152 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



Cavendish had taken with him to point out channels 

 among the islands. The people of Manila, seeing the 

 ship, fled away ; because, as this was not the time when 

 the ships arrive from New Spain, they thought the ship 

 was English. For they remembered the ship of Thomas 

 Cavendish, and the warning of the Governor to act thus. 

 At last a boat approached with four Spaniards, who 

 seemed to the weary navigator " like four thousand 

 angels." Soon people crowded to see the ship which 

 " came from Peru to fetch the Queen of Sheba from the 

 Isles of Solomon." 



At Manila Quiros wrote to de Morga, the Lieutenant- 



Governor of the Philippines, a " brief narrative " of the 



voyage, the object of which, he says, had been "to go 



and subject and people the Western islands of the South 



Sea." " I beg you," he concluded, "to keep it secret, for 



man does not know what time brings ; for, looking at it 



rightly, it is fit that the first islands should remain concealed 



until His Majesty be informed, and order whatever may 



Fear that the be most for his service ; for, as they are placed, taking 



s^tfle^ThY a middle position between Peru, New Spain, and this 



islands. country, the English on knowing it, might settle in them, 



and do much mischief in this sea." 



The The voyage, then, had failed even to rediscover the 



unvisiteci for Solomons ; and two hundred years passed before they 

 200 years. were again seen by European eyes. "Though ship after 

 ship set out to seek them, they were so completely lost 

 to Europeans that, in the course of two centuries, geo- 

 graphers came to doubt their existence, and they were 

 actually expunged from the chart. And this, although 

 the group included eight large islands stretched like a 

 net across the course of navigation in an almost unbroken 

 line for six hundred miles." x It was not till 1766 that 

 the Englishman Carteret sailed by them, and he did not 

 recognize them. Bougaineville did likewise in 1767, 

 and Surville in 1769. It was not till 1781 that a French 

 scholar proved that the Solomon Islands had at last been re- 

 discovered. 2 " In the history of travel there is probably 

 1 Amherst, p. i. 2 Amherst, pp. Ixxiv-lxxvi. 



