Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/83

 Rh The maps upon which the supposition of the discovery is alone founded are all French, and that they are all repetitions, with slight variations, from one source, is shown by the fact that the inaccuracies are alike in all of them. But although the maps are in French, there are indications of Portuguese in some of the names, such as Terre ennegade, a Gallicized form of "Tierra anegada," i.e., "land under water," or "sunken shoal," "Graçal," and "cap de Fromose." The question then arises, were the French or the Portuguese the discoverers? In reply, we present the following statement.

In the year 1529, a voyage was made to Sumatra, by Jean Parmentier of Dieppe, and in this voyage he died. Parmentier was a poet and a classical scholar, as well as a navigator and good hydrographer. He was accompanied in this voyage by his intimate friend the poet Pierre Crignon, who, on his return to France, published, in 1531, the poems of Parmentier, with a prologue containing his eulogium, in which he says of him, that he was "le premier François qui a entrepris à estre pilotte pour mener navires à la Terre Amérique qu'on dit Brésil, et semblablement le premier François qui a descouvert les Indes jusqu'à l'Isle de Taprobane, et, si mort ne l'eust pas prévenu, je crois qu'il eust été jusques aux Moluques." This is high authority upon this point, coming as it does from a man of education, and a shipmate and intimate of Parmentier himself. The French, then, were not in the South Seas beyond Sumatra before 1529. The date of the earliest of our quoted