rately free from danger, could be discovered; since _five or six
weeks_ of the usual route, by the north of New Guinea or the more eastern
islands, would thereby be saved. Notwithstanding the great obstacles
which navigators had encountered in some parts of the Strait, there was
still room to hope, that an examination of the whole, made with care and
perseverance, would bring such a passage to light. A survey of it was,
therefore, an object much to be desired; not only for the merchants and
seamen trading to these parts, but also from the benefits which would
certainly accrue therefrom to general navigation and geography.

2nd. _An examination of the shores of the GULPH OF CARPENTARIA_. The real
form of this gulph remained in as great doubt with geographers, as were
the manner how, and time when it acquired its name.* The east side of the
Gulph had been explored to the latitude of 17 deg., and many rivers were
there marked and named; but how far the representation given of it by the
Dutch was faithful--what were the productions, and what its
inhabitants--were, in a great measure, uncertain. Or rather it was
certain, that those early navigators did not possess the means of fixing
the positions and forms of lands, with any thing like the accuracy of
modern science; and that they could have known very little of the
productions, or inhabitants. Of the rest of the Gulph no one could say,
with any confidence, upon what authority its form had been given in the
charts; so that conjecture, being at liberty to appropriate the Gulph of
Carpentaria to itself, had made it the entrance to a vast arm of the sea,
dividing Terra Australis into two, or more, islands.

[* I am aware that the president de Brossed says, "This same year also
(1628) CARPENTARIA was thus named by P. Carpenter, who discovered it when
general in the service of the Dutch Company. He returned from India to
Europe, in the month of June 1628, with five ships richly laden." (_Hist.
des Nav. aux Terres Aust_. Tome I. 433). But the president here seems to
give either his own, or the Abbe' Prevost's conjectures, for matters of
fact. We have seen, that the coast called Carpentaria was discovered long
before 1628; and it is, besides, little probable, that Carpenter should
have been making discoveries with five ships richly laden and homeward
bound. This name of Carpentaria does not once appear in Tasman's
Instructions, dated in 1644; but is found in Thevenot's chart of 166