Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/168

 20 A MEMORIAL RESPECTING

Vaez de Torres being left in the bay and most disconsolate for the loss of the Capitana, resolved, with the consent of his companions, to continue the discovery. Being prevented by stress of weather from making the circuit of the land of the Baia, to see whether it were an island or mainland as they had imagined, and finding himself in great straits in twenty- one degrees south, to which high latitude he had persevered in sailing in about a south-westerly direction from the fifteen or twenty minutes south in which lay the aforesaid Baia, he put back to the north-west and north-east up to fourteen degrees, in which he sighted a very extensive coast, which he took for that of New Guadalcanal ; from thence he sailed westwards, having constantly on the right hand the coast of atiother very great land, xohich he continued coasting, according to his oicn reckoning, more than six hundred leagues, having it still to the right hand^ (in which course may be understood to be comprehended New Guadalcanal and New Guinea). Along the same coast he discovered a great diversity of islands. The whole country was very fertile and populous ; he continued his voyage on to Bachan and Ternate, and from thence to Manilla, which was the end of this discovery.

There was also a pilot named Juan Fernandez, who dis- covered the track from Lima to Chili by going to the west- ward (which till then had been made with much difficulty, as they kept along shore, where the southerly winds almost constantly prevail) : he sailing from the coast of Chili about the latitude of forty degrees, little more or less, in a small ship, with some of his companions, in courses between west and south-west, was brought in a month's time to what was, to the best of their judgment, a very fertile and agreeable continent, inhabited by a white and well-proportioned people,

' It is from this sentence that Dalrympic observed the passage of Torres through these dangerous straits, and consccj[uently gave to them the name of that navigator.