SKETCH. xxvii the list we may place the two quartos published by de Brosses in 1756, containing a complete collection of all the known voyages to the South Lands — (p. 575) ; the first volume of which contained the Dutch voyages en Aiistrala»ie, with a chapter (xxvi) on the Dutch discoveries in New Holland. The charts published with each volume showed the position and extent of Nouvelle Hollande as it was then known, and were no doubt consulted with peculiar interest as the Endeavour neared its eastern coast. When he was leaving it in September, 1770, Cook mentioned them in his journal : — ^^ The charts with which I compared such parts of this coast as I visited, are bound up with a French work entitled Histoire des Navigations aux Torres Australes, which was published in 1756, and I found them tolerably exact.^* Looking at one of these charts, we observe that there is nothing to indicate the existence of the straits between the mainland and Van Diemen's Land; but the passage now kno^Ti as Torres Straits is distinctly shown, although in the text the author repeatedly expresses a doubt whether the mainland touched New Guinea or not. Why this doubt should have been expressed by de Brosses when the position of the straits is shown so clearly in his charts, is a question not easily answered. The discovery of the fact that Torres had sailed through the straits in 1606 is attributed to Dalrymple, who made it known to' the world in his Account of the Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean previous to 1764, published in 1767 — a work which we may safely assume had its place in the Bndeavour^s library — (p. 576). Flinders states in his introduction that "the existence of such a strait was generally unknown until 1770, when it was again discovered and passed by our great circumnavigator, Captain Cook.^^ In making this statement, he seems to have repeated a remark made in the introduction (p. xvi) to Cook's Third Voyage, where the reader is told that "though the great sagacity and extensive reading of Mr. Dalrymple had (discovered some traces of such a passage having been found before, yet those traces were so obscure and so little known in the present age that," among other things, '^ the President de Brosses had not been able to satisfy himself Digitized by Google
