106 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



decided that Tierra del Fuego was part of the continent, 

 should have expressed this doubt about New Guinea, 

 and should have drawn his map in a way that suggests 

 that it probably is an island. One wonders whether 

 Spanish or Portuguese seamen had been in the neighbour- 

 hood of Torres Strait, and had come home, like Dutch 

 seamen a century later, doubting whether it was a strait 

 or only a shallow bay. They seem at least to have sailed 

 far enough down the Southern coast to get the suggestion 

 that New Guinea was possibly, and even probably, an 

 island. But the matter was so " uncertain " that map- 

 makers and writers continued to take different opinions. 

 Ortelius drew an island, but wrote on it that it was 

 " uncertain " whether it was an island or part of the 

 continent. Wytfliet drew an island, and wrote that it 

 was separated from the continent by a narrow strait. 1 

 Plancius definitely made it a part of the continent. 2 On 

 the whole, however, the insular theory prevailed. " Almost 

 all the Northern side of it," wrote Dr. Arias soon after 

 1614, " has been discovered. It is a country encompassed 

 with water, and according to the greater number of those 

 who have seen it, it is 700 leagues in circuit." 3 



He put Then, passing Westward, Mercator shows us a huge 



Perrtam a in nd ulf that certainly ought to be the Gulf of Carpentaria,, 

 the region of containing two islands, the larger of which certainly ought 

 Carpentaria, to ^ e Groote Eyland. But we observe that the great gulf 

 roughly corresponds to the great gulf in the Austral 

 continent of Finaeus, which in its turn roughly corre- 

 sponds to the opening in the ring of the Region of Brazil 

 of Schoner. For some inexplicable reason, it was the 

 fashion to draw a big gulf between two huge promon- 

 tories in this part of the Austral continent, and Mercator 

 has found this fashion particularly convenient because, 

 as we shall notice in a moment, it gave him an opportunity 

 to find space for two islands which, he understood, existed 

 South of Java. The main difference between his map 



1 See map, p. 112. 2 See map, p. 107. 



3 Dr. Arias, however, wrote with knowledge that the voyage of 

 Torres (1606) had proved the insular theory to be correct. 



