OCEANIC EXPLOEATION. 9 



Beyond the zone of navigation utilised by the Acapulco galleons, nearly all the 

 equatorial archipelagoes of the South Sea were at least sighted by the Spanish 

 mariners during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1567 Mendana de 

 Neyra saw the groups at present known by the name of the Ellice and Soloiuon 

 Islands ; in 1595 Hurtado de Mendoza discovered the Marquesas ; in 1606 Queiros 

 sailed through the Low Archipelago, visited the New Hebrides, and skirted the 

 Australian seaboard, which he claimed to have first observed, although his voyage 

 to these shores had been anticipated by the Portuguese pilot Godinho de Eredia, 

 and in 1531 even by the Provençal Guillaume le Testu.* Lastly, Torres, who had 

 accompanied the Queiros expedition, successfully navigated the dangerous laby- 

 rinth of reefs and islets separating Australia from New Guinea. His name has 

 been justly given to the strait which, with rare boldness and seamanship, he 

 traversed from sea to sea in the space of two months. 



But Spaniards and Portuguese had no longer the monopoly of these oceanic 

 regions, which had been shared between them by the famous Bull of Alexander VI. 

 The illustrious English seafarer, Francis Drake, repeated fifty-seven years later 

 the exploit of Magellan, first circumnavigator of the globe, and after him the 

 routes of the Pacific were further surve^'ed by Cavendish and some Dutch 

 mariners. By the close of the sixteenth century Dutch traders had even already 

 founded factories in Java, whence their power gradually spread from island to 

 island, everywhere displacing that of the Portuguese. In their turn the Dutch 

 sailors took up the work of discovery in the southern waters, Tasman especially 

 enlarging our knowledge of the Austral lands. Thus were revealed to the 

 western world the west coast of Australia as far as Torres Strait, Tasmania with 

 its basalt headland. New Zealand and its active volcanoes. But such was at that 

 time the intensity of international rivalries between the chief trading peoples, 

 that the discoveries already made by the Spanish or Portuguese pioneers remained 

 unknown to or overlooked by the Netherlandish explorers. Although Torres had 

 actually demonstrated the existence of a passage separating Australia from New 

 Guinea, Tasman maintained forty years later that both lands belonged to the 

 same continent. 



The second half of the eighteenth century was the decisive epoch in the scientific 

 exploration of the South Sea Islands. Henceforth exploring expeditions were no 

 longer undertaken in the interests of a single nation, or of some powerful trading 

 company, but rather for the benefit of the whole of the civilised world. At 

 the same time the more accurate observations now made imparted far greater 

 authority to the reports of the explorers themselves. The longitudes in the 

 southern waters were for the first time determined by the method of lunar dis- 

 tances by Wallis in 1766. Thenceforth the enormous errors of the early seafarers, 

 with discrepancies of from one thousand to two thousand miles, became impossible, 

 and mariners were no longer doomed to beat about for weeks and months together in 

 search of large archipelagoes already reported by their predecessors. Owing to this 

 uncertainty, numerous explorers had to abandon the attempt to sight the Solomon 



* Major, Journal uf the Royal Geographical Societi/^ 1S72. 



