Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/163

Rh but between natives and illness they came to grief. Mendana and his brother-in-law died; and when only fifty miles from the Solomons, as is now known, they turned back and made for Manilla in the Philippines, but one ship, the Fragata, disappeared. She was said to have been afterwards discovered ashore somewhere “with all her sails set and all her people dead and rotten.”

Again, in 1605, Quiros left Callao with two ships and Luis Vaez de Torres as second in command, determined to find the Solomons, that Land of Ophir. At last he came to San Christoval, but had no idea it was one of the Solomons or that he had seen it forty years previously. So, still looking for it, he sailed on till he reached a great land, anchored in a bay, and named it Australia del Esperito Santo. A mutiny broke out, and he sailed back to Mexico, leaving Torres and his ship behind. The great land is said to have been an island of the New Hebrides, now known as Esperitu Santo; but several writers of to-day, amongst them Cardinal Moran, the distinguished Archbishop of Sydney, strive to prove that Quiros really did reach Australia and that the harbour and island he named were Gladstone Harbour and Curtis Island in Queensland; and it would seem as if there is good ground for this assertion. Curtis Island is the lone isle where Mrs. Campbell Praed, one of the most interesting of Australian writers, spent part of her early married life, and about which her novel, An Australian Heroine, is written. I myself was once nearly becoming part owner of this large island; but that is long ago now. Its owner, Mr. Paterson, used to swim his horse across the Narrows which divide it from the mainland and make his way to Raglan, where I met him when on a visit there. Perhaps that was Solomon's Land of Ophir, for gold enough is there,