The names of the French voyagers who may have sighted Australia in the first half of the sixteenth century were Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, who, sailing across the Indian Ocean after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, was blown out of his course and landed on the shores of a great island, which he believed to be Terra Australis (perhaps only Madagaskar); and Guillaume le Testu, who, starting apparently from Marseilles in 1530, also rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and in directing his course for the Spice Islands apparently stumbled on the coast of West Australia. The southern continent is certainly indicated on an old French map of 1542, now in the possession of the British Museum. But this discovery of the Provençal sailor is based on slender evidence. The definite revelation of Australasia will be dealt with in succeeding chapters. Meantime, before we begin to review the historical discovery of the Australian continent and the islands and islets of Malaysia, Papuasia, and of the Pacific, let us first of all realize what were the conditions of life amongst the savage or semi-savage inhabitants of these regions before they came into contact with the men of strong minds and strong bodies who left western Europe from the sixteenth century onwards to found colonies in the new worlds of America and Australasia. In the sixteenth century the distribution and condition of the native races in Australasia and the Pacific islands stood thus: Java was thickly populated, far more so than any other island in Malaysia. This population consisted almost entirely of a short, yellow-skinned people of MALAY speech and more or less of Mongolian type, but with some ancient Hindu intermixture. In the mountainous regions of the interior was a forest-dwelling race--the Kalangs--(now extinct), a wild people, supposed to be negroid but in reality more like the Australoids. Java, colonized some two to three thousand years ago by the Hindus, and at a later date much visited by Arabs and Chinese, had attained a high degree of civilization (of a very Indian character) when first visited by Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under the Dutch from the seventeenth century onwards it became the great centre of Malaysian commerce.