5. Whether New Holland did or did not join to New Guinea, was a question involved in much doubt and uncertainty, before Captain Cook’s sailing between them, through Endeavour Strait, decided it. We will not hesitate to call this an important acquisition to geography. For though the great sagacity and extensive reading of Mr. Dalrymple had discovered some traces of such a passage having been found before[20], yet these traces were so obscure, and so little known in the present age, that they had not generally regulated the construction of our charts; the President De Brosses[21], who wrote in 1756, and was well versed in geographical researches, had not been able to satisfy himself about them; and Mons. de Bougainville, in 1768, who had ventured to fall in with the south coast of New Guinea, near ninety leagues to the westward of its south-east point, chose rather to work those ninety leagues directly to windward, at a time when his people were in such distress for provisions as to eat the seal-skins from off the yards and rigging, than to run the risk of finding a passage, of the existence of which he entertained the strongest doubts, by persevering in his westerly course.[22] Captain Cook therefore in this part of his voyage (though he modestly disclaims all merit[23]), has established, beyond future controversy, a fact of essential service to navigation, by opening, if not a new, at least an unfrequented and forgotten communication between the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. 6. One more discovery, for which we are indebted to Captain Carteret, as similar in some degree to that last mentioned, may properly succeed it in this enumeration. Dampier, in sailing round what was supposed to be part of the coast of New Guinea, discovered it to belong to a separate island, to which he gave the name of New Britain. But that the land which he named New Britain, should be sub-divided again into two separate large islands, with many smaller intervening, is a point of geographical information, which, if ever traced by any of the earliest navigators of the South Pacific, had not been handed down to the present age: and its having been ascertained by Captain Carteret, deserves to be mentioned as a discovery, in the strictest sense of the word; a discovery of the utmost importance to navigation. St. George’s Channel, through which his ship found a way, between New Britain and New Ireland, from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean, to use the Captain’s own words[24], “is a much better and shorter passage, whether from the eastward or westward, than round all the islands and lands of the northward.”[25] V.