If one looks at the west coast of Australia one is struck by the large number of Dutch names which are jotted down the coast.  There is Hoog Island, Diemen’s Bay, Houtman’s Abrolhos, De Wit land, and the Archipelago of Nuyts, besides Dirk Hartog’s Island and Cape Leeuwin.  To the extreme north we find the Gulf of Carpentaria, and to the extreme south the island which used to be called Van Diemen’s Land.  It is not altogether to be wondered at that almost to the middle of this century the land we now call Australia was tolerably well known as New Holland.  If the Dutch had struck the more fertile eastern shores of the Australian continent, it might have been called with reason New Holland to the present day; but there is scarcely any long coast-line of the world so inhospitable and so little promising as that of Western Australia, and one can easily understand how the Dutch, though they explored it, did not care to take possession of it.

[Illustration:  TERRES AUSTRALES. d’apres d’Anville. 1746.]

But though the Dutch were the first to explore any considerable stretch of Australian coast, they were by no means the first to sight it.  As early as 1542 a Spanish expedition under Luis Lopez de Villalobos, was despatched to follow up the discoveries of Magellan in the Pacific Ocean within the Spanish sphere of influence.  He discovered several of the islands of Polynesia, and attempted to seize the Philippines, but his fleet had to return to New Spain.  One of the ships coasted along an island to which was given the name of New Guinea, and was thought to be part of the great unknown southern land which Ptolemy had imagined to exist in the south of the Indian Ocean, and to be connected in some way with Tierra del Fuego.  Curiosity was thus aroused, and in 1606 Pedro de Quiros was despatched on a voyage to the South Seas with three ships.  He discovered the New Hebrides, and believed it formed part of the southern continent, and he therefore named it Australia del Espiritu Santo, and hastened home to obtain the viceroyalty of this new possession.  One of his ships got separated from him, and the commander, Luys Vaz de Torres, sailed farther to the south-west, and thereby learned that the New Australia was not a continent but an island.  He proceeded farther till he came to New Guinea, which he coasted along the south coast, and seeing land to the south of him, he thus passed through the straits since named after him, and was probably the first European to see the continent of Australia.  In the very same year (1606) the Dutch yacht named the Duyfken is said to have coasted along the south and west coasts of New Guinea nearly a thousand miles, till they reached Cape Keerweer, or “turn again.”  This was probably the north-west coast of Australia.  In the first thirty years of the seventeenth century the Dutch followed the west coast of Australia with as much industry as the Portuguese had done with the west coast of Africa, leaving up to the present day