Industrial Pioneers 259 



Australis is the most southern of all lands, and 

 is separated from New Guinea by a narrow 

 strait. . . . The Terra Australis begins at 

 one or two degrees from the Equator, and is 

 ascertained by some to be of so great an extent 

 that if it were thoroughly explored it would be 

 regarded as a fifth part of the world." 



Within a few years, Torres confirmed part of 

 this guess if it were a guess by sailing between 

 New Guinea and the mainland of Australia by 

 the strait that has ever since borne his name. 

 Then came the Dutch, who discovered Australia 

 as far as the history of the land can tell. Tasman, 

 most intelligent of ocean explorers, found Tas- 

 mania, which he named Van Diemen's L,and 

 after his patron, and New Zealand, which still 

 bears the curious Dutch name he gave it. In- 

 deed, Australia was known in the seventeenth 

 century as New Holland, and had considerable 

 difficulty in shaking off the name. Thus a good 

 deal was known about the great South Land be- 

 fore the first Englishman landed on its shores. 

 He was William Dampier, a genial pirate, who 

 wrote of his adventures with such engaging in- 

 terest that he attracted much English attention 

 to the new country. On a second voyage to 

 Australia, undertaken in 1699 in the Admiralty 

 vessel Roebuck, Dampier found that the new 

 country offered few attractions to him, for he was 

 a picker-up of unconsidered trifles rather than an 

 explorer. 



