept on board this plate, which, for nearly two centuries, had been spared by nature, and by those who might have observed it before him. He himself also placed on the north-east part of this island a second plate, on which were inscribed the name of his corvette, and the date of his arrival on those shores. In the translation given in Peron's work of the earlier of these two inscriptions, a droll mistake is made by an error in punctuation, as will be seen by comparing the original inscription, see p. lxxxi, with the following: "1616. Le 25 Octobre ​est arrivé ici le navire l'Endraght d' Amsterdam: premier marchand, Gilles Miebais Van Luck; capitaine, Dirck Hartighs d'Amsterdam; il remit sous voile le 27 du même mois; Bantum étoit sous marchand; Janstins premier pilote: Pieter Ecoores Van-Bu ..... Anne 1616."
Thus it will be seen, that Bantam, in Java, for which they set sail, is transformed into the undermerchant, and the person who really held that post is converted into chief pilot, while poor Pieter Dockes, whose name, perhaps more feebly scratched at the close of the inscription, had become obliterated by more than a century's rough usage, is deprived of the honour of holding any post whatever. Even this rendering of the inscription is however highly interesting, as giving some indications of the degree of obliteration effected by the weather in this long space of time.
In 1617 appeared a work, the title of which renders some mention of it in this place necessary. It was entitled "Mundus alter et idem, sive Terra Australis antehac semper incognita longis itineribus peregrini academici nuperrime lustrata. Hanau, 1617." The book bearing this delusive title was by Bishop Joseph Hall. It was in reality an invective against the characteristic vices of various nations, from which it is said that Swift borrowed the idea of Gulliver's Travels.
A strange blunder has been made by the Abbé Prevost, tom. ii, p. 201, of his Histoire des Voyages, 4to. ed., and by the President de Brosses, in his ​Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, tom. i, p. 432; and copied by Callander in his unacknowledged translation from De Brosses, to the effect that in the year 1618, one Zeachen, a native of Arnheim, discovered the land called Arnheim's Land, and Van Diemen's Land on the N. coast of Australia, in about the latitude of 14°. He proceeds to say that Diemen's Land owes its name to Anthony Van Diemen, at that time general of the Dutch East India Company, who returned to Europe with vast riches in 1631. The blunder is easily demonstrable. Zeachen, or as it is also given, Zechaen, is a form of word plainly irreconcileable with the genius of the Dutch language, and is an evident misspelling for Zeehaen, which is the name not of a man, but of a ship, the Sea-hen.
No such voyage is mentioned in the recital of discoveries which preface the instructions to Tasman, nor is there any notice of the north coast of New Holland having been visited by the Dutch in that year. Moreover Van Diemen, as we learn from the Vies des Gouverneur's Généraux avec l'abrégé de l'histoire des établissemens Hollandois by Dubois, was not governor general until January 1st, 1636, and it is observable that one of the ships employed in Tasman's voyage in 1642, in which he discovered the island now known as Tasmania, but to which he, out of compliment, gave the name of the governor general, Van Diemen, was called the Zeehaen, from which in all probability, by some complication of mistakes, the mis-statement here made has originated.
​The Mauritius, an outward bound ship, appears to have made some discoveries upon the west coasts, in July 1618, particularly of Willem's River, near the north-west cape, but no further particulars are known.
It would seem that another of the outward bound ships referred to in the Dutch recital, as visiting the coasts of New Holland, was commanded by Edel, and the land there discovered, which was on the west coast, was named the land of Edel. From Campbell's edition of Harris's voyages, we learn that this discovery was made in 1619. It appears from Thevenot's chart, published in 1663, to have extended from about 29° northward, to 26+$^1$⁄$_2$, where the land of Eendragt commences, but in Van Keulen's chart, published near the close of the century, it is made to extend still more southward, to 32° 20', which Thevenot's chart would attribute rather to the discovery made three years later (1622) by the ship Leeuwin (the Lioness).
The great reef lying off the coast of Edel's Land, called Houtman's Abrolhos, was discovered at the same time. The name was doubtless given after the Dutch navigator Frederick Houtman, although we find no trace of his having himself visited this coast. The Portuguese name Abrolhos, meaning "open your eyes," was given to dangerous reefs, implying the necessity of a sharp look out.
The name of the commander of the Leeuwin has not yet appeared in any published document that has met the editor's eye. The land to which the name of that vessel was given, extended from 35° northward, ​to about 31°; but as we have already stated, in Van Keulen's and later charts, the northern portion of this tract has been included in the discovery by Edel.
For the nearer discovery of Eendraght's Land, the Dutch recital informs us that the governor general, Jan Pietersz Coen, dispatched in September, 1622, the yachts De Haring and Harewind; but this voyage was rendered abortive by meeting the ship Mauritius, and searching after the ship Rotterdam.
In January 1623, the Dutch recital informs us, the yachts Pera and Arnhem, under the command of Jan Carstens, were despatched from Amboina by order of his Excellency Jan Pieterz Coen. Carstens, with eight of the Arnhem's crew, was treacherously murdered by the natives of New Guinea; but the vessels prosecuted the voyage, and discovered "the great islands, Arnhem and the Spult." Arnhem's Land forms the easternmost portion of the north coast of New Holland, lying to the west of the Gulf of Carpentaria. In a chart inserted in Valentyn's Beschryvingh van Banda, fo. 36, is laid down the river Spult in Arnhem's Land, in about the position of Liverpool River, with which, in all probability, it is identical; and the country in its vicinity is probably what is here meant by the Spult.
The ships were then "untimely separated", and the Arnhem returned to Amboina, The Pera persisted, and "sailed along the south coast of New Guinea to a flat cove situate in 10° south latitude, and ran along the west coast of this land to Cape Keer Weer; from ​thence discovered the coast further southwards, as far as 17 degrees, to Staten River. From this place, what more of the land could be discerned seemed to stretch westward." The Pera then returned to Amboina. "In this discovery were found everywhere shallow water and barren coasts; islands altogether thinly peopled by divers cruel, poor, and brutal nations, and of very little use to the Dutch East India Company.
The first discovery of the south coast of New Holland was made in 1627. The Dutch recital says: "In the year 1627, the south coast of the great south land was accidently discovered by the ship the Gulde Zeepaard, outward bound from Fatherland, for the space of a thousand miles." The journal of this voyage seems to have been lost. The editor has spared no pains, by inquiry in Holland and Belgium, to trace its existence, but without success; and the only testimony that we have to the voyage is derived from the above passage and Dutch charts, which give the name of Pieter Nuyts to the immense tract of country thus discovered. Nuyts is generally supposed to have commanded the ship; but Flinders judiciously remarks that, as on his arrival at Batavia, he was sent ambassador to Japan, and afterwards made governor of Formosa, it seems more probable that he was a civilian—perhaps the Company's first merchant on board—rather than captain of the ship. In estimating the thousand miles described in the recital, allowance must doubtless be made for the irregularities of the coast, embracing from Cape Leeuwin to St. Francis and St. Peter's Islands.
​The next discovery upon the western coasts was that of the ship Vianen, one of the seven which returned to Europe under the command of the Governor-General, Carpenter. In this year, the Dutch recital informs us that the coast was seen again accidentally, in the year 1628, on the north side, in the latitude 21° south, by the ship Vianen, homeward bound from India, when they coasted two hundred miles without gaining any knowledge of this great country; only observing "a foul and barren shore, green fields, and very wild, black, barbarous inhabitants."
This was the part called De Witt's Land; but whether the name were applied by the captain of the Vianen does not appear. The President De Brosses, whose account, however, is too full of blunders to follow very implicitly, says, "William de Witt gave his own name to the country which he saw in 1628 to the north of Remessen's River; and which Vianen, a Dutch captain, had, to his misfortune, discovered in the month of January in the same year, when he was driven upon this coast of De Witt, in 21° of latitude, and lost all his riches." The name of De Witt was subsequently retained on this part of the coast in all the maps.
In Thevenot's Recueil de divers Voyages curieux, 1663, is given an account, translated from the Dutch, of the shipwreck of the Batavia, Captain Francis Pelsart, in the night of June 4, 1629, on the reef still known as Houtman's Abrolhos, lying between 28° and 29° S. lat., on the west coast of Australia. A loose and incorrect translation of this account, is ​given in vol. i, p. 320, of Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (Campbell's edition), but a new translation is supplied, in its proper chronological place, in the present volume. At daylight, the shipwrecked sailors saw an island at about three leagues distance, and, still nearer, two islets, to which the passengers with some of the crew were sent. As no fresh water was found on these islets, Pelsart put to sea on the 8th of June, in one of the boats which he had had covered with a deck, and sailed to the main land for the purpose of seeking for water. He found his latitude at noon to be 28° 13' south. The coast, which bore N. by W., he estimated to be eight leagues from the place of shipwreck. It was rocky and barren, and about of the same height as the coast of Dover. He essayed to put in at a small sandy bay, but the surf and unfavourableness of the weather compelled him to keep off the shore. He then steered north, but the abruptness of the shore, and the breakers which he found along the coast, prevented his landing for several days, till at length on the 14th of June, being then in 24° latitude, he saw some smokes at a distance, and steered towards them, but the shore was still found to be steep and rocky, and the sea broke high against it; at length six of his men leaped overboard, and with great exertion reached the land, the boat remaining at anchor in twenty-five fathoms. The sailors, while busily engaged in seeking for water, perceived four natives creeping towards them on their hands and feet; but suddenly, on one of the sailors appearing on an eminence, they rose up and ​fled, so that those who remained in the boat could see them distinctly. They were wild, black, and entirely naked.
The search for water was unsuccessful, and the sailors swam back to the boat, though much bruised by the waves and the rocks. They then again set sail, keeping outside of the shoals. On the morning of the 15th, they discovered a cape, off which lay a chain of rocks, stretching out four miles into the sea, and beyond this another reef, close to the shore. Finding here an opening where the water was smooth, they put into it, but with great risk, as they had but two feet of water with a stony bottom. Here in the holes of the rocks they found fresh rain water, of which they collected forty gallons. There were evident traces of the natives having been there but a short time before. On the 16th of July, they endeavoured to collect more water but without success. There were no signs of vegetation on the sandy level country to be seen beyond, and the ant hills were so large, that they might have been taken for the houses of the natives. The quantity of flies was so great, that they could with difficulty free themselves from them. Eight savages, carrying sticks or spears in their hands, came within musket shot, but fled when the Dutch sailors moved towards them. When Captain Pelsart found there was no hope of procuring water, he again weighed anchor, and got outside of the reef by a second opening more to the north; for having observed the latitude to be 22° 17', his intention was to seek for the river of Jacob Remessens near the ​north-west cape, but the wind changing to northeast, he was compelled to quit the coast. Being now four hundred miles from the place of shipwreck, and having barely water enough for their own use, he determined to make the best of his way back to Batavia for assistance.
Meanwhile, by a fortunate accident, one of them who had been left on the Abrolhos chanced to taste the water in two holes, which water had been supposed to be salt, as it rose and fell with the tide. To their inexpressible joy it proved to be fit to drink, and afforded them an unfailing supply. Captain Pelsart afterwards returned to the Abrolhos in the yacht Saardam, from Batavia; but finding a shameful conspiracy on foot, he was compelled to execute some, and two men were set on shore on the opposite main land. In the instructions subsequently given to Tasman for his voyage in 1644, he was directed "to inquire at the continent thereabouts after two Dutch men, who, having forfeited their lives, were put on shore by the Commodore Francis Pelsart, if still alive. In such case, you may make your enquiries of them about the situation of those countries; and if they entreat you to that purpose, give them passage hither."
Gerrit Tomaz Pool, or Poel, was sent in April of this year from Banda, with the yachts Klyn, Amsterdam, and Wezel upon the same expedition as Carstens; and at the same place on the coast of New Guinea he met with the same fate. Nevertheless, "the voyage was assiduously continued under the charge of ​the super cargo Pieterz Pietersen; and the islands Key and Arouw visited. By reason of very strong eastwardly winds, they could not reach the west coast of New Guinea (Carpentaria); but shaping their course very near south, discovered the coast of Arnhem or Van Diemen's Land, in 11° south latitude; so named from the governor general Van Diemen, who was sent out this year, and sailed along the shore for one hundred and twenty miles (thirty mijlen), without seeing any people, but many signs of smoke.
A short account of this voyage is given by Valentyn, in his volume on Banda, p. 47, a translation of which will be found at p. 75 of the present volume.
Abel Janszen Tasman, who, in the year 1642, had made the two great discoveries of south Van Diemen's Land—in these days more correctly named after himself, Tasmania,—and of New Zealand, was again sent out in 1644, for the express purpose of examining the north and north-western shores of New Holland. His instructions, of which we have already repeatedly spoken, say, that "after quitting Point Ture, or False Cape, situate in 8 degrees on the south coast of New Guinea, you are to continue eastward along the coast to 9 degrees south latitude, crossing prudently the cove at that place. Looking about the high islands or Speults River, with the yachts for a harbour, despatching the tender De Braak for two or three days into the cove, in order to discover whether, within the great inlet, there be not to be found an entrance into the South Sea. ​From this place you are to coast along the west coast of New Guinea, to the furthest discoveries in 17 degrees south latitude, following the coast further, as it may run west or southward. But it is to be feared you will meet in these parts with the south-east trade winds, from which it will be difficult to keep the coast on board, if stretching to the south-east; but, notwithstanding this, endeavour, by all means to proceed, that we may be sure whether this land is divided from the great known south continent or not." Thus it became part of Tasman's duty to explore Torres Straits, then unknown, though possibly suspected to exist. That they had unconsciously been passed through by Torres, in 1606, we have already seen. Tasman, however, failed, as will be presently shewn, in making the desired exploration, and it was not till 1770 that the separation of New Holland from New Guinea was established by Captain Cook. In the remaining portion of his duty, Tasman fully succeeded, viz., in establishing the continuity of the north-west coast of the land designated generally "the great known south continent," as far south as about the twenty-second degree. It is greatly to be regretted that the account of this interesting voyage has not been published. The Burgomaster Witsen, in a work on the migrations of the human race, which appeared in 1705, gives some notes on the inhabitants of New Guinea and New Holland, in which Tasman is quoted among those from whom he gained his information; thus showing that Tasman's narrative was then in existence. M. Van Wyk ​Roelandszoon, in a letter addressed to the editor of the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, dated 26th July, 1825, states, that many savans du premier ordre had for a long time sought in vain for the original papers of Abel Tasman. One young, but very able fellow-countryman of his, had even made a voyage for that express purpose to Batavia, in the hope that they might be found there, but he unfortunately died shortly after his arrival at that place. M. Van Wyk continues, "we still live in the hope of receiving some of these documents." This hope, however, was not realized, and the efforts of the editor of the present volume, which have been exerted in influential quarters for the same object, have been equally unsuccessful. But, although we have to regret the loss or non-appearance of any detailed account of this most important voyage, the outline of the coasts visited by Tasman is laid down, though without any reference to him or his voyage, on several maps which appeared within a few years after the voyage was performed. The earliest representation which the editor has found anywhere mentioned, although in all probability it was preceded by others published in Holland, was on the mappemonde of Louis Mayerne Turquet, published in Paris in 1648. It was also represented on a planisphere, inlaid in the floor of the Groote Zaal, in the Stad-huys at Amsterdam, a building commenced in 1648. The site adopted for this remarkable map was peculiar, and scarcely judicious; for though it gratified the eyes of the enterprising burghers, with the picture of the ​successful explorations of their countrymen, it exposed the representation itself to almost unceasing detrition from the soles of their feet. This outline was also given in the map entitled Mar di India, in the 1650 edition of Janssen's Atlas, 5 vol. supplement. It also occurs in a large Atlas in the King's Library in the British Museum, by J. Klencke, of Amsterdam, presented to King Charles the Second, on his restoration in 1660, and also in a chart inserted in Melchisedech Thevenot's Relation de divers voyages curieux, 1663. From these maps it is apparent that it was from this voyage that the designation of New Holland was first given to this great country. In a map by Van Keulen, published at the close of the seventeenth century, a portion of Tasman's track with the soundings is given, but this also is without reference to Tasman himself. It has, however, been the good fortune of the editor of the present volume to light upon a document which, in the absence of Tasman's narrative, and his own original chart, is the next to be desired: viz., an early copy, perhaps from his own chart, with the tracks of his two voyages pricked thereon, and the entire soundings of the voyage of 1644 laid down. A reduction of this chart is here given. It forms Art. 12 in a miscellaneous MS. collection marked 5222 in the department of MSS. in the British Museum. It bears no name or date, but is written on exactly the same kind of paper, with the same ink, and by the same hand, as one by Captain Thomas Bowrey, in the same volume, done at Fort St. George in 1687. It is observable, that in the
* ↑ Since the reading of this memoir at the Institute, M. Correa da Serra, to whom I had previously read it, has had the goodness to inform me of some researches which he has made upon this subject. He discovered that Don Miguel de Sylva left the kingdom of Portugal in 1542, that he only arrived in Italy in 1543 to receive the cardinal's hat, and he thinks that he could only have reached that country by passing through France, where he had formerly studied, and that he doubtless there left the originals from which our charts were copied.
* ↑ This name, from the Dutch form which it bears, might suggest the idea that the visitor was a Dutchman; but it must be remembered that the Dutch were not in those seas till the end of the sixteenth century, and that the Synod of Dort was held in the years 1618 and 1619, which renders the suggestion at the closeof the paragraph as to "the images to represent their divinity" unreasonable as coming from a native of that country. It is more probable that, from the lapse of time, a mistake was made in the repetition of the name by a savage, and that a Portuguese, and not a Dutchman, suggested the use of images to represent a divinity.
* ↑ For the account of this voyage see a letter from Quiros to DonAntonio de Morga, cap. vi, p. 29, of De Morga's Sucesos en las Islas Filipinas, Mexico, 1609, 4to.; and Figueroa's Hechos de Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, quarto Marques de Cañete, Madrid, 1613, 4to., 1. 6, p. 238.
It is worthy of remark, that the map by Klencke, already referred to, leaves the passage towards Torres Strait open, while in the map here given it is closed. The missing narrative of Tasman alone could explain this discrepancy, or show us the amount of authenticity to be ascribed to either of these maps; but it appears to the editor, that the track laid down with the soundings, gives to the map here given the claim to preference, while the very depth of the imaginary ​ ​preface to a work by Captain Bowrey, on the Malay language, he says, that in 1688, he embarked at Fort St. George, as a passenger for England, having been nineteen years in the East Indies, continually engaged in navigation and trading in those countries, ill Sumatra, Borneo, Bantam, and Java. The twofold blunder, both as to fact and date, contained in the sentence inserted in the middle of the chart, "This large land of New Guinea was first discovered to Joyne to y$^e$ south land by y$^e$ Yot Lemmen as by this chart Francois Jacobus Vis. Pilot Major Anno 1643" is self-evidently an independent subsequent insertion, probably by Bowrey himself, and therefore by no means impugns the inference that the chart is otherwise a genuine copy. The soundings verify the track, and show that Tasman regarded the first point of his instructions as to the exploration of the "great inlet," either as of less importance or of greater danger than the subsequent portion, as to establishing the continuity of the lands on the north and north-west coasts of "the great known southern continent."
It is worthy of remark, that the map by Klencke, already referred to, leaves the passage towards Torres Strait open, while in the map here given it is closed. The missing narrative of Tasman alone could explain this discrepancy, or show us the amount of authenticity to be ascribed to either of these maps; but it appears to the editor, that the track laid down with the soundings, gives to the map here given the claim to preference, while the very depth of the imaginary ​bight here drawn, instead of the strait, throws it out of the line of exploration in the voyage whose track is described. From the notes of the Burgomaster Witsen (1705), we derive the only fragment of an account of this most important voyage. From thence we gain the earliest information respecting the inhabitants. The translation is given by Dalrymple, in his volume on Papua. It is as follows: "In latitude 13 degrees, 8 minutes south, longitude 146 degrees, 18 minutes (probably about 129+$^1$⁄$_2$ degrees east of Greenwich), the coast is barren. The people are bad and wicked, shooting at the Dutch with arrows, without provocation, when they were coming on shore. It is here very populous."
"In 14 degrees, 58 minutes south, longitude 138 degrees, 59 minutes (about 125 degrees east) the people are savage, and go naked: none can understand them. In 16 degrees, 10 minutes south, the people swam on board of a Dutch ship, and when they received a present of a piece of linen, they laid it upon their head in token of gratitude. Every where thereabout all the people are malicious. They use arrows and bows, of such a length that one end rests on the ground when shooting. They have also hazegayes and kalawayes, and attacked the Dutch, but did not know the execution of the guns.
"In Hollandia Nova [a term which seems to imply that the previously named plans were not supposed by Witsen to be included under the name of New Holland] in 17 degrees, 12 minutes south (longitude 121 degrees or 122 degrees east), Tasman found ​naked black people, with curly hair: malicious and cruel, using for arms bows and arrows, hazeygayes and kalawayes. They once came to the number of fifty, double armed, dividing themselves into two parties, intending to have surprised the Dutch, who had landed twenty-five men; but the firing of the guns frightened them so much that they took to flight. Their canoes are made of the bark of trees: their coast is dangerous: there is but little vegetation: the people have no houses."
"In 19 degrees, 35 minutes S., longitude 134 degrees (about 120 degrees apparently), the inhabitants are very numerous, and threw stones at the boats sent by the Dutch to the shore. They made fires and smoke all along the coast, which it was conjectured they did to give notice to their neighbours of strangers being upon the coast. They appear to live very poorly; go naked; eat yams and other roots."
This fragment of description is meagre enough; but it is all that we can boast of possessing. It is further remarkable that those who have spoken of the part of the coast visited by Tasman in this voyage, have led their readers into a misconception by attributing the discovery of the Gulf of Carpentaria to Carpenter, and of the northern Van Diemen's Land to the governor so named. So soon after the voyage as the year 1663, we find Thevenot printing as follows: "We shall, in due course, give the voyages of Carpenter and Diemen, to whom is due the principal honour of this discovery. Van Diemen brought back gold, porcelain, and a thousand other articles of ​wealth; which at first gave rise to the notion that the country produced all these things: though it has been since ascertained that what he brought was recovered from a vessel which had been wrecked on these coasts. The mystery which the Dutch make of the matter, and the difficulties thrown in the way of publishing what is known about it, suggest the idea that the country is rich. But why should they shew such jealousy with respect to a country which produces nothing deserving so distant a journey? La Neuville also, in his Histoire de Hollande (Paris, 1703, tom, ii, p. 213), speaking of Van Diemen, says: "This latter not only examined the coasts of this great land, but had two years previously sailed as far as 43 degrees towards the antarctic pole, and discovered, on the 24th of November 1642, a new country in the other continent, which now bears the name of Van Diemen's Land," Here the very details clearly expose the nature of the mistake, since the maps and the instructions to Tasman shew his second voyage to have been in 1644, and the discovery of Van Diemen's Land in 1642 is known to be his beyond all dispute. The fact is moreover confirmed by the identity of the names given to the tracts discovered in these two voyages, viz. those of the principal members of the council and of Marie van Diemen, to whom Tasman is supposed to have been attached.
Prévost, in his Histoire des Voyages (Paris, 1753, tom. ii, p. 201), says that Carpentaria was discovered by Carpenter in 1662. We then find De Brosses correcting this statement (p. 433) by saying, "the ​Abbé Prevost ought not to have stated that, in 1662, Carpentaria was discovered by Pieter Carpenter, since he was Governor-General of the Company of the Indies, and returned to Europe in June 1628 with five vessels richly laden." He then quotes the above passage from Thevenot, and continues: "Unfortunately Thevenot has not fulfilled his promise respecting Carpentaria. That learned collector was engaged in preparing, at the time of his decease, a fifth volume of his collection, of which some incomplete portions of what he had already published were found in his cabinet. From amongst these I have extracted the journal of Captain Tasman, who discovered Van Diemen's Land. There was, however, nothing respecting the voyage of Captain Carpenter, nor that of the Governor-General, Van Diemen, even if he had left one: at least, if the manuscripts of these voyages were there originally, it is not known what has become of them." De Brosses concludes by saying that his researches in private collections and in printed geographical works had been unsuccessful in procuring further information on the subject. Subsequent geographers continued to attribute to Carpenter the discovery of Carpentaria, and many of them to Van Diemen the discovery of the north Van Diemen's Land. In Dubois' work, Vies des Gouverneurs Généraux, already quoted, which was compiled in Holland from the manuscript journals and registers from Batavia, he says expressly, p. 82, in speaking of Carpenter, who was governor between 1623 and 1627: "Some writers attribute to him personally the honour ​of the discovery of Carpentaria, the southern land lying between New Guinea and New Holland; but this is without any apparent foundation, inasmuch as they fix this discovery in the year 1628, in which year he returned to Holland, on the 12th of June, with five vessels richly laden, having sailed from Batavia on the 12th of November of the previous year." It should, moreover, be observed, that no evidence has been adduced of his having been on the coast at all, while there is every reason to believe that the exploration of the Gulf of Carpentaria was not only "achevé," as M. Eyriès suggests (p. 12, art. 1, vol. ii, of Nouvelles Annales des Voyages), by Tasman in 1644, but accomplished by that navigator for the first time. It might then be asked how comes it that Tasman, who had in both his voyages so largely complimented the governor Van Diemen, by giving his name and that of his daughter Maria, to whom he was attached, to various points of his discovery, should finally give the name of Carpenter to an important gulf and tract of country, when the governor bearing that name had left Batavia sixteen years before? The answer is readily given. The Governor and Company of Batavia formed a local administration under the presidency of the Company of the Indies at Amsterdam, which latter consisted of seventeen delegates from the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands. In the year 1623, in which Carpenter commenced his governorship in the east, an event occurred in Amboina which threatened to produce a war between Holland and England. Some ​English officials, in concert with some Japanese soldiers, had formed a conspiracy to kill the Dutch in the island and to gain possession of the fortress. The conspiracy was discovered, and the governor had the conspirators put to death. In England the governor's conduct was regarded as a piece of heartless cruelty. Mutual recriminations ensued, and for several years a contest between the two countries was imminent. After Carpenter's return to Holland in 1628, he was sent out as one of a deputation to London on this subject despatched in the year 1629. He was also appointed president of the Company of the Indies in Amsterdam, which post he occupied till his death in 1659. It need, therefore, no longer be subject of surprise that Tasman should have given the name of Carpenter, the president of the Home Company of the Indies, to an extensive country and gulf discovered by him in 1644.
We cannot dismiss our notice of this important voyage, which thus gave the name of New Holland to the great South Land, without quoting the remark of Thevenot in the Relation de l'estat présent des Indes, prefixed to the second volume of his Relation de Divers Voyages Curieux. He says: "The Dutch pretend to have a right to the southern land which they have discovered... They maintain that these coasts were never known by the Portuguese or the other nations of Europe..... It is to be noticed that all this extent of country falls within the line of demarcation of the Dutch East India Company, if we are to believe their maps, and that ​this motive of interest has perhaps made them give a false position to New Zealand, lest it should fall within the line of demarcation of the Dutch West India Company; for these two companies are as jealous of each other, as they are of the other nations of Europe... It is to be observed, that although the Portuguese possess many places in the Indies, they are extremely weak, by reason that their enemies are masters of these seas and of the traffic which they themselves formerly possessed."
The observation would seem to imply that Thevenot, a Frenchman, was not wanting in the belief that these coasts had really been discovered by the Portuguese before they were visited by the Dutch, while it passes by in silence any thought of a claim thereto on the part of his own countrymen, a point worth noticing in connexion with the evidence of the early French manuscript maps of which we have already so fully treated.
From the voyage of Tasman to the close of the seventeeth century, it is probable that a considerable number of voyages were made to the west coasts of New Holland, of which no account has ever been printed. By the obliging and intelligent assistance of Mr. Frederick Müller, of Amsterdam, (a rare example of a bookseller who interests himself not only in obtaining curious early books illustrative of the history of his country, but in minutely studying that history himself), the editor has been enabled to procure some documents from the Hague, which have never before been printed, and one which, although ​in print, has become exceedingly scarce, and has never before been rendered into English.
The earliest of these is an account of the ship De Vergulde Draeck, on the Southland, and the expedition undertaken both from Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope in search of the survivors, etc., drawn up and translated from authentic MS. copies of the logbooks in the Royal Archives at the Hague, De Vergulde Draeck, which set sail from the Texel in October 1655, was wrecked on a reef on the west coast, in latitude 30 degrees, 40 minutes, and a hundred and eighteen souls were lost. The news was brought to Batavia by one of the ship's boats, sixty-eight of the survivors having remained behind, exerting themselves to get their boat afloat again, that they might send some more of their number to Batavia, The Governor General immediately dispatched the flyboat the Witte Vaelk, and the yacht the Goede Hoop, to the assistance of those men, and also to help in the rescue of the specie and merchandize lost in the Vergulde Draeck. This expedition was attended with bad success, as they reached the coast in the winter time. Similar ill luck attended the flyboat Vinck, which was directed to touch at New Holland, in its voyage from the Cape to Batavia in 1657, to search for the unfortunate men who had been left behind. The company next dispatched from Batavia two galliots, the Waeckende Boey, and the Emeloort, on the 1st of January, 1658. These vessels also returned to Batavia in April of the same year, having each of them separated, after parting company by the way, ​sailed backwards and forwards again and again, and landed parties at several points along the coast. They had also continually fired signal guns night and day, without, however, discovering either any Dutchmen, or the wreck of the vessel. The only things seen were some few planks and blocks, with a piece of the mast, a taffrail, fragments of barrels, and other objects scattered here and there along the coast, and supposed to be remnants of the wreck. This account, with a description of the west coast of the South Land, by the Captain Samuel Volkersen, of the Pink Waeckende Boey, is accompanied by copies of original charts, showing the coast visited by this vessel and the Emeloort, never before printed. These documents are followed by an extract from the Burgomaster Witsen's Noord en Oost Tartarye, descriptive of the west coast, a portion of which is plainly derived from the account of Abraham Leeman, the mate of the Waeckende Boey.
We must not here omit to mention, that in the year 1693, appeared a work bearing the following title: Les Avantures de Jaques Sadeur dans la découverte et le voyage de la Terre Australe, contenant les coutumes et les mœurs des Australiens, leur religion, leurs exercises, leurs études, leurs guerres, leurs animaux, particuliers à ce pays et toutes les raretez curieuses qui s'y trouvent. À Paris, chez Claude Barbin, au Palais, sur le second perron de la Sainte Chapelle, 1693. In the Vannes edition, p, 3, the author's Christian name is given Nicolas. An English translation appeared in the same year, ​entitled "A new discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern World, by James Sadeur, a Frenchman, who, being cast there by a shipwreck, lived thirty-five years in that country, and gives a particular description of the manners, customs, religion, laws, studies and wars of those southern people, and of some animals peculiar to that place, with several other rarities. These memoirs were thought so curious, that they were kept secret in the closet of a late great minister of state, and never published till now, since his death. Translated from the French copy printed at Paris by publick authority, April 8. Imprimatur, Charles Hern, London. Printed for John Dunton, at the Raven, in the Poultry, 1693." The work is purely fictitious throughout.
The next Dutch voyage of which we have succeeded in finding an account, is that of Willem de Vlamingh, in 1696, which also owed its origin to the loss of a ship, the Ridderschap van Hollandt. This vessel had been missing from the time she had left the Cape of Good Hope in 1684 or 1685, and it was thought probable she might have been wrecked upon the great South Land, and that some of the crew might, even after this lapse of time, be still living. The commodore, Willem de Vlaming, who was going out to India with the Geelvink, Nyptang, and Wezel, was, therefore, ordered to make a search for them. The account of this voyage, which was printed at Amsterdam in 1701, 4to, is exceedingly scarce; and after many years enquiry, the editor ​deemed himself fortunate in procuring it through the medium of Mr. Müller, of Amsterdam, and a translation of it is here given. The search of De Vlaming was, however, fruitless, and the two principal points of interest were the finding of the plate already described, with the inscription commemorating the arrival and departure of Dirk Hartog, in 1616, and the discovery of Swan River, where the embodiment of the poet's notion of a rara avis in terris was for the first time encountered, and two of the black swans were taken alive to Batavia.
Meanwhile, the shores of New Holland had been visited by a countryman of our own, the celebrated Dampier. In the buccaneering expedition in which he made a voyage round the world, he came upon the north-west coast in 16 degrees, 50 minutes due south from a shoal, whose longitude is now known to be 122+$^1$⁄$_4$ degrees east. Running along the shore N.E. by E., twelve leagues to a bay or opening convenient for landing, a party was sent ashore to search for water, and surprised some of the natives, some of whom they tried to induce to help in filling the water casks, and conveying them to the boat. "But all the signs we could make," says Dampier, "were to no purpose; for they stood like statues, staring at one another, and grinning like so many monkeys. These poor creatures seem not accustomed to carry burdens; and I believe one of our ship's boys, of ten years old, would carry as much as one of their men." In his description of the natives, he agrees with Tasman in their being "a naked black people, with ​curly hair, like that of the negroes in Guinea; but he mentions other circumstances which are not mentioned in the note from Tasman. He describes them as "the most miserable people in the world. The Hottentots compared with them are gentlemen. They have no houses, animals, or poultry; their persons are tall, straight bodied, thin, with long limbs; they have great heads, round foreheads, and great brows; their eyelids are always half closed, to keep the flies out of their eyes, for they are so troublesome here, that no fanning will keep them from one's face; so that, from their infancy, they never open their eyes as other people do, and therefore they cannot see far, unless they hold up their heads as if they were looking at something over them. They have great bottle noses, full lips, wide mouths; the two fore teeth of the upper jaw are wanting in all of them; neither have they any beard. Their hair is short, black and curled, and their skins coal black, like that of the negroes in Guinea, Their only food is fish, and they consequently search for them at low water; and they make little weirs or dams with stones across little coves of the sea. At one time, our boat being among the islands, seeking for game, espied a drove of these people swimming from one island to another, for they have neither boats, canoes, nor bark logs." Dampier remained there from January 5 to March 12, 1688, but is silent as to any dangers upon the twelve leagues of coast seen by him.
In the year 1699, Great Britain being at peace ​with the other maritime states of Europe, king William ordered an expedition for the discovery of new countries, and for the examination of some of those already discovered, particularly New Holland and New Guinea. Dampier's graphic narrative of his buccaneering voyages caused the Earl of Pembroke to select him to conduct the expedition. The Roebuck, a ship belonging to the royal navy, was equipped for the purpose. After a voyage of six months, Dampier struck soundings in the night of August 1st, 1699, upon the northern part of the Abrolhos shoal, in latitude about 27 degrees, 40 minutes S. Next morning he saw the main coast, and ran northward along it, discovering in 26 degrees, 10 minutes, an opening two leagues wide, but full of rocks and foul ground. August 6th, he anchored in Dirk Hartog's Road, at the entrance of a sound which he named Shark's Bay: where he remained eight days examining the sound, cutting wood upon the islands, fishing, etc., and gives a description of what was seen in his usual circumstantial manner. His description of the kangaroo, probably the first ever given of that singular animal, is a curious one. "The land animals we saw here were only a sort of raccoons, but different from those of the West Indies, chiefly as to their legs; for these have very short forelegs, but go jumping, and like the raccoons are very good meat."
Sailing northward along the coast, he found an archipelago extending twenty leagues in length, which has been more recently examined by Captain ​King. He anchored in lat. 20 degrees, 21 minutes, under one of the largest of the islands, which he named Rosemary Island. This was near the southern part of De Witt's Land; but besides an error in latitude of 40 minutes, he complains that in Tasman's charts "the shore is laid down as all along joining in one body or continent, with some openings like rivers, and not like islands, as really they are." "By what we saw of them, they must have been a range of islands, of about twenty leagues in length, stretching from E.N.E. to W.S.W., and, for aught I know, as far as to those of Shark's Bay; and to a considerable breadth also, for we could see nine or ten leagues in amongst them, towards the continent or main land of New Holland, if there be any such thing hereabouts: and by the great tides I met with awhile afterwards more to the north-east, I had a strong suspicion that here might be a kind of archipelago of islands; and a passage, possibly, to the south of New Holland and New Guinea, into the great South Sea eastward.
"Not finding fresh water upon such of the islands as were visited that day, Captain Dampier quitted his anchorage next morning, and 'steered away E.N.E., coasting along as the land lies.' He seems to have kept the land in sight, in the daytime, at the distance of four to six leagues; but the shore being low, this was too far for him to be certain whether all was main land which he saw; and what might have been passed in the night was still more doubtful.
​"August 30th, being in latitude 18 degrees, 21 minutes, and the weather fair, Captain Dampier steered in for the shore; and anchored in eight fathoms, about three-and-a-half leagues off. The tide ran 'very swift here; so that our nun-buoy would not bear above the water to be seen. It flows here, as on that part of New Holland I described formerly, about five fathoms.'
"He had hitherto seen no inhabitants; but now met with several. The place at which he had touched in the former voyage 'was not above forty or fifty leagues to the north-east of this. And these were much the same blinking creatures (here being also abundance of the same kind of flesh flies teizing them), and with the same black skins, and hair frizzled, tall and thin, etc., as those were. But we had not the opportunity to see whether these, as the former, wanted two of their fore teeth.' One of them, who was supposed to be a chief, 'was painted with a circle of white paste or pigment about his eyes, and a white streak down his nose, from his forehead to the tip of it. And his breast, and some part of his arms, were also made white with the same paint.'
"Neither bows nor arrows were observed amongst these people: they used wooden lances, such as Dampier had before seen. He saw no houses at either place, and believed they had none; but there were several 'things like haycocks, standing in the savannah; which, at a distance, we thought were houses, looking just like the Hottentots' houses at the Cape ​of Good Hope; but we found them to be so many rocks.' These rocks he could not have examined very closely; for there can be little doubt that they were the ant ills described by Pelsart as being 'so large, that they might have been taken for the houses of Indians.'
"The land near the sea coast is described as equally sandy with the parts before visited, and producing, amongst its scanty vegetation, nothing for food. No stream of fresh water was seen, nor could any, fit to drink, be procured by digging.
"Quitting this inhospitable shore. Captain Dampier weighed his anchor on September 5th, with the intention of seeking water and refreshments further on to the north-eastward. The shoals obliged him to keep at a considerable distance from the land, and finally, when arrived at the latitude of 16 degrees, 9 minutes, to give up his project, and direct his course for Timor."
With the voyage of Dampier terminates the information gained of the western coasts previously to the present century, which does not lie within the range of our inquiries.
In 1705 another and last voyage was made by the Dutch for the discovery of the north coast. The expedition consisted of three vessels, the Vossenbosch, the Wayer, and the Nova Hollandia. The commander was Martin van Delft. The journals appear to have been lost. At all events they have not hitherto been found, but a report to the Governor-General and ​Council of the discoveries and notable occurrences in the expedition, was drawn from the written journals and verbal recitals of the officers on their return, by the Councillors Extraordinary, Hendrick Swaardecroon and Cornelis Chastelijn. This report is given for the first time in English in the present collection, from which it appears that the part of the coast visited was carefully explored, and that the Dutch had intercourse with the natives, a result in which De Vlaming's expedition had entirely failed. In the miscellaneous tracts of Nicholas Struyck, printed at Amsterdam, 1753, is also given an imperfect account of this voyage as follows: "March 1st, 1705. Three Dutch vessels were sent from Timor with order to explore the north coast of New Holland, better than it had before been done. They carefully examined the coasts, sand banks, and reefs. In their route to it, they did not meet with any land, but only some rocks above water, in 11 degrees, 52 minutes south latitude" (probably, says Flinders, the south part of the great Sahul Bank, which, according to Captain Peter Heywood, who saw it in 1801, lies in 11 degrees 40 minutes). "They saw the west coast of New Holland, four degrees to the eastward of the east point of Timor. From thence they continued their route towards the north, and passed a point, off which lies a bank of sand above water, in length more than five German miles of fifteen to a degree. After which they made sail to the east, along the coast of New Holland; observing everything with care, until they came to a gulf, the head ​of which they did not quite reach. I (Struyck) have seen a chart made of these parts."
Flinders remarks upon this account, "What is here called the west must have been the north-west coast," and he is right; for in the report here printed, the country is called "Van Diemen's Land," lying, as we know, on the north-west coast of New Holland, already in this introduction frequently referred to in distinction from the island more generally so known, and now called Tasmania. Flinders continues: "which the vessels appear to have made somewhat to the south of the western Cape Van Diemen. The point which they passed was probably this same cape itself; and in a chart, published by Mr. Dalrymple, August 27th, 1783, from a Dutch manuscript (possibly a copy of that which Struyck had seen), a shoal, of thirty geographic miles in length, is marked as running off from it, but incorrectly, according to Mr. M$^c$Cluer. The gulf here mentioned was probably a deep bay in Arnhem's Land; for had it been the Gulf of Carpentaria, some particular mention of the great change in the direction of the coast would, doubtless, have been made."
In the year 1718 a Mons. Jean Pierre Purry, of Neufchatel, published a work entitled, Mémoire sur le Pays des Caffres et la Terre do Nuyts par rapport à l'utilité que la Compagnie des Indes Orientales en pourroit rétirer pour son Commerce, followed by a second memoir in the same year. These publications were explanatory of a project he entertained of founding a colony in the land of Nuyts. The scheme had ​been submitted to the Governor-General, Van Swoll, at Batavia, but was discountenanced. It subsequently met the same fate when laid by its author before the Directors of the Dutch East India Company at Amsterdam. M. Purry shortly afterwards brought his proposition before the West India Company, and it was supposed by some that the voyage of Roggeween to the South Seas in 1721 was a result of this application; but it is distinctly stated by Valentyn that it was an entirely distinct expedition. In 1699 Roggeween's father had submitted to the West India Company a detailed memoir on the discovery of the southern land; but the contentions between Holland and Spain prevented the departure of the fleet destined for the expedition, and it was forgotten. Roggeween, however, who had received his father's dying injunctions to prosecute this enterprize, succeeded at length in gaining the countenance of the directors, and was himself appointed commander of the three ships which were fitted out by the company for the expedition. According to Valentyn, the principal object of this voyage was the search for certain "islands of gold," supposed to lie in 56 degrees south latitude; but the professed purpose was distinctly avowed by Roggeween to be directed to the south lands. Although the expedition resulted in some useful discoveries, it did not touch the shores of New Holland.
The last document in the collection here printed is a translation from a little work published in Dutch, in 1857, by Mr. P. A. Leupe, Captain of Marines in ​the Dutch Navy, "The Houtman's Abrolhos in 1727," detailing the disasters of which those dangerous shoals had been the cause.
It will be seen that we have been unable to supply any descriptive account of discoveries on the eastern coast of Australia. That it was really discovered, and in all probability by the Portuguese, in the early part of the sixteenth century, we have already endeavoured to show. During more than two centuries from that period, it was probably never visited by any European. The honour of exploring that portion of the great island was reserved for the immortal Cook, who first saw that coast on April 19th, 1770, but a reference to such well known explorations certainly does not fall within the scope of antiquarian investigation. The like may be said of the first visit to Van Diemen's Land, subsequent to Tasman's discovery in 1642, which was made by Marion a hundred and thirty years later.
In conclusion, it would be inappropriate to omit the remark that it is to that most able and distinguished voyager, Matthew Flinders, to whose valuable work, A Voyage to Terra Australis, the editor has been greatly indebted for help in this introduction, that we have to give the credit for the compact and useful name which Australia now bears. In a note on page 111 of his introduction, he modestly says, "Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term [Terra Australis], it would have been to convert it into Australia, as being more agreeable to the ear, ​and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth."
It has been the habit, for the most part, of editors of works for the Hakluyt Society, to endeavour to elucidate their text by introductions, which have often reached to a considerable length. A very slight consideration of the nature of the subjects which the Society professes to deal with, will show the reasonableness, nay, even the necessity of such introductions. When the attention of a reader is invited to the narrative of a voyage, however interesting and curious in itself, which carries him back to a remote period, it is but reasonable that he should have explained to him the position which such a narrative, arbitrarily selected, holds in the history of the exploration of the country treated of. To do this satisfactorily is clearly a task requiring no little labour, and although it may necessarily involve a somewhat lengthy dissertation, certainly calls for no apology. Nevertheless, the simple fact of an introduction bearing a length at all approaching to that of the text itself, as is the case in the present volume, does, beyond question, at the first blush, justly require an explanation. All the publications of our Society consist of previously unpublished documents, or are reprints or translations of narratives of early voyages become exceedingly rare. But it is evidently matter of accident to what length the text may extend, while it is equally evident that the ​introductory matter illustrative of a small amount of text may be, of necessity, longer than that required to illustrate documents of greater extent. This is strikingly the case with the subject of the present volume. It has been matter of good fortune that the editor has been enabled to bring together even so many documents as are here produced, in connection with the early discoveries of Australia, while the enigmatical suggestions of early maps, unaccompanied by any descriptive matter to be found after diligent research, has necessitated an inquiry into their merits, which, though lengthy, it is hoped will not be deemed unnecessary. This so called introduction in fact, in a great measure, consists of matter, which, if supplied by original documents, would form a component part of the text itself.
The editor cannot close his labours on this most puzzling subject of the "Early Indications of Australia," without expressing an earnest hope that further researches may yet result in the production of documents, as yet undiscovered, which may throw a light upon the history of the exploration of this interesting country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, if possible, solve the great mystery which still hangs over the origin of the early manuscript maps so fully treated of, and it is hoped not without some advance towards elucidation, in this introduction.