In the year 1529, a voyage was made to Sumatra, by Jean Parmentier of Dieppe, and in this voyage he died. Parmentier was a poet and a classical scholar, as well as a navigator and good hydrographer. He was accompanied in this voyage by his intimate friend the poet Pierre Crignon, who, on his return to France, published, in 1531, the poems of Parmentier, with a prologue containing his eulogium, in which he says of him, that he was “le premier François qui a entrepris à estre pilotte pour mener navires à la Terre Amérique qu’on dit Brésil, et semblablement le premier François qui a descouvert les Indes jusqu’à l’Isle de Taprobane, et, si mort ne l’eust pas prévenu, je crois qu’il eust été jusques aux Moluques.” This is high authority upon this point, coming as it does from a man of education, and a shipmate and intimate of Parmentier himself. The French, then, were not in the South Seas beyond Sumatra before 1529. The date of the earliest of our quoted maps is not earlier than 1535, as it contains the discovery of the St. Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in that year; but even let us suppose it no earlier than that of Rotz, which bears the date of 1542, and ask, what voyages of the French in the South Seas do we find between the years of 1529 and 1542? Neither the Abbé Raynal, nor any modern French writer, nor even antiquaries, who have entered most closely into the history of early French explorations, as for example, M. Léon Guérin, the author of the _Histoire Maritime de France_, Paris, 1843, 8vo.; and of _Les Navigateurs Français_, 8vo., Paris, 1847, offer the slightest pretension that the French made voyages to those parts, in the early part or middle of the sixteenth century. Now we do know from Barros and Galvano that, at the close of 1511, Albuquerque sent from Malacca, Antonio de Breu, and Francisco Serrano, with three ships to Banda and Malacca: they passed along the east side of Sumatra to Java, and thence by Madura, Bali, Sumbava, Solor, etc., to Papua or New Guinea. From thence they went to the Moluccas and to Amboyna. See _Barros_, d. 3, l. 5, c. 6, p. 131, and _Galvano, translated by Hakluyt_, p. 378. Here we have the very islands, forming the northern portion of the Grande Jave, at this early date; but that which is totally wanting between this and 1529, is the account of the various explorations of the eastern and western coasts of the vast country described under that name. It is certain, moreover, that France was at that time too poor, and too much embroiled in political anxieties, to busy itself with extensive nautical explorations. Had she so done, the whole of North America and Brazil might now have belonged to her. At the same time, however, we know that the Portuguese had establishments before 1529, in the East Indian Islands, and the existence of Portuguese names on the countries of which we speak, as thus delineated on these French maps, is in itself an acknowledgment of their discovery by the Portuguese, as assuredly the