[1] It has been computed that, during the years between 1510 and 1530, the Spanish and Portuguese ships exploring the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans lost ten thousand seamen from scurvy. After sailing, sailing, sailing across the equatorial belt of the Pacific Ocean they at length reached--if no disaster arrested their progress--the limits of the known: they came to some part of Malaysia where the natives were no longer naked, black, unreasoning cannibals, or crafty, yellow, naked thieves; some seaport in the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, or Java where they met men of the Muhammadan religion, or even other European Christians who had reached Australasia round the Cape of Good Hope. But the Muhammadans might out of jealousy or of revenge for wrongs they had suffered from other Christians cause them to be imprisoned or murdered, while more often than not the fellow Christians they were greeting after a twelve-thousand miles' voyage half round the world belonged to some nation in rivalry or at war with their own. Then they might be held long years in captivity, or be executed (with or without torture) outright. (Matthew Flinders was imprisoned in Mauritius for six and a half years by the French not much more than a hundred years ago.) At any rate they would probably be refused those sea stores and materials necessary for repairing a crazy ship, and have to face the return voyage across the Indian Ocean, round the stormy extremity of Africa, and through the violent gales of the northern Atlantic with but a slender hope of reaching home, or even of surviving the perils of the sea, in a leaky, worm-eaten ship with splintered masts and rotten sails. * * * * * This fifth division of the earth's surface which they had come to explore consisted of an almost uncountable number of islands ranging in size from Australia, with an area of 2,946,691 square miles, New Guinea, which has about 312,330, and Borneo, with another 290,000, to tiny islets like the Fanning atoll, 9 miles by 4, or little Pitcairn, 2 miles square, on which the mutineers of the _Bounty_ long hid themselves. The larger islands nearer to Asia were for the most part fragments of a former extension of the Asiatic or Australian continents; even New Zealand (104,000 square miles) must once have formed part of a huge strip of continental land stretching southwards from New Guinea and north-east Australia. But most of the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia (as distinct from Melanesia[2]), though they may have been larger than they are now and have risen out of comparatively shallow seas, were nevertheless always oceanic, that is to say, never connected with any great continent in recent ages. [2] At this stage it may assist the reader if I give in a footnote the principal geographic divisions of Australasia.