THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



Greeks and 

 Romans 

 knew that 

 the earth 

 was a sphere, 

 and that 

 probably 

 there was an 

 inhabited 

 land in the 

 South. 



But they 

 thought 

 that, owing 

 to the 

 scorching 

 heat of the 

 Tropics, 

 passage to a 

 Southern 

 Continent 

 was 

 impossible. 



posed of three parts, with shores washed by the circum- 

 fluent Ocean Sea. And what lies beyond the Ocean 

 Sea ? Why not some other huge island, some fourth 

 part of the world, some Utopia of the South, in which 

 one's dreams are facts ? 



Fancy built on firm foundation. Greek geographers 

 were men of science, whose thought outstripped experience, 

 and conquered unseen worlds. They had proved that 

 the earth was a sphere ; proved it by reasonings, known 

 now to every schoolboy, which could never be refuted, 

 and which could never be forgotten. They had proved 

 the existence of climatic zones. They had made it certain 

 that, beyond scorched tropic seas, must be some great 

 region in which the climate was like that of the temperate 

 zone of the North. What more likely, in a well-ordered 

 lawfully governed Kosmos, than that South corresponds 

 to North ; that there, also, exists a continent as great as 

 the three-fold " island " of the known world ; and that, 

 since " nature loves life," this unknown continent is 

 inhabited by populous nations of human beings, like 

 and unlike to those of the North ? 



But to this land of the temperate South no Greek nor 

 Roman sailed. Thought was free to girdle the earth ; 

 but travel was bounded by the Tropics. Long before the 

 Equator was reached, knowledge of Africa faded into 

 speculation, romance, fable and fairy-tale. Herodotus, 

 it is true, once heard a story that about 600 B.C., Phoeni- 

 cian seamen had sailed through the Red Sea, and had 

 returned three years afterwards through the Mediter- 

 ranean. The seamen had declared, so the tale was told 

 to Herodotus, that, sailing Southward, the sun 'had 

 appeared to the North ; a statement which seemed to him to 

 prove that the seamen were liars, but which the modern 

 critic is inclined to take as evidence that they had at all 

 events sailed to some point South of the Equator. On the 

 West coast of Africa, Carthaginian seamen under Hanno had 

 sailed Southward as far as Sierra Leone, and had returned 

 with stories of " wild men and women covered with hair 

 called gorillas " ; with stories, too, of lands burnt up with 



