Old Le Maire started a suit for the recovery of his ship and its contents. After two years of pleading he won his case. The East India Company was ordered to pay back the value of the ship and the goods confiscated. All his official papers were returned to Le Maire. His name and that of the little town of Hoorn, given to the most southern point of the American continent and to the shortest route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, tell of this great voyage of the year 1618. CHAPTER X TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA It often happened that ships of the Dutch East India Company on their way to the Indies were blown out of their course or were carried by the currents in a southern direction. Then they were driven into a part of the map which was as yet unknown, and they had to find their way about very much as a stranger might do who has left the well-known track of the desert. Sometimes these ships were lost. More often they reached a low, flat coast which seemed to extend both east and west as far as the eye could reach, which offered very little food and very little water, and appeared to be the shore-line of a vast continent which was remarkably poor in both plants and animals. Indeed, so unattractive was this big island, as it was then supposed to be, to the captains of the company that not a single one of them had ever taken the trouble to explore it. They had followed the coast-line until once more they reached the well-known regions of their map, and then they had hastened northward to the comfortable waters of their own Indian Ocean. But of course people talked about this mysterious big island, and they wondered. They wondered whether, perhaps, the stories of the Old Testament, the stories of the golden land of Ophir, which had never yet been found, might not yet be proved true in that large part of the map which showed a blank space and was covered with the letters of _terra incognita_. If there were any such land still to be discovered by any European people, the Dutch East India Company decided that they ought to benefit by it. Therefore their directors studied the question with great care and deliberation. A number of expeditions were sent out one after the other. In the year 1636 two small vessels were ordered to make a careful examination of the island of New Guinea, which was supposed to be the peninsula part of the unknown Southern continent. But New Guinea itself is so large that the two vessels, after spending a very long time along the coast, were obliged to return without any definite information.