turned northwards to the Solomon Islands,[66] and thence sailed past the coasts of the large island of New Ireland (now known as New Mecklenburg), and so on along the north coast of New Guinea. Rounding this great island, and directing his course southward, he arrived at the island of Buru, between the Moluccas and Celebes. Here he found himself within the sphere of Dutch influence, and after calling in at Batavia, the capital of Java, he made his way back, round the Cape of Good Hope, to St. Malo, only having lost seven out of a crew of two hundred men in this remarkable sea journey round the world. [66] The largest and nearly the most northern of the group is named after him. Thus, before Cook set out on his famous journey in 1768, the position of European knowledge in regard to the Pacific Ocean and the continent and islands of Australasia was as follows: The outline of the Australian continent had been roughly traced by the Dutch (who called the land New Holland) from Cape York westwards to the southernmost point of Tasmania (which was not known to be an island); a portion of the west coast of New Zealand (the North Island and a small part of the South) had been placed on the map by Tasman, but it was not known whether this land of high mountains consisted of one or more large islands, or whether it might not even be another peninsula of a mighty southern continent; Tasman had discovered the small Tonga Islands; New Guinea was known in regard to its western and eastern extremities and a part of its north coast, but, owing to secrecy having been kept as to the existence of Torres Straits, it was also thought to be an outlying part of New Holland (Australia); New Britain and New Ireland (now Neu Pommern and New Mecklenburg) had been explored by Dampier in 1700; the Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz, and the islands of the New Hebrides group had been rediscovered by Bougainville, who had also first visited and named the Louisiade archipelago to the south-east of New Guinea. [The Solomons and the New Hebrides had been known for two centuries to the Spanish Government, and for a shorter period to Dutch navigators]. Easter Island--the easternmost of the Polynesian islands, not much more than 2000 miles from the coast of South America--had been seen by the English pirate, Captain Davis, in 1685, but was only definitely known and named, after its discovery by the Dutch navigator, Roggeveen,[67] on Easter Sunday in 1722; and was considered by some geographers in Holland and France to be an outlying point of the great southern continent: which, if this were the case, would be almost as large as Asia, and would occupy quite half the space actually covered by the Pacific Ocean. The existence of Tahiti was fully known, inasmuch as it was pitched upon by the British astronomers as being the best place in that region of the globe from which to observe the transit of Venus. The existence of the Marquezas Islands had long been established by