Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/37

 SKETCH. It is necessary here to clear away a very prevalent misappre- hension with respect to the land known to geography as Terra Australis, or Terra Australis Incognita. It has been supposed by many writers that the southern continent which formed the main object of Cook's first voyage was identical with the country then known as New Holland. The great discovery that he had in view had nothing to do with that part of the world. His object was to settle the question — about which the geographers were still uncertain — whether the southern continent, classically termed the Terra Australis, really existed or not. As he put it in the introduction to his Second Voyage, he had to deter- mine ^^ whether the unexplored part of the southern hemisphere be only an immense mass of water, or contain another continent.'^ The geographers were not at all curious about the precise position and extent of New Holland ; in fact they had not manifested any curiosity about it at all ; but the question of the unknown con- tinent was the most important problem in their science at that time. The common misconception on this subject may perhaps be traced to a mistaken construction of the word Terra. As used by the old geographers, it evidently meant a continent as dis- tinguished from an island. When, for instance, the Spaniards passed from Hispaniola to the mainland, they called it the Tierra firme, to distinguish it from the islands. So, too, when the geographers gave the name Terra Australis Incognita to the undiscovered land in the south, they were thinking of a vast continent stretching from east to west through the South Pacific, and running round the South Pole. The land discovered by the Dutch — ^which they afterwards called HoUandia Nova in their charts and Nieuw Holland in their conversation — was always supposed to be either one island or several islands separated by straits. In the sixteenth century, it was described on the map drawn by John Eotz (1542) as The Londe of Java ; the idea being Digitized by Google