rench voyage in which the continent was
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 Spanish 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.

_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 a belief in a great southern land. G.B.
Barton, in an introduction to his valuable Australian history, traces
this from 1578, when Frobisher wrote:

"Terra Australis seemeth to be a great, firm land, lying under and about
the south pole, being in many places a fruitful soil, and is not yet
thoroughly discovered, but only seen and touched on the north edge
thereof by the travel of the Portiugales and Spaniards in their voyages
to their East and West Indies. It is included almost by a parallel,
passing at 40 degrees in south latitude, yet in some places it reacheth
into the sea with great promontories, even into the tropic Capricornus.
Only these parts are best known, as over against Capo d'buona Speranza
(where the Portiugales see popinjayes commonly of a wonderful greatness),
and again it is known at the south side of the Straight of Magellanies,
and is called Terra del Fuego. It is thought this south land, about the
pole Antarctic, is far bigger than the north land about the pole Arctic;
but whether it be so or not, we have no certain kno