As a result of these Dutch voyages the existence of a great land somewhere to the south-east of Asia became common property to all civilised men.  As an instance of this familiarity many years before Cook’s epoch-making voyages, it may be mentioned that in 1699 Captain Lemuel Gulliver (in Swift’s celebrated romance) arrived at the kingdom of Lilliput by steering north-west from Van Diemen’s Land, which he mentions by name.  Lilliput, it would thus appear, was situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the great Bight of Australia.  This curious mixture of definite knowledge and vague ignorance on the part of Swift exactly corresponds to the state of geographical knowledge about Australia in his days, as is shown in the preceding map of those parts of the world, as given by the great French cartographer D’Anville in 1745 (p. 157).

These discoveries of the Spanish and Dutch were direct results and corollaries of the great search for the Spice Islands, which has formed the main subject of our inquiries.  The discoveries were mostly made by ships fitted out in the Malay archipelago, if not from the Spice Islands themselves.  But at the beginning of the eighteenth century new motives came into play in the search for new lands; by that time almost the whole coast-line of the world was roughly known.  The Portuguese had coasted Africa, the Spanish South America, the English most of the east of North America, while Central America was known through the Spaniards.  Many of the islands of the Pacific Ocean had been touched upon, though not accurately surveyed, and there remained only the north-west coast of America and the north-east coast of Asia to be explored, while the great remaining problem of geography was to discover if the great southern continent assumed by Ptolemy existed, and, if so, what were its dimensions.  It happened that all these problems of coastline geography, if we may so call it, were destined to be solved by one man, an Englishman named JAMES COOK, who, with Prince Henry, Magellan, and Tasman, may be said to have determined the limits of the habitable land.

His voyages were made in the interests, not of trade or conquest, but of scientific curiosity; and they were, appropriately enough, begun in the interests of quite a different science than that of geography.  The English astronomer Halley had left as a sort of legacy the task of examining the transit of Venus, which he predicted for the year 1769, pointing out its paramount importance for determining the distance of the sun from the earth.  This transit could only be observed in the southern hemisphere, and it was in order to observe it that Cook made his first voyage of exploration.