Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/190

 90 AUSTRAUA 1787 a Voyage to Terra Australis. Thus he made it clear that, notwithstanding his personal preference for Australia^ he had finally settled in his own mind the name which the country was to bear in future times. It may be said, no doubt, that if Flinders was not the first to apply the term Australia to this continent, neither was Dalrymple ; seeing he found the original form of the word Austri&Ua. — Austrialia — in a memorial presented by de Quiros to the De Quiroe. King of Spain, which appeared in a work well-known to Purchas. geographers — Purchas, His Pilgrimes, published in 1625. Tiie word Australia is substituted for Austrialia in a note appended to this memorial, entitled—^' a note of Australia Hakiuyt. del Espiritu Santo, written by Master Hakluyt."* The memorial was also translated and published by Dalrymple in his Collection of Voyages, and consequently he had the indirect authority of de Quiros for applying the name of Australia to ^11 the lands and islands to the eastward of South America. The land discovered by the Portuguese navigator was named by him la Austrialia del Espiritu Santo,f which Dalrymple translated ^^The Australia del ♦ ParchaB, vol. iv, p. 1426-7-9. t He is Bup^aed to have given this name for two reasons ; first, because Philip the Third, King of Spain, was head of the House of Austria ; and secondly, because possession of the country had been taken on the Kind's birthday, the festival of the Holy Spirit. AtutricUia was therefore a dis- tinctiy different word from Australia. The eastern coast of Kew Holland, previous to the time of Cook's discoveries, was known on the maps bv^ the name ftiven by de Quiros. In the Carte Qin^raU, published in 1756 oy de Brosses with his Histoire dea NavigcUions, the eastern coast is marked Terre du St. Esprit, and a point on the coast is termed Manicolo, The New Hebrides had not then been explored, and geographers had generally accepted de Quiros' assertion that he had discovered the veritable Terra Australia, Captain Cook, when sailing off Cape Tribulation, in June, 1770, wrote : — ''We were now near the latitude assigned to the islands which were discovered by Quiros, and which some geographers, for what reason I know not, have thought fit to join to this land." For many years after Cook's time, de Quiros was looked upon as the first discoverer of the country. VVentworth, in his Account of the British Settlements in Austral- asia, 1824, wrote : — '*New Holland is said to have been discovered by the Spanish captain, Don Pedro Fernando de Quiros, in 1609"; although in the first edition of his work the discovery was attributed to the Dutch in 1616. He had evidently not read, or had forgotten, the summary of Australian discovery given by Flinders in the introduction to his Voyage, p. viii, in which the claim of de Quiros to the discovery in question takes its proper place. Digitized by Google