[Footnote 27:  We are indebted to Mr Dalrymple for the recovery of an interesting document respecting a passage betwixt New Holland and New Guinea, discovered by Torres, a Spanish navigator, in 1606.  It was found among the archives of Manilla, when that city was taken by the British, in 1762, being a copy of a letter which Torres addressed to the king of Spain, giving an account of his discoveries.  The Spaniards, as usual, had kept the matter a profound secret, so that the existence of the strait was generally unknown, till the labours of Captain Cook, in 1770, entitled him to the merit here assigned.  Captain Flinders, it must be remembered, is of opinion, that some suspicion of such a strait was entertained in 1644, when Tasman sailed on his second voyage, but that the Dutch, who were then engaged in making discoveries in these regions, were ignorant of its having been passed.  Several navigators have sailed through Torres’s Strait, as it has been justly enough named, since the time of Cook, and have improved our acquaintance with its geography.  Of these may be mentioned Lieutenant (afterwards Rear-Admiral) Bligh, in 1789; Captain (afterwards Admiral) Edwards, in 1791; Bligh, a second time, accompanied by Lieutenant Portlock, in 1792; Messrs Bampton and Alt, in 1793; and Captain Flinders, in 1802-3.  The labours of the last-mentioned gentleman in this quarter surpass, in utility and interest, those of his predecessors, and, if he had accomplished nothing else, would entitle his name to be ranked amongst the benefactors of geography.  What mind is so insensible as not to regret, that after years of hardship and captivity, the very day which presented the public with the memorial of his services and sufferings, deprived him of the possibility of reaping their reward?—­E.]

6.  One more discovery, for which we are indebted to Captain Carteret, as similar in some degree to that last mentioned, may properly succeed it, in this enumeration.  Dampier, in sailing round what was supposed to be part of the coast of New Guinea, discovered it to belong to a separate island, to which he gave the name of New Britain.  But that the land which he named New Britain should be subdivided again into two separate large islands, with many smaller intervening, is a point of geographical information, which, if ever traced by any of the earliest navigators of the South Pacific, had not been handed down to the present age:  And its having been ascertained by Captain Carteret, deserves to be mentioned as a discovery, in the strictest sense of the word; a discovery of the utmost importance to navigation.  St George’s Channel, through which his ship found a way, between New Britain and New Ireland, from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean, to use the Captain’s own words, “is a much better and shorter passage, whether from the eastward or westward, than round all the islands and lands to the northward."[28]