296 THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



great discoveries ; and he had no successor till Cook. When, 

 a century and a quarter later, Cook sailed into Australian 

 seas, he knew no more about them than was told by his 

 mutilated abstract from Tasman's Journal, save that 

 the reading of Arias's Memorial had led Alexander 

 Dalrymple to believe that the tangled region to the South 

 of New Guinea was not a Shallow Bay but a Strait. 

 Knowledge The surprising thing is that Cook knew what Tasman 

 ^ new< ^ e Dutch Empire was founded on the principle 

 of monopoly of trade ; and the best protection of monopoly 

 of trade was monopoly of knowledge. " It were to be 

 wished," wrote the Directors in 1645, on hearing of some 

 fertile islands, " that the said land continued still unknown 

 and never explored, so as not to tell foreigners the way 

 to the Company's overthrow." In view of statements 

 like this, it seems surprising that foreigners were allowed 

 to know that Tasman had mapped the outlines of an island 

 eight thousand miles in circuit, that he had touched the 

 coast of what seemed a solid part of a great Southern 

 Continent which, he believed, stretched from Tierra del 

 Fuego to New Zealand, and that he had discovered rich 

 tropical islands inhabited by friendly people. But it 

 seems that the free atmosphere of the Netherlands was 

 unfavourable to the spirit of monopoly in the sphere of 

 knowledge. Linschoten's voyage, we remember, had 

 been quickly published, and had shown to English as 

 well as to Dutch the way to the Moluccas. Le Maire's 

 Voyage had also been quickly published, and several 

 other Dutch voyages that had taken Drake's way through 

 the Straits. And now again the same liberal policy was 

 used. Already in 1652 a map was published, which was 

 dedicated to a Director of the Amsterdam Chamber of 

 the East Indian Company, and which showed the results of 

 Tasman's two voyages. In 1648 the people of Amsterdam 

 began to build a new Town Hall, and inlaid its floor with 

 a map of the two hemispheres in order, wrote a Dutch 

 poet-wit in 1656, to teach us to trample on the world 

 and to look up to heaven and on this map the discoveries 

 of Tasman were depicted. In the following years they 



