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Updated: May 10, 2025
Travel once tasted is a lodestone that draws the spirit from the cosiest corner to fresh adventure." But at this I shook my head. "Here is my lodestone," I said, and I pressed Anna to my heart. But who can foretell the future, or predict the decrees of Fate? Five years of wedded happiness followed my return to Amsterdam from my second voyage with Dirk Hartog into the Southern Seas.
It would have shamed me to confess fear to go with these women, and, not dreaming of treachery, I descended to the canoe, while Hartog and the others made ready to follow in the ship's boats.
These islands were named the Islands of Armenio, after an Armenian merchant who was on board the ship. Donna Isabel professed to have received from her late husband the true bearings of these islands, which she confided to Hartog, and a course was set accordingly.
It was plain we had chanced upon a Spanish colony, probably of some of the people of Mendana's fleet, who had succeeded in forming a settlement in New Holland. Anxious to make a favourable impression upon our first landing, Hartog and I now donned our best, and the cutter, being manned, we were pulled toward the beach, where we could see that a number of Spaniards had assembled to receive us.
We now equipped an expedition to explore the Ruby Mountains, of which I was appointed leader. Hartog wished to come with us, but I persuaded him that his place was on board our ship, which, remembering how the Spaniards had, on a former occasion, pirated the vessel, he could not deny. "You are right, Peter," he said, when we had argued the matter.
Hartog, also, was in no mood to leave the gold until every effort had been made to obtain it, so we continued to beat about in the vicinity of the island awaiting a calm.
In no record of any voyage that Hartog or I knew of is any mention made of this phenomenon, so we concluded we were the first to see it. The farther we went the more numerous became the icebergs, and the more difficult the navigation owing to fogs and mists.
In other seasons we were driven by storm and stress. But at length, in spite of every obstacle, an unbroken coast stretched before us far as the eye could reach. For three days we sailed past verdure-covered hills, white, sandy beaches, and bluff headlands, until Hartog felt assured the Great South Continent was at last in very truth before him.
When I came aboard Hartog was overjoyed at my return. "I shall have to keep thee tied up, Peter," he said to me, in jest at my frequent mishaps. "You are for ever either falling overboard or running away." But when I told him of my adventure on Amazon Island he listened with great interest, expressing regret that I should have pledged my word against the ship's calling there.
The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 had given rise to a theory that a vast continent known as Terra Australis existed in the South, and Portuguese and Spanish ships had made report from time to time of this southern land. It was to confirm or dispel this belief that the voyage of Dirk Hartog was made.
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