the south-east; from thence he conjectured that there was in that place a passage through the land, which conjecture we proved to be true, as he himself had certainly done, had not the wind changed as he thought in his favour, giving him an opportunity of returning the way he came in, which he preferred to standing into a bay with an on-shore wind, upon the strength of conjecture only. Again, when he came the length of Cape Maria Van Diemen he observed hollow waves to come from the north-east, from whence he concluded it to be the northernmost part of the land, which we really found it to be. Lastly, to his eternal credit be it spoken, although he had been four months absent from Batavia when he made this land, and had sailed both west and east, his longitude (allowing for an error in that of Batavia, as he has himself stated it) differs no more than [1] from ours, which is corrected by an innumerable number of observations of the moon and sun, etc., as well as of a transit of Mercury over the sun, all calculated and observed by Mr. Green, a mathematician of well-known abilities, who was sent out in this ship by the Royal Society to observe the transit of Venus. Thus much for Tasman; it were too much to be wished, however, that we had a fuller account of his voyage than that published by Dirk Rembrantz, which seems to be no more than a short extract, and that other navigators would imitate him in mentioning the supposed latitudes and longitudes of the places from whence they take their departures; which precaution, useful as it is, may almost be said to have been used by Tasman alone.
The face of the country is in general mountainous, especially inland, where probably runs a chain of very high hills, parts of which we saw at several times. They were generally covered with snow, and certainly very high; some of our officers, men of experience, did not scruple to say as
- ↑ Left blank in Banks's Journal. The following note was appended by Banks at the end of the chapter:—
Though Tasman's longitude of Cape Maria Van Diemen comes near the truth, our seamen affirm, and seem to make it appear, that he erred no less than 4° 49′ in running from the first land he made to Cape Maria Van Diemen; if so, his exactness must be attributed more to chance than skill.
