xliii 



Spanish navigators who had preceded 

 them. Even Tasman's right to the dis- 

 covery of Tasmania has been doubted, and 

 he has been accused of appropriating 

 Portuguese discoveries. But of late years 

 the Dutch claims have been abundantly 

 vindicated by the publication, not onlj- of 

 old maps, but of original journals of dis- 

 covery ships, which have been carefully 

 treasured up in the archives of the Dutch 

 East India Co. It will, therefore, be suffi- 

 cient for our purpose, disregarding all 

 other maps, to taiie the works of the Dutcli 

 cartographers in order to show how the 

 mythical Terra Australis Incognita was dis- 

 placed, and the actual Southland — New 

 Holland or Australia — was gradually 

 evolved in its place. It was during the 

 70 years war with Spain, and on the eve of 

 the rise of the Dutch Republic, the period 

 so graphically described in the pages of 

 Motley, that the Dutch first appeared as ex- 

 plorers of unknown countries. It was in 

 " the spacious times of great Eliza- 

 beth," when Cecil and Walsingham 

 seconded the efforts of Raleigh, Drake, 

 Frobisher, and other great seamen to estab- 

 lish England's sea-power and lay the 

 foundations of her empire. But Holland 

 was first in the field, and at the first was 

 more successful. Her ships v/ere the most 

 numerous and the be.-;t, her seamen more 

 skilful, her scientific geogi^aphers more 

 accomplished. At that time Holland was 

 not only the commercial, but also the 

 intellectual, centre of Europe. As a natural 

 result of the extraordinary development 

 of Dutch commercial enterprise there 

 arose in Flanders, and also in Hol- 

 land, a great school of cartographeis, 

 of which Antwerp and Amsterdam 

 were successively the centres. The most 

 celebrated of these map makeis, indeed 

 the only one whose name is at all familiar 

 to English people, was the Flemish Ger- 

 hard Kremer, better known by his 

 Latinised name of Gerald Mercator. In 

 1541 Mercator produced his great globe, 

 and in 1569 his great world map. It is to 

 Mercator and his friend Abraham Oertel 

 (or Ortelius) that we owe the first modern 

 Atlas, both the thing itself and the name. 

 In 1570 (18 years before the Spanish 

 Armada) Ortelius brought out, at Amster- 

 dam, his first Atlas. It was called 

 '^TheatrwiuOrbis Terrarum,or "Spectacle of 

 the countries of the globe," and contained 

 53 maps. It was not until near the 

 end of the century, 1598, after the 

 death of Mercator," that the hitter's 

 Atlas was published at Amsterdam by 

 his son in conjunction with Hondius. 

 The work of Ortelius (increased in later 

 editions to 100 maps), and that of Mercator 

 and Hondius, were the first examples of 

 the modern atlas. The name was derived 

 from the figure on the title-page of the 

 giant Atlas supporting on his shoulders a 



celestial globe. The construction of a 

 world map was by no means an easy task 

 for these early cartographers to accom- 

 plish to their satisfaction. (1.) The 

 countries that had been actually observed 

 by competent navigators and travellers 

 they could lay down with a fair approach 

 to accuracy (2), but in the delineation of 

 the more distant and less known countries 

 they were confronted by the difficulty due 

 to uncertainty of longitude, which there 

 was no means of ascertaining with even 

 approximate accuracy. (8.) Then the 

 regions vaguely indicated by the inaccu- 

 rate and often misleading descriptions of 

 old travellers such as Marco Polo had to 

 be fitted in somewhere and somehow. (4.) 

 They were all more or less dominated by 

 the fear of deserting the traditionary 

 ideas about what was absolutely unknown. 

 (5.) And, finally, they had a horror of 

 blank spaces, and liked to fill up the map, 

 if only with something conjectural, or if 

 that was not practicable, with strange 

 figures of land monsters, sea beasts, or 

 (more innocently) of ships. The result is 

 often a strange jumble of f a^t and fancy. 

 The Ortelius world map of 1570, in the first 

 edition of the atlas already mentioned, is 

 a fair example of this blending of know- 

 ledge and wild conjecture. The unscien- 

 tific character of the map is evident at a 

 glance. There is no attempt to distin- 

 guish by dotted lines or otherwise, as is 

 the practice of modern times, between the 

 purely conjectural and the known. The 

 Arctic and Antarctic regions, the N.W. 

 "'oast of North America (not explored until 

 r.v'o '•enturies later), the interior of Africa, 

 are ill laid down in as absolute and 

 definite 'ines as the shores of the Mediter- 

 ranean. In the delineation of the Terra 

 Australis Incognita we have a fine example 

 of the method of the map-maker of the 

 period. The one point of actual knowledge 

 is the Strait of Magellan, and that side 

 of the supposed Southland is. therefore, 

 oalled "MagellanicaRegio." New Guinea is 

 shown as a large, round island, some 

 ISdeg. too far to the East, with a note that 

 it is uncertain whether it is an island or 

 part of the Southern Continent, which is 

 accordingly extended so as nearly to touch 

 it. The reported discovery by the Portu- 

 guese of this Southern Continent in 

 another longitude is shown by a prolonga- 

 tion to the south of Java to about the 

 latitude of the Cambridge Gulf, but some 

 15deg. too far to the west, separated from 

 Java by a strait called Lantch idol Mare (a 

 mis-spelling of the Malay Laut Kid^, 

 meaning " South Sea.") This northern 

 promontory bears the name "Beach" 

 (on many maps called " Regio Aurifera"), 

 and also the words "Luach" and "Maletur," 

 with a statement that these extensive 

 regions are known from the writings of 

 Marco Polo and others. The actual" fact 



