STORY OF A LOST ARCHIPELAGO. -253 



could hardly have been looked upon with feelings o£ great satis- 

 faction at the Spanish Court, where the veteran navigator in the 

 true spirit of Columbus now repaired to advocate the colonization 

 of the Australia del Espiritu Santo he had just discovered. The 

 Isles of Salomon had been also discovered, it is true ; but two 

 succeeding expeditions had failed to find them. Santa Cruz had 

 similarly eluded the efforts of Quiros ; and his last discovery of the 

 supposed southern continent had been proved by his companion, 

 Torres, to be an island. Several years had passed away, and Quiros 

 was an old man before his wishes for a new expedition were 

 granted. In furtherance of the exploration of the Isles of Salomon 

 and the Australia del Espiritu Santo, he is said to have presented 

 no less than filty memorials to the king ; in one of which, after 

 painting in the brightest colours the beauty and fertility of his last 

 discovery, he thus addresses his Sovereign : " Acquire, sire, since you 

 can, acquire heaven, eternal fame, and that new world with all its 

 promises." Such appeals coming from one who might fitly be called 

 the Columbus of his age could scarcely be rejected by the monarch. 

 In 1614, Quiros, bearing a commission from the king, departed from 

 Spain on his way to Callao, where he intended to fit out another 

 expedition. Death, however, overtook him at Panama on his way 

 to Peru ; and with Quiros died all the grand hopes, which he had 

 fostered, of adding the unknown southern continent to the dominion 

 of Spain. Had he lived to carry out his project, Australia 

 might have become a second Peru. The spirit of enterprise 

 on the part of the Spanish nation never again extended itself 

 into this region of the Western Pacific. During the next century 

 and a half the large island-groups, which the Spaniards had dis- 

 covered in these seas, were not visited by any European navigators;' 

 and it is surprising how few benefits have accrued to geography 

 from these three Spanish expeditions to these regions. Their dis- 

 coveries have had to be rediscovered ; and it has been only by a 

 laborious process on the part of the geographer that the navigator 

 has been able to make any use of the imperfect information, which 

 the Spanish navigators have bequeathed to us of their discoveries 

 in these seas. 



The death of Quiros deepened more than ever the mystery that 



^ In 1616, the Dutch navigator, Le Make, when he discovered and named the Home 

 Islands m lat. 14° 56' S. and Hope Island in 16° S. thought that he had found the Solomon 

 Islands ; but these islands lie more than a thousand miles to the eastward of this group- 

 Dalrymple's Hist. Coll., vol. 11., p. 59. 



