8 HISTORICAL EVIDENCES [Parr I. 
In enumerating the n1storicaL EvipENcEs on this subject, I shall confine myself to 
such authorities as appear to be original and independent of each other. The facts recorded 
by these witnesses have been transcribed and often confounded by a multitude of compilers, 
and it is therefore indispensable to our purpose to attend mainly to the statements of original 
observers, and to refer only incidentally to the remarks of commentators. It has also appeared 
desirable not merely to translate, but to reprint the exact words of those brave old voyagers, 
who in the infancy of nautical and medical science, encountered a vast amount of peril and 
suffering, and yet found means to observe and record the natural wonders which came in 
their way. 
Compilers are unanimous in stating that the Islands of Mauritius and Bourbon were first 
discovered by Mascaregnas, a Portuguese, who gave his own name to the latter island, and 
called the former Cerne.!' I have not been able to find the origmal authority for this 
statement, though it is probably founded on fact. Castagneda, Osorio, Barros, Roman, 
Lafitau, and the other authors who treat of the Portuguese conquests in India, record the 
exploits of Pedro Mascaregnas, and of two or three other persons of the name, but apparently 
make no allusion to the discovery of these islands, which, indeed, lay completely out of the 
ordinary track of the Portuguese navigators. There is also a great discrepancy in the date 
assigned to the discovery, which one writer? fixes at 1502; a second,* at 1505; a third,* at 
1542; and a fourth,® at 1545.6 Be this as it may, it seems clear that nothing definite is 
recorded of Mauritius or its productions until 1598, when the Dutch under Jacob Cornelius 
Neck, or Van Neck, finding it uninhabited, took possession, and changed its name from 
Cerne to Mauritius. 
' The Portuguese discoverers appear to have named this island Cerne, from an utterly untenable notion 
that it might be the Cerne of Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi. 36, and x. 9.), an island which, according to the usual 
punctuation of the text, lay off the Persian Gulf, but was more probably on the West Coast of Africa (see A. de 
Grandsagne’s edition of Pliny, Paris, 1829, vol. iv. p. 143, and vol. v. p. 344). Later authors, however, from Clusius 
downwards, insist that the Portuguese called it Cerne or Cisne, i. e. Swan Island, from the Dodos, which they 
compared to Swans (see Clusius, Exotica, p. 101). The statement that Vasco de Gama, in 1497, discovered, sixty 
leagues beyond the Cape of Good Hope, a bay called after San Blaz, near an island full of birds with wings like 
bats, which the sailors called Solitaries (De Blainville, Nouv. Ann. Mus. H.N., and Penny Cyclop. Dopo, p. 47.) 
is wholly irrelevant. The birds are evidently Penguins, and their wings were compared to those of bats, from being 
without developed feathers. De Gama never went near Mauritius, but hugged the African Coast as far as Melinda, 
and then crossed to India, returning by the same route. This small island inhabited by Penguins, near the Cape 
of Good Hope, has been gratuitously confounded with Mauritius. Dr. Hamel, in a Memoir in the Bulletin de la 
Classe Physico-mathématique de V Acad. de St. Péersbourg, vol. iv. p. 53, has devoted an unnecessary amount of 
erudition to the refutation of this obvious mistake. He shews that the name So/itaires, as applied to Penguins by 
De Gama’s companions, is corrupted from Sofilicairos, which appears to be a Hottentot word. 
? Ersch and Gruber’s Encyelopiidie. ° Grant’s Mauritius. 4 Penny Cyclopzedia. 
> Du Quesne in Leguat’s Voyage, on the authority of a stone pillar, placed in Bourbon by the Portuguese. 
6 Tn one of De Bry’s maps, which illustrates the jirs¢ Dutch expedition of 1595-1597, these islands are 
indicated as ‘* I. de Mascarenhas.” 
