ast, going much more south than Cape Leeuwin, at
last reached land in latitude 43.30 deg. and longitude 163.50 deg.. This
he called Van Diemen's Land, after the name of the Governor-General
of Batavia, and it was assumed that this joined on to the land
already discovered by De Nuyts. Sailing farther to the eastward,
Tasman came out into the open sea again, and thus appeared to prove
that the newly discovered land was not connected with the great
unknown continent round the south pole.

But he soon came across land which might possibly answer to that
description, and he called it Staaten Land, in honour of the
States-General of the Netherlands. This was undoubtedly some part
of New Zealand. Still steering eastward, but with a more northerly
trend, Tasman discovered several islands in the Pacific, and ultimately
reached Batavia after touching on New Guinea. His discoveries were
a great advance on previous knowledge; he had at any rate reduced
the possible dimensions of the unknown continent of the south within
narrow limits, and his discoveries were justly inscribed upon the map
of the world cut in stone upon the new Staathaus in Amsterdam, in
which the name New Holland was given by order of the States-General
to the western part of the "terra Australis." When England for a
time became joined on to Holland under the rule of William III.,
William Dampier was despatched to New Holland to make further
discoveries. He retraced the explorations of the Dutch from Dirk
Hartog's Bay to New Guinea, and appears to have been the first
European to have noticed the habits of the kangaroo; otherwise
his voyage did not add much to geographical knowledge, though when
he left the coasts of New Guinea he steered between New England
and New Ireland.

As a result of these Dutch voyages the existence of a great land
somewhere to the south-east of Asia became common property to all
civilised men. As an instance of this familiarity many years before
Cook's epoch-making voyages, it may be mentioned that in 1699 Captain
Lemuel Gulliver (in Swift's celebrated romance) arrived at the kingdom
of Lilliput by steering north-west from Van Diemen's Land, which he
mentions by name. Lilliput, it would thus appear, was situated
somewhere in the neighbourhood of the great Bight of Australia. This
curious mixture of definite knowledge and vague ignorance on the
part of Swift exactly corresponds to the state of geographical
knowledge about Australia in his