Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/191

 A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 91 Espiritu Santo'' — a curious compound of Englisli and 1787 Spanish. The literal rendering of the title would be — ^JJJJJSd "The Southern Land of the Holy Spirit''; and in substi- {j^"»- tuting "The Australia" for "The Southern Land," Dal- rymple was apparently exercising his own judgment in the selection of an appropriate name. But de Quiros, again, was not in any sense the originator of the name in question; he did nothing more than translate the old Latin term into Spanish, just as the French geographers rendered it. into their language in the shape of La Terre Australe. One of the earliest records in which that title can be found is an old oid maps. French map — ^'faicte a ArqTies par Pierre Descelliers, pbre : (presbyt^re) Jan: 1550 " — ^in which a conjectural outline of the Great South Land is named La Terre Avstralle.^ The derivation of Australia from the old Latin, French, and Spanish names is so obvious that it would be useless to discuss the question of its authorship. The most rational supposi- tion is that it came into vogue in much the same manner as the word America derived its existence from Amerigo — ^by America a species of spontaneous generation. The distinction of authorship cannot be claimed either for Flinders, Dal- rymple, de Quiros, or any other geographer in whose writings obtained for the Pubuc Libraries of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. In another map of the same period, attributed to John Rotz, hydrographer, 1642, an outline of a lai'ge southern continent ia named Jave la Orande, A curiona resemblance between some of the names marked on this map of Jave la Grande and those given by Captain Cook to his discoveries, formed the subject of some animated discussions among the geographers, reviewed by Major in his Early Voyages to Terra Austraus. Captain Bumey also remarked the resemblance in his History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, 1803, vol. i, p. 381 :— '*The coast here (of Jave la Orande) has nearly the same direction with the corresponding part of New Holland, but is continued far to the south ; and by a very eztraordinaiy coincidence, immediately beyond the latitude of 30 degrees, the country is named Coste dea herbaiges, answering in climate and In name to Botany Bav. The many instances of similitude to the present charts, which are to be found in the general outline of this land, it is not easy to imaffine were produced solely by chance.'* These maps formed the subject of an interesting Paper read by J. H. Maiden, Esq., F.L.S., F.KG.S., Curator of the Technological Museum at Sydney, before the New South Wales branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, on the 26th August, 1886 ; and published m the Transactions of the Society, vol. iv, p. 91. Digitized by Google
 * The original map is in the British Masenm, bat fac-similes of it were