CHAPTER XI. 



THE JOUR^fAL OF GALLEGO — PREFATORY REMARKS. 



4 CONSIDERABLE interest was aroused in tlie minds of geo- 

 -^- graphers, rather more than a century ago, by the recent dis- 

 coveries of French and English navigators in that portion of the 

 Western Pacific in which the Solomon Islands are now known to 

 lie. M. M. Buache and Fleurieu (pages 263-265.) endeavoured to 

 show that the islands there discovered were none other than the 

 mysterious Islands of Solomon discovered two centuries before by 

 the Spaniards, the existence of which had been long treated as a 

 myth, and in fact, had almost been forgotten. This view was 

 opposed by Mr. Dalrymple, one of the foremost of the English 

 geographers ; and it laboured under the serious disadvantage that 

 the only existing narrative of this Spanish voyage, on which such a 

 conclusion could be based, was a very brief and imperfect account 

 incorporated by Dr. Figueroa' in a work that was published at 

 Madrid nearly half a century after the return of the voyagers to 

 Peru. There were some reasons for believinof that Hernando 

 Gallego, the chief pilot of the expedition, had kept a journal of the 

 voyage ;" but the geographical writers of the close of last century 

 failed to have access to such an account, and its existence was 

 doubted by some of them. The only other account, worthy of the 

 name, that was known to these writers was one included by Herrera 

 in his " Descripcion de las Indias Occidentales," a work which was 

 published at Madrid about the year 1601, or more than thirty years 

 after the Spanish voyagers had returned to Peru. But this account 

 was a somewhat vague, general description of the Solomon Islands, 



1 Hechos de Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, Quarto Marques de Canete ; por el Doctor 

 Christoval Suarez de Figueroa. Madrid, 1G13. Vide Note I. of the Geographical Appendix. 



2 A M S. journal of Gallego was referred to by Penelo as occurring in the Barcia Library. 

 (Dalrymple's Hist. Coll. Voy. and Disc : p. 96.) 



