WESTERN AUSTRALIA, &c.
PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.
Recent researches in the British Museum have led to presumptive proof that the great continent of Australia was discovered by the Portuguese very early in the sixteenth century. The archives of Portugal state that New Guinea was discovered by Menezes in 1527, which receives corroboration by the claim of the Spaniards to its discovery in 1528. The manuscript hydrography by John Rotz, dated 1542, which is written in English, and dedicated to the king, has Australia delineated nearly as it was in the seventeenth century, prior to the voyage of Abel Tasman. A later map, supposed to have been copied from it about 1550, instead of retaining the Portuguese names found in Rotz's charts, has them translated into French. The land descried by Torres in 1606, when south of New Guinea, is conjectured to have been a part of Northern Australia. A Dutch yacht, called the Duyfhen, ran down nearly a thousand miles of the south and west coasts of New Guinea. Both Torres and the Dutch navigator do not appear to have known, that the land descried by them was the northern limit
