gards Australia, we may rest assured that as she has been so practically loyal in the past, so she will not be found wanting in the future. Naturally all those interested in British New Guinea hope that it may be found possible to continue in some shape or form the work started and carried on by Sir William MacGregor. No country has ever been more fortunate in its first administrator, and without actual knowledge of the place and its difficulties, it is hard to realise the great work he has done, and is doing. The last nine years of his life have been devoted solely, and without any thought of his health or strength, to the existing and future welfare of British New Guinea, and speaking as one with some small practical knowledge of his work, I can honestly say I know no man of whom it may be more truly said "He holds no parley with unmanly fears; Facing a thousand dangers at her call, And trusting in his God, surmounts them all." THE ISLANDS OF THE WESTERN PACIFIC BY BASIL THOMSON In a series of papers on the British Empire, it is not strictly accurate to include an account of the islands of the South-Western Pacific, for of the numerous groups that lie between Australia and 130° east longitude England possesses but six dependencies. Time was when she might have had them all for the taking, and, seeing that the influence of Australia and New Zealand must inevitably make itself felt throughout the island groups in their neighbourhood, posterity may some day blame her bitterly for her neglect of opportunities. Since, however, the commercial importance of the islands still belongs to the far future, and our vast empire can ill afford to be weighted with unremunerative dependencies, there is much to be said for the policy of self-denial. The history of the discovery of the islands begins with Magellan's celebrated voyage in December 1520, in which he discovered the Ladrones. The earliest chart in which any islands appear south of the Equator is that of Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1592, where the two uninhabited islands discovered by Magellan appear as St. Pedro and Tiburon. Their position varies so much in the different accounts of the voyage that they are difficult to identify, but they may have been Palmerston and Isabella islands. A few unimportant discoveries followed in subsequent Spanish voyages from the New World, but it was not until Mendaña's famous expedition in 1567 that any of the large groups became known to Europeans. Of this voyage we have two manuscript accounts by Gallego, the pilot, and Catoira, the purser, both of which will shortly be translated and published by the Hakluyt Society. Steering a westerly course to the northward of the large groups, Mendaña discovered one of the Union group and the Solomon Islands, and stayed long enough among the latter to build a small boat and examine a large extent of the coast-line. He found gold among the natives, and springing to the conclusion that they were the Ophir of Scripture, named them after King Solomon. I have examined Gallego's MS. in the library of Lord Amherst of Hackney, to whom it belongs, and it is remarkable to notice that the natives of the Solomons have not altered in one single particular during the past three hundred years. The loss of the Solomon Islands is one among many of the romances of the South Seas. Voyage after voyage was undertaken to find them; group after group was discovered in the vain search, but, owing to the error in the longitude assigned to them by Mendaña, geographers began to doubt their existence, and they came at last to be almost omitted from the charts. Mendaña himself, in a second voyage undertaken in 1595, failed to find them, though he discovered both the Marquesas, and another of the Union group, which he named "Isla de Gente Hermosa" (The Isle of Handsome People). They were lost to geographers until Surville, a French navigator, rediscovered them on October 7, 1769. In 1606 Quiros, who had been pilot in Mendaña's second voyage, but who now commanded an expedition of his own, discovered Tahiti, which he named Sagittaria, and the northern islands of the New Hebrides, which he believed to be part of a great southern continent. With him the discoveries of the Spaniards give place to those of the Dutch. In 1616 the Dutch navigators, Schouten and Le Maire, discovered the most northerly islands of the Tonga group, Nuiatobutabu and Niuafo'ou, and the little outlying Polynesian island, Futuna. Had their course lain a few degrees to the southward they would have encountered the main groups of Tonga and Fiji, but these they left for their greater countryman, Abel Tasman. Early in the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company began to cast covetous eyes upon the trade of the Spanish East Indies, and Van Diemen, the Viceroy at Batavia, was instructed to push forward discoveries to the eastward. He selected Tasman to command the expedition, which set forth early in 1642. Considering the defective instruments, the cumbrous ships of his time, and the myriad dangers of these reef-strewn and uncharted seas, no voyage of discovery has been prosecuted with so happy a mingling of skill and good fortune. He discovered New Zealand, Tonga, Australia, Tasmania, the northern islands of the Fiji group, besides numerous outlying islands that had escaped the Spanish navigators. Acting upon their policy of commercial exclusiveness, the Dutch East India Company kept the result of his discoveries secret. A map was constructed on the floor of their Staadhouse, and his MS. was consigned to the Royal Library of the Hague, together with the curious charts and sketches with which he had illustrated it. He appears to have acted with a humanity towards the natives that was much in advance of his time, but being a rough sailor he lacked, unfortunately, the literary skill of our own navigator Cook, and his account of the natives is too meagre to be of much historical value. Nevertheless, the traditions of his visit are still preserved among the Tongans, in common with the name of the king who entertained him. Tasman's Journal lay buried for nearly two centuries. In 1860 a mutilated edition was published in Dutch, and it is only within the last few years that a complete edition has been undertaken by M. Fleeres, the Royal Librarian of the Hague. With Roggewein, who treated the natives of Easter Island with savage barbarity, the Dutch discoveries close. The discoveries of the eighteenth century belong to English and French navigators. In 1767 Wallis revisited Tahiti and discovered Uea or Wallis Island. In the following year the French admiral, De Bougainville, discovered the main islands of the Samoan group, and the Louisiades. In the middle of the last century our greatest geographer was Dalrymple. Having made an exhaustive study of the voyages of the Spanish and Dutch navigators, he became convinced of the existence of a vast Southern Continent. In the light of fuller knowledge it is pathetic to read his admirably reasoned arguments, his marshalled array of evidence, which were to be blown to the winds by the crude test of sailing a ship over the site of his Continent. There is not in all the history of science a more striking instance of the errors to which deductive reasoning is prone. By all the laws of scientific deduction there should have been a Southern Continent stretching from Australia to the Pole, and there was not. But Dalrymple and his followers brought pressure to bear on the Admiralty to put their theory to the test, and the result was the fitting out of Captain Cook's famous expedition. We all know how he set that question at rest for ever. His discoveries included the Cook or Raratongan group, the Loyalty Islands, Savage Island, and Hawaii or the Sandwich Islands, where he lost his life through over-confidence in the disposition of the natives. But his real services lay in the enormous additions he made to hydrography, and to our knowledge of the social state of the natives. Hawaii lies geographically outside |