10 A NATURALIST IN TASMANIA ch. 



has played an important and picturesque part 

 in the colonization of the southern seas, where 

 certain rare touches of romance redeem a some- 

 what dark and equivocal history, and are not 

 lightly to be forgotten. 



Pope Alexander VI in 1493 issued his famous 

 bull assigning the world west of the Azores to 

 Spain, and east to Portugal, and so it came about 

 that the Spaniards working west from America 

 and the Portuguese to eastward from India met 

 in their trading enterprises in the East Indies. 

 The unknown south land, which had existed as a 

 kind of myth even in classical times, became the 

 Terra Australis Incognita, a vaguely imagined con- 

 tinent, dreamed of, adumbrated, and finally sighted 

 by a succession of navigators. The Spaniards 

 De Quiros and Torres (1594) are credited with 

 having first seen the north coast of Australia, 

 and Torres certainly sailed through the straits 

 between New Guinea and the mainland, which 

 bear his name ; but his discovery was forgotten, 

 and Tasman, in his map of fifty years later, 

 makes New Guinea a northern projection of 

 Australia. At the beginning of the seventeenth 

 century the Dutch were rapidly supplanting the 

 Spaniards in the command of the seas, and had 

 already established an important trade in the 

 spices and other products of the East Indies ; 

 in the pursuit of this trade the navigators of the 

 Dutch East India Company on their way from 

 Europe were in the habit, after rounding the 



