AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



Sir.UTINC I. AND. 



began to follow the Portuguese to those famous lands, and it was about this time, 

 in the month of June, ,503. that the ship LEspoir, commanded by Binot Paulmyer, 

 Sieur de Gonneville, left the harbour of Honrleur, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, 



and was then driven out of her course and reckoning by 

 a violent storm. The sight of birds coming from the south 

 decided the Captain to sail in that direction in the hope 

 of finding land where his vessel might be watered and 

 repaired. The storm-worn mariners were fortunate enough 

 to make a large island, which they named hides mcridi- 

 onalcs, where they stopped six months. On the refusal of 

 the crew to sail further south the Captain put his ship 

 about, and taking with- him a young native of the country, 

 steered for France, in sight of which he was lucky enough 

 to arrive when, between the isles of Jersey and Guern- 

 sey, an English privateer captured him and his men and 

 set them ashore on the French coast. At the command 

 of the J'rocnrc/tr dit Roi he filed a complaint before the 

 French Board of Marine, on the igth of July, 1505, which 

 was signed by all his officers. This document was included 

 in the memoirs of a priest, which bore the imprint of 



Cramoisy. Paris, 1663, and which were dedicated to Pope Alexander VII. This priest was 

 himself descended from the native whom De Gonneville had brought back with him and 

 whom he married to one of his relations in Normandy. The priest, who claimed to be 

 the great-grandson of the native, signs himself with the initials J.P.D.G. probably Jean 

 Paulmyer de Gonneville Canon of the Cathedral S.P.U.L. He worked with writings 

 and traditions which existed in his family relating to Binot Paulmyer's voyage, the 

 logs and journals of which had fallen into the hands of the English and had never 

 been recovered. The Count de Maurepas, Minister of the Admiralty of France, in- 

 stituted researches in Normandy to find the original declaration of the Sieur de 

 Gonneville, but without success, as civil wars and an interval of two hundred and fifty 

 years rendered the search useless; but the Count cle Caylus ascertained that a very 

 consistent tradition current in the country attested the truth of the report, and M. E. 

 Marin l.a MesleY. Member of the Paris Society of Commercial Geography, gives a 

 full account of this interesting incident, which purports to be a translation from an old 

 Norman record in all probability the very document which De Maurepas and Ue 

 Caylus successively searched for in vain. 



Later maritime explorers, including Flinders, were inclined to believe that the coast 

 upon which De Gonneville landed in 1503 was not, as he supposed, Australia, but the 

 island of Madagascar, fourteen hundred leagues to the west of that continent. On the 

 other hand a few writers consider that the old French navigator's story is corroborated 

 in some particulars by Sir George Grey in his " Journals of Two Expeditions of Dis- 

 coveries in North-west and Western Australia," particularly with regard to the appearance 

 of the country, and the manners and customs of the natives in the neighbourhood of 

 the Glenelg and Prince Regent Rivers, between the East and West Kimberley Districts. 



