288 



THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



Loss of 



Tasman's 



Journal. 



The official 

 report. 



The Gulf. 



Naked 

 beach- 

 rovers. 



A South- 

 land with an 

 8ooo-mile 

 coast. 



thither by the first opportunity to secure this property 

 by founding a permanent colony there." 



Tasman's Journal of the voyage has disappeared. 

 Careful research has only discovered the binding which 

 once contained it. 1 There remain, however, two testi- 

 monies that give a fairly adequate report of the main 

 results of the voyage, though they leave us entirely ignorant 

 of the detail of discovery. 



Firstly, we have a letter written by the Governor-General 

 and Council to the Seventeen Directors at Amsterdam, 

 which gives a short but plain account of the voyage and 

 of its worth. The yachts, they say, sailed in February, 

 but " found no open channel between the half -known Nova 

 Guinea, and the known land of D'Eendracht or Willem's 

 River ; they found, however, a large spacious Bay or 

 Gulf (the Gulf of Carpentaria), as shown in the annexed 

 Chart and Journal. Nor did they make any profit by 

 bartering transactions, having only met with naked beach- 

 roving wretches, destitute of rice, and not possessed of 

 any fruits worth mentioning, excessively poor, and in 

 many places of a very malignant nature, as your Worships 

 may in great detail gather from the Batavia minutes." 

 Tasman " continually sailed in shallow water along 

 the coast " to Willem's River, and thence returned to 

 Batavia in August. " What there is in this South-land, 

 whether above or under the earth, continues unknown, since 

 the men have done nothing beyond sailing along the coast ; 

 he who makes it his business to find out what the land 

 produces must walk over it, which these discoverers 

 pretend to have been out of their power, which may be 

 true to some extent. Meanwhile this vast and hitherto 

 unknown South-land has, by the said Tasman, been sailed 

 round in two voyages, and is computed to comprise eight 

 thousand miles of land (2000 Dutch miles), as shown by 

 the delineation of the coasts, which we subjoin for Your 

 Worships' inspection. Now it can hardly be supposed that 

 no profits of any kind should be obtainable in so vast a 

 country, situated under various zones, the South-Eastern 

 1 Heeres' Tasman, p. 74. 



