WAS AUSTRALIA KNOWN? 113 



extent, that, if it were thoroughly explored, it would 

 be regarded as a fifth part of the world." 



It seems to me that the significance of this passage 

 has been very much exaggerated. It has its origin, in 

 my opinion, not in "a discovery of Australia" (as Mr. 

 Collingridge thinks), but in the voyages through the "straits 

 of Magellan, which, so geographers of the school of Mercator 

 contended, had meant the discovery of the Magellanican 

 continent or Terra Australis. 



When a cosmographer of the school of Mercator said 

 that Terra Australis had been visited, all he meant was 

 that Tierra del Fuego had been visited, and that the 

 rest of the continent had bashfully veiled herself and had 

 refused to be visited. And, after the disastrous voyages 

 of Magellan and Del Cano, even the visits to Tierra del 

 Fuego has ceased. The route through the straits had 

 been abandoned, and the shy continent was permitted 

 to remain undisturbed behind the veil. That is the meaning 

 of Wytfliet's statement, as I understand it. The " sailors 

 driven to Terra Australia by storms " were, I imagine, 

 the same sailors as the " Portingals " who, according 

 to Frobisher, " saw popinjays commonly of a marvellous 

 greatness " on the shores of Terra Incognita far Southward 

 of the Cape of Good Hope. Their voyages probably 

 took place to the part of Brazil that is in South America, 

 not to the part of Brazil that, according to Schoner and 

 Finaeus, is in Antarctica. 



So far our study both of narratives and of maps has 

 tended to foster, in us the spirit of unbelief. But we Maps of a 



now have to study another series of maps of a different t ? lrd *yF e 

 * give a huge 



type : maps which I regard as the difficulty of our present Southerly 

 chapter, and which I have therefore reserved for considera- ^avT 810 " 

 tion to the end, in order that we might have in mind 

 what, apart from them, is known about cosmographers 

 and cosmography in the sixteenth century. 



These maps are of various dates, ranging from about 

 1530 to about I57O. 1 One of them was made in the time 

 of Francis of France for the benefit of his son the Dauphin, 

 1 See maps in the following pages. 



VV.A. H 



