Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/26

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viii
INTRODUCTION.

and to the East Indies, also of Schouten and Lemaire's Circumnavigation of the Globe in 1615-18, which was published in 1646. He referred to the fact that the voyages of Van Noort, l'Hermite, and Spilbergen had also been published, and stated that, generally speaking, such had been the case with all the voyages of the Dutch as early as the year 1646, and that their discoveries were exactly laid down in the 1660 edition of the maps of P. Goos.

He furthermore announced (in reply to an invitation which had been given to the learned men of Holland, to fill up the gaps in their history which had been complained of), that one of the learned societies of Holland had offered a prize for a careful essay on the discoveries of the Dutch mariners.[1]

In publishing this remonstrance, the editor of the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages judiciously observed, that if the reproach of jealousy which applied to the Portuguese, did not apply to the Dutch, it was at least true that some sort of carelessness had prevented either the preservation or the publication of a great number of Dutch narratives, amongst which he quoted those of De Nuyts, Van Vlaming, etc., to the coasts of New Holland, We must not, however, lose sight of the fact, that Sir William Temple's charge of want

  1. With respect to the essay for which the learned society referred to (the Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen of Utrecht) had offered a prize, it was published in that society's Transactions in 1827, under the title of "Bennet and VanWijck's Verhandeling over de Nederlandsche Ontdekkingen." The editor, who has examined this work carefully, can state that it supplies no information in addition to that which we had already possessed.