Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/143

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INTRODUCTION.
cxv

of which they did not quite reach. I (Struyck) have seen a chart made of these parts."

Flinders remarks upon this account, "What is here called the west must have been the north-west coast," and he is right; for in the report here printed, the country is called "Van Diemen's Land," lying, as we know, on the north-west coast of New Holland, already in this introduction frequently referred to in distinction from the island more generally so known, and now called Tasmania. Flinders continues: "which the vessels appear to have made somewhat to the south of the western Cape Van Diemen. The point which they passed was probably this same cape itself; and in a chart, published by Mr. Dalrymple, August 27th, 1783, from a Dutch manuscript (possibly a copy of that which Struyck had seen), a shoal, of thirty geographic miles in length, is marked as running off from it, but incorrectly, according to Mr. McCluer. The gulf here mentioned was probably a deep bay in Arnhem's Land; for had it been the Gulf of Carpentaria, some particular mention of the great change in the direction of the coast would, doubtless, have been made."

In the year 1718 a Mons. Jean Pierre Purry, of Neufchatel, published a work entitled, Mémoire sur le Pays des Caffres et la Terre do Nuyts par rapport à l'utilité que la Compagnie des Indes Orientales en pourroit rétirer pour son Commerce, followed by a second memoir in the same year. These publications were explanatory of a project he entertained of founding a colony in the land of Nuyts. The scheme had