CHAPTER X. BLIGH AND THE MUTINY OF THE "BOUNTY" CHAPTER XI. BLIGH AS GOVERNOR CHAPTER XII. OTHER NAVAL PIONEERS--THE PRESENT MARITIME STATE OF AUSTRALIA--CONCLUSION LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS MARTIN FROBISHER FROBISHER'S MAP A DUTCH SHIP OF WAR SOVEREIGN OF THE SEAS A SIXTH RATE, 1684 DAMPIER COOK GOVERNOR PHILLIP VIEW OF BOTANY BAY SYDNEY COVE CAPTAIN JOHN HUNTER ATTACK ON THE WAAKSAMHEYD GOVERNOR KING LA PÉROUSE SIR JOSEPH BANKS GEORGE BASS MATTHEW FLINDERS VIEW OF WRECK REEF GOVERNMENT HOUSE, SYDNEY, IN 1802 VIEW OF SYDNEY GOVERNOR BLIGH "Whenever I want a thing well done in a distant part of the world; when I want a man with a good head, a good heart, lots of pluck, and plenty of common sense, I always send for a Captain of the Navy."--LORD PALMERSTON. THE NAVAL PIONEERS OF AUSTRALIA CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY--THE EARLIEST AUSTRALIAN VOYAGERS: THE PORTUGUESE, SPANISH, AND DUTCH. Learned geographers have gone back to very remote times, even to the Middle Ages, and, by the aid of old maps, have set up ingenious theories showing that the Australian continent was then known to explorers. Some evidence has been adduced of a French voyage in which the continent was discovered in the youth of the sixteenth century, and, of course, it has been asserted that the Chinese were acquainted with the land long before Europeans ventured to go so far afloat. There is strong evidence that the west coast of Australia was touched by the Spaniards and the Portuguese during the first half of the sixteenth century, and proof of its discovery early in the seventeenth century. At the time of these very early South Sea voyages the search, it should always be remembered, was for a great Antarctic continent. The discovery of islands in the Pacific was, to the explorers, a matter of minor importance; New Guinea, although visited by the Portuguese in 1526, up to the time of Captain Cook was supposed by Englishmen to be a part of the mainland, and the eastern coast of Australia, though touched upon earlier and roughly outlined upon maps, remained unknown to them until Cook explored it. [Illustration: MARTIN FROBISHER. From the portrait in Holland's "Herolowologia Anglica" [London, 1620]. _To face p_. 2.] _Early Voyages to Australia_, by R.H. Major, printed by the Hakluyt Society in 1859, is still the best collection of facts and contains the soundest deductions from them on the subject, and although ably-written books have since been published, the industrious authors have added little or nothing in the way of indisputable evidence to that collected by Major. The belief in the existence of the Australian continent grew gradually and naturally out of the belief in a great southern land. Mr. G.B. Barton, in an introduction to his valuable Australian [Sidenote: 1578] history, traces this from 1578, when Frobisher wrote:--