Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.Major, Richard Henry
History
Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.
Major, Richard Henry
Australia -- Discovery and exploration; Discoveries in geography -- Portuguese; Voyages and travels
This point of Van Diemen’s land having been thus explored, they occupied
themselves, from the second of April to the twelfth of July, in visiting
the bays, head lands, islands, rivers, etc., to the best of their
ability according to their instructions. But not being sufficiently
provided with fresh provisions for so long a voyage, many men on board
began to suffer and also to die, from severe sickness, principally
fever, acute pains in the head and eyes, and above all, dropsy, so that
they were compelled to resolve upon returning, and to direct their
course to Banda; the patsjallang however alone arrived there; the fluit
_Vossenbosch_, and the sloop _Waijer_, being forced by unfavourable
weather and the weakness of the crew, to pass that government, and to
hold on towards Macassar, as your nobilities will have already learnt by
the papers from Banda and Macassar. The skipper, upper and under
steersman, with most of the petty officers and sailors of the
_Vossenbosch_ being already dead, and their incomplete journals alone
having reached us, the new maps moreover, made by the direction of the
skipper Martin van Delft, having been improperly detained at Macassar,
we are not at present in a position to forward the same complete
information on the subject, which the arrival of these maps would have
enabled us to give, as they contain many new names, which could not
possibly be found in the limited compass of the Company’s former charts.
According to their own accounts, they have only been able to visit a
strip of land of about sixty miles along the coast E. and W., including
merely a very small portion of that great bay, which it was recommended
to them to sail over and explore as much as possible.
The daily courses, winds, currents, depths, reefs, soundings, variations
of the compass, and the like observations, more especially depending
upon the art of the steersman, are to be found in the above-mentioned
journals, and shall here be passed over as out of place, in a
compendious report like the present. We shall here principally follow
the logbook of the skipper Martin van Delft, of the _Vossenbosch_, and
that of the under steersman Andries Roseboom, of the sloop _Waijer_, as
the journals of the captain of the patsjallang, Pieter Fredericks of
Hamburg, and of the steersman of the _Vossenbosch_, notwithstanding
their general usefulness, do not afford any additional information, as
they merely describe the same subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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