discovered in the youth of the sixteenth century, and, of course, it has
been asserted that the Chinese were acquainted with the land long before
Europeans ventured to go so far afloat. There is strong evidence that the
west coast of Australia was touched by the Spaniards and the Portuguese
during the first half of the sixteenth century, and proof of its discovery
early in the seventeenth century. At the time of these very early South
Sea voyages the search, it should always be remembered, was for a great
Antarctic continent. The discovery of islands in the Pacific was, to the
explorers, a matter of minor importance; New Guinea, although visited by
the Portuguese in 1526, up to the time of Captain Cook was supposed by
Englishmen to be a part of the mainland, and the eastern coast of
Australia, though touched upon earlier and roughly outlined upon maps,
remained unknown to them until Cook explored it.

[Illustration: MARTIN FROBISHER. From the portrait in Holland's
"Herolowologia Anglica" [London, 1620]. _To face p_. 2.]

_Early Voyages to Australia_, by R.H. Major, printed by the Hakluyt
Society in 1859, is still the best collection of facts and contains the
soundest deductions from them on the subject, and although ably-written
books have since been published, the industrious authors have added little
or nothing in the way of indisputable evidence to that collected by Major.
The belief in the existence of the Australian continent grew gradually and
naturally out of the belief in a great southern land. Mr. G.B. Barton, in
an introduction to his valuable Australian [Sidenote: 1578]
history, traces this from 1578, when Frobisher wrote:--

"Terra Australis seemeth to be a great, firme land, lying under
and aboute the south pole, being in many places a fruitefull
soyle, and is not yet thorowly discovered, but only seen and
touched on the north edge thereof by the travaile of the
Portingales and Spaniards in their voyages to their East and West
Indies. It is included almost by a paralell, passing at 40 degrees
in south latitude, yet in some places it reacheth into the sea
with great promontories, even into the tropicke Capricornus. Onely
these partes are best known, as over against Capo d' buona
Speranza (where the Portingales see popingayes commonly of a
wonderful greatnesse), and againe it is knowen at the south side
of the straight of Magellanies, and is