Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 14, 2025
Burney inclines to the belief that the land visited by De Gonneville could be no other than Madagascar. After him, Major, than whom no higher or more respected authority exists in geographical matters of this kind, seems to have too readily accepted Burney's opinion.
The first claim to the discovery of the Australian Continent may be, therefore, settled in favor of De Gonneville; although, there is little doubt that the existence of a great southern land was suspected by the Chinese, and also by the ancients.
He is said to have doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and being driven by stress of weather into an unknown sea, found a land inhabited by friendly people, with whom he stayed some time, being accompanied back to France by one of the king's sons who was desirous of studying the precepts of Christianity. The general belief, however, is that it was probably Madagascar whereon De Gonneville landed.
De Gonneville found a fine district, watered by a large river, and inhabited by men who possessed a kind of rudimentary civilization, a tribal organization, and obeyed some established individual authority.
There is evidently here some strange mixture of European and Malay art, the former exhibited in the remarkable AUREOLAS which so commonly surround the heads of saints in the old images, in painted church windows of the middle ages, and the times of De Gonneville, and the latter in the kind of dress over the body, which appears to be meant to represent some sort of matted stuff.
The Madagascar natives never made use of the skins of animals as an article of dress, whilst this custom is common to the aborigines of all parts of Australia, where the kangaroo, opossums, native bears, and emus, furnish them with the material, with which they could manufacture these garments of skins or beds of feathers described by De Gonneville.
The only alternative theory would be that, in their explorations along the coast of the island, the Portuguese were so unfortunate as to land everywhere but near the spot where De Gonneville may be supposed to have resided.
In the first place, the judicial declaration cited above, which had been for more than three centuries and a half mislaid among the records of the Admiralty of Normandy, was discovered in the year 1873 by the French geographer, Benoit D'Avezac, who published it in a pamphlet in which he discusses this question, and concludes that the land visited by De Gonneville must have been some part of South America.
To close this discussion, it may be added, that in most instances the early voyages of the Dutch or possibly the Portuguese to Western Australia were the result of such accidents as befell De Gonneville, as they were carried by storms out of their course to India or the Sunda Islands, and thrown on the west coast of the Australian Continent.
A river of the size described pre-supposes a country of considerable extent, and therefore De Gonneville could not have landed on any of the islands lying between Madagascar and the Sunda Islands. It could not have been either of the latter named, as they lie to the north, and not the south of the calm latitudes referred to by De Gonneville.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking