Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/43

SKETCH., XXXV ce n^est peui-etre pas un seul continent. U y a toute apparence gue ces grandes contrees aont isolees par pluaieura detroits incorvnua. Althongli this passage is correctly translated bj Callander (vol. i, p. 10), he interpolates nearly six pages (pp. 48-48) in the text of de Brosses for the purpose of developing his own ideas on the subject ; beginning with the contradictory statement that " New Guinea, Carpentaria, New Holland, Diemen's Land, and the coxmtry discovered by Quires, make all one great continent, from which New Zealand seems to be separated by a strait.'^ Callander's title may be largely responsible for the confusion of ideas which misled Bumey and Flinders, as well as others ; although the name Terra Australis was applied to this country in many publications before his time. Dampier, for instance, in his New Voyage Bound the World, spoke of it as — '^ New Holland, a part of Terra Australis Incognita.^' But he, too, thought that New Holland was an island : — " I found that other parts of this great Tract of Terra Australis, which had hitherto been repre- sented as the Shore of a Continent, were certainly Islands ; and 'tis probably the same with New Holland J^* The fact that he believed the country to be an island at the same time that he spoke of it as part of the unknown continent, shows how unsettled his opinion was about it. At the time he wrote, there was nothing but uncertainty on the snbject; Tasman's second voyage had not been made known to the world ; and even the hydrographers of a much later period had not succeeded in getting any accurate ideas. In the introduction to his Col- lection of Voyages in the South Pacific, published by Dalrymple in 1770 — ^two years after Cook set sail on his voyage in the Endeavour — he gave it as his opinion, based on a long- continued study of the subject, that " it is more than probable that another continent will be there found [in the South Pacific] , extending from 80" south towards the pole.^' He believed, too, that the continent in question had ^^ been seen on the west side by Tasman in 1642, and on the east by Juan Fernandas above half a century before, and by others after him, in different • Tojage to New Holland, rol. iii, p. 126, ed. 1729. Digitized byCjOOQlC