CHAPTER XLI
EARLY DISCOVERERS OF AUSTRALIA
While the French and English were feverishly seeking a way to the East, either by the North Pole or by way of America, the Dutch were busy discovering a new land in the Southern Seas.
And as we have seen America emerging from the mist of ages in the sixteenth century, so now in the seventeenth we have the great Island Continent of Australia mysteriously appearing bit by bit out of the yet little-known Sea of the South. There is little doubt that both Portuguese and Spanish had touched on the western coast early in the sixteenth century, but gave no information about it beyond sketching certain rough and undefined patches of land and calling it Terra Australis in their early maps; no one seems to have thought this mysterious land of much importance. The maritime nations of that period carefully concealed their knowledge from one another. The proud Spaniard hated his Portuguese neighbour as a formidable rival in the race for wealth and fame, and the Dutchman, who now comes on the scene, was regarded by both as a natural enemy by land or sea.
Magellan in 1520 discovered that the Terra Australis was not joined to South America, as the old maps had laid down; and we find Frobisher remarking in 1578 that "Terra Australis seemeth to be a great, firm land, lying under and about the South Pole, not thoroughly discovered. It is known at the south side of the Strait of Magellan and is called Terra del Fuego. It is thought this south land about the pole Antarctic is far bigger than the north land about the pole Arctic; but whether it be so or not, we have no certain knowledge, for we have no particular description thereof, as we have of the land about the North Pole."
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AN EARLY MAP OF "TERRA AUSTRALIS," CALLED "JAVA LA
GRANDE" IN ITS SUPPOSED EASTERN PART. From the "Dauphin" map of 1546. There was then supposed to be a great mainland of Java, separated from the island of "Java Minor" by a narrow strait. See the copy of the whole of [this map] in colour, where it will be seen that the "Terra Australis" was supposed to stretch from east to west. |
And even one hundred years later the mystery was not cleared up. "This land about the straits is not perfectly discovered whether it be continent or islands. Some take it for continent, esteeming that Terra Australis or the Southern Continent may for the largeness thereof take a first place in the division of the whole world."