Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/70

 xlvi have given rise have been so complacently accepted by successive geographical writers, the subject has never yet been minutely investigated by any English writer, nor, indeed, have the foregoing arguments of the French been ever before brought together into a focus. The editor, therefore, first proposes to answer the hypothesis of M. Barbié du Bocage respecting the voyage he adduces of Gomez de Sequeira, and then, finally, to deal with the general question of the suggestive evidence of the maps.

With respect to Gomez de Sequeira's voyage, it is certainly surprising that M. Barbié du Bocage should have contented himself with referring to Castanheda and Maffei for a slight and loose description of this voyage, when it was equally competent to him to have resorted to the more ample description of Barros, the most distinguished of all the early Portuguese historians, who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, and who has devoted a whole chapter to the minute description of the voyage in question. (See Dec. 3, liv. x, cap. 5.) So full and ample is Barros' narrative that, with a modern map before us, we can track Sequeira's course with a nicety which, so far as the main question is concerned, is not interrupted even by the accidents of the storm and the unshipping of his rudder. Let the reader for a moment consult any modern map of the Moluccas and neighbouring islands, and he will find that the island of Celebes, to which Sequeira directed his course from Ternate, presents the northernmost of the three horns of its oddly-shaped outline at a distance of about sixty leagues from