ers, and not like islands, as really they are.... This
place, therefore, lies more northerly by 40 minutes than is laid
down in Mr. Tasman's draught, and besides its being made a firm,
continued land, only with some openings like the mouths of rivers,
I found the soundings also different from what the line of his
course shows them, and generally shallower than he makes them,
which inclines me to think that he came not so near the shore as
his line shows, and so had deeper soundings, and could not so well
distinguish the islands. His meridian or difference of longitude
from Sharks' Bay agrees well enough with my account, which is 232
leagues, though we differ in latitude. And, to confirm my
conjecture that the line of his course is made too near the shore,
at least not so far to the east of this place, the water is there
so shallow that he could not come there so nigh."

That the narrative of Tasman's voyage was at [Sidenote: 1638-1697]
that time in existence there is little doubt, and an outline of the coasts
visited by him was given in an atlas presented to Charles II. of England,
in 1660, by Klencke, of Amsterdam, and now in the British Museum. Major
also found in the British Museum copies of charts and a quantity of MS.
describing Tasman's 1644 voyage, which, there is reason to believe, were
made from Tasman's originals by one Captain Bowrey in 1688, who had spent
fourteen years before that date trading in the Dutch East Indies. These
documents are all that have been found, and a diligent search of
geographers still leaves undiscovered Tasman's original narrative. The
1688 copies were probably known to Dampier when he sailed in the
_Roebuck_, and he was, likely enough, supplied with specially made
duplicates by the naval authorities. In 1697 a translation of a French
book was published in England by John Dunton, of the Poultry, London, with
the title _A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern
World, by James Sadeur, a Frenchman._ The Frenchman told a story of
thirty-five years' adventures in New Holland; but his tale was a lie from
beginning to end. Coming so close to the date of Dampier's voyage, it is
worth noting that he does not allude to the book, and so probably,
notwithstanding the little knowledge Englishmen then had of the southern
continent, Dampier was shrewd enough to detect the imposture.

The _Roebuck_ struck soundings on t