Excerpt from The Living Age, Vol. 29

For some time this new discovery was supposed to be the great south land; and, in 1642, Van Die men, the governor of Batavia. Sent Tasman to make explorations. In this voyage the geography of the region was determined the extreme southern por tion of the land was sailed round, and named after the governor. And its disconnection with an Austral continent conclusively proved. Tasman afterwards discovered New Zealand; and, possessed with the ideas of the period, he imagined that this remote island stretched away, and united with the Staten Land of Schouten and Le Maire at Terra del Fue go, and hoped it was part of the unknown soutlt continent. As an acknowledgment of Tasman's services by the states-general, the large island was named New Holland.

Those daring sea-rovers, the Bucaneers, while pushing their lawless cruises, for greater part of the seventeenth century, wherever the hope of plunder led them, contributed materially. Though indirectly. To extend the limits of geographical re search. Dampier and Wafer were among the party who marched across the Isthmus of Panama; and embarking in several canoes which they had stolen, rowed out to sea, and made prize of a vessel lying at anchor. Emboldened by success, they attacked and took larger ships, and in these traversed the Pacific Ocean. One of their captures was turned adrifi as useless, with seven hundred pigs of metal on board, which they supposed to be lead; after wards, when they came to make bullets from a lump which they had kept, the lead proved to be silver. Desirous of reentering the Atlantic, they stretched boldly to the southwards till they met with ice, and doubled Cape Horn and inspired so much confidence b their resolute perseverance, that a voyage roun South America came to be re garded with diminished apprehension. Dampier was afterwards appointed to the command of a vessel, fitted out by the government of William III., in which he made further discoveries in New Holland and other southern countries. The war which broke out between England and Spain in 1739 led to Anson's famous voyage, which, though in many respects unfortunate, widened the boun daries of geogra bical knowledge. The wreck of one of the aqu ron, the Wager, on the coast of Terra del Fue 0, although it gave the survivors an intimate know edge of the country, will always be remembered as a most melancholy incident in the annals of disaster. Nothing can be imagined, says the historian of the expedition, more savage and gloomy than the whole aspect of this coast. In doubling Cape Horn, we had a continual sue cession of such tempestuous weather as surprised the oldest and most experienced mariners on board, and obliged them to confess that what they had hitherto called atoms were inconsiderable gales compared with the violence of these winds, which raised such short, and, at the same time, such mountainous waves, as greatly surpassed in danger all seas known in any other part of the globe. And he laments that the squadron would be separated never to unite again, and that this day of our passage would be the last cheerful day that the greatest part of us would ever live to enjoy.

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