l
explorers are connected with our knowledge of the interior of North
America. Unknown settlers have been the pioneers of geography,
and not as elsewhere has the reverse been the case. In the two
other continents whose geographical history we have still to trace,
Australia and Africa, explorers have preceded settlers or conquerors,
and we can generally follow the course of geographical discovery
in their case without the necessity of discussing their political
history.

[_Authorities:_ Winsor, _From Cartier to Frontenac_; Gelcich, in
_Mittheilungen_ of Geographical Society of Vienna, 1892.]

CHAPTER X

AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS--TASMAN AND COOK

If one looks at the west coast of Australia one is struck by the
large number of Dutch names which are jotted down the coast. There
is Hoog Island, Diemen's Bay, Houtman's Abrolhos, De Wit land, and
the Archipelago of Nuyts, besides Dirk Hartog's Island and Cape
Leeuwin. To the extreme north we find the Gulf of Carpentaria,
and to the extreme south the island which used to be called Van
Diemen's Land. It is not altogether to be wondered at that almost
to the middle of this century the land we now call Australia was
tolerably well known as New Holland. If the Dutch had struck the
more fertile eastern shores of the Australian continent, it might
have been called with reason New Holland to the present day; but
there is scarcely any long coast-line of the world so inhospitable
and so little promising as that of Western Australia, and one can
easily understand how the Dutch, though they explored it, did not
care to take possession of it.

[Illustration: TERRES AUSTRALES. d'apres d'Anville. 1746.]

But though the Dutch were the first to explore any considerable
stretch of Australian coast, they were by no means the first to
sight it. As early as 1542 a Spanish expedition under Luis Lopez de
Villalobos, was despatched to follow up the discoveries of Magellan
in the Pacific Ocean within the Spanish sphere of influence. He
discovered several of the islands of Polynesia, and attempted to
seize the Philippines, but his fleet had to return to New Spain.
One of the ships coasted along an island to which was given the
name of New Guinea, and was thought to be part of the great unknown
southern land which Ptolemy had imagined to exist in the south
of the Indian Ocean, and to be connected in some way with Tierra
del Fuego. Curiosity was thus aroused, and in 1606 Pedro de Quiro