vigatien" of Jacob
le Maire and Willem Cornelisz Schouten, made in 1615 to 1617. They sailed
through the Straits of Magellan, crossed the Pacific, touched at the
Solomon Islands, and thence made their way round by the north of New
Guinea to Java. The word Australia does not occur anywhere in the
black-letter text of the narrative, and the word Australische in the
phrase "Australische Navigatien," simply means southern. There are
references in the book to "Terra Australis," but Le Maire and Schouten
knew not Australia. Nor does the narrative make any allusion to the
continent which we know by that name. The Terra Australis of these Dutch
navigators was land of the southern hemisphere in general. But,
curiously, the indexer of the Generale Beschrijvinge made four entries,
in which he employed the word Australia. Thus, his entry "Australia
Incognita Ondeckt" (Australia Incognita Discovered) referred to passages
in Le Maire and Schouten's voyage relating to the southern lands they had
seen. But it did not refer to the Australia of modern geography. It is
very strange that the Dutch indexer in Batavia should have hit upon the
word and employed it when he did not find it in the text of the book
itself.

The use of Australia in an English book of 1693 is also extremely
curious. In 1676 Gabriel de Foigny, under the assumed name of Jacques
Sadeur, published at Vannes a quaint little duodecimo volume, purporting
to give a description of an unknown southern land. He called his book La
Terre Australe connue; c'est a dire, la description de ce pays inconnu
jusqu'ici. It was a "voyage imaginaire," a pure piece of fancy. In 1693
it was translated into English, and published in London, by John Dunton,
under the title A New Discovery of Terra Incognita, or the Southern
World, by James Sadeur, a Frenchman, who being cast there by a shipwreck,
lived 35 years in that country and gives a particular description of the
manners, customs, religion, laws, studies and wars of those southern
people, and of some animals peculiar to that place; with several other
rarities. In the original French the word Australia does not occur. But
in the English translation Foigny's phrase "continent de la Terre
Australe," is rendered "Australia." Foigny's ingenious piece of fiction
drew its "local colour" from the South American region, not from any
supposed land in the neighbourhood of the Australian continent. The
instance is all the more interesting from the