346 



THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 



arts, and particularly the art of making war, which these 

 Australians desired with an incredible passion." But 

 the promise was not kept. The Indian prince remained in 

 France, was baptised, and married a relative of Gonneville. 

 His great-grandson was the " pretre indien," who told 

 the story in order to urge that he should be sent as 

 missionary to the land of his Australian ancestors. 



Unhappily he was unable to say where that land was. 

 Gonneville's ships had, on the return journey, been captured 

 by an English privateer, who robbed him of his journal, 

 and everything he had. On landing, he had on the Ipth 

 of July, 1505, made a judicial declaration, authenticated 

 by all the proper forms of law. In this declaration he 

 had given some description of the Austral land he had 

 discovered it was a very fertile land, and the natives 

 were wondrously affable, and received the French as 

 " angels from heaven " but by inexplicable mischance he 

 had said no word that could throw light on the question 

 of its locality, and no one had the least idea where this 

 Southern India was. No wonder that the longing of 

 the " Indian priest " of the seventeenth century to visit 

 the land of his great-grandfather did not avail to take 

 him there. 



It was, however, a story that interested his French 

 fellow-countrymen, and it was much talked of in France 

 in the early eighteenth century. Patriotic French geo- 

 graphers held that Gonneville's voyage " secured without 

 difficulty to the French nation the honour of the first 

 discovery of the Austral lands sixteen years before the 

 departure of Magellan." l 



Frenchmen began to grow ashamed that they had so long 

 delayed to make good the claim conferred by first discovery. 

 The trouble, however, remained that, while the " Land 

 of Gonneville" certainly belonged to France, no one knew 

 where the land of Gonneville was. Some thought it was 

 in the region of the " Cape of the Austral Lands," that 

 had been marked on the maps of the South Atlantic in 

 Latitude 42, Longitude 7 (from Teneriffe), on the evidence 

 1 De Brosses, vol. i. p. 103. 



