The most important voyage of all was that of Abel Tasman, in 1 1642. He started from Mauritius, to discover a passage south of the Australian continent; and after landing in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, he sailed across the Tasman Sea and up the west coast of New Zealand, and so back to Batavia by way of Tonga and the Fiji islands and the north coast of New Guinea. He left behind him another name, New Holland, for the whole continent. These names throughout Australasia bear witness to the skill and energy of the Dutch navigators; but they came only as traders, and the west coast of Australia, which they knew best, had little to attract them to permanent settlement. Sand and grass, hostile natives, and dangerous reefs marked by a series of shipwrecks sum up their impression of the new land. Here are two views of 2,3 the coast; it does not seem attractive for sailors. We can quite understand why they made no effort to open up a trade like that of the East Indies, especially as they missed the east coast, the most promising region for European settlement. Here are two charts showing our knowledge of Australia, the first soon after Tasman’s voyage, the second nearly a century later. 4,5 [Illustration: MAP OF PIETER GOOS, 1660.] The discovery of the east coast was to come more than a century later; it was made by an Englishman, at a time when England was looking for new outlets, both for trade and settlement, as an offset to her losses in the continent of North America. It is true that Dampier visited the west coast towards the end of the seventeenth century, and wrote an account of the animals, natives, and plants; but he does not seem to have been much more favourably impressed than the Dutch, and nothing came of his visit. [Illustration: MAP OF R. DE VAGONDY, 1752.] But in the eighteenth century England and France were the great rivals in colonisation, and voyages of discovery and plans of annexation became the order of the day. It was a revival, in a less forcible though more scientific form, of the old rivalry with Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century. State influence was behind the explorers, as it had been in the days of Drake and his freebooters. Captain Cook sailed in a ship belonging to the Royal Navy, and not in a trader. In our own country his memory is still kept green in the little port of Whitby where he served his apprenticeship to the sea, and where the ships were built in which he made his great voyages of discovery; in the Antipodes it is for ever associated with the beginnings of a great and growing 6,7 Empire. Here we see his statue in Sydney, and here is a picture of his ship, the _Endeavour_, approaching New Zealand.