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Updated: May 14, 2025
Tasman's draught, and besides its being made a firm continued land, only with some openings like the mouths of rivers, I found the soundings also different from what the pricked line of his course shows them, and generally shallower than he makes them, which inclines me to think that he came not so near the shore as his line shows, and so had deeper soundings, and could not so well distinguish the islands.
Dampier disputes the accuracy of the "draught of Tasman's" that he had with him in many particulars, and constantly advances his theory of the existence of a strait dividing New Holland into two parts, probably taking this idea, as before indicated, from the old map of the DAUPHIN.
But to come back to the summary of Dutch voyages found in Tasman's instructions: During 1605 and 1606 the Dutch yacht Duyphen made two exploring voyages to New Guinea.
He anchored in Golden Bay; but luck was against him. First of all the natives of the bay paddled out to view his ships, and, falling on a boat's crew, clubbed four out of seven of the men. Tasman's account which I take leave to doubt makes the attack senselessly wanton and unprovoked.
The plan adopted was nearly similar to that of the great hunting-matches in India: a line was formed reaching across the island, with the intention of driving the natives into a cul-de-sac on Tasman's peninsula. The attempt failed; the natives, having tied up their dogs, stole during one night through the lines.
It appears from Captain Tasman's account that he was now in haste to return to Batavia, and did not give himself so much trouble as at the beginning about discoveries, and to say the truth, there was no great occasion, if, as I observed, his commission was no more than to sail round the new discovered coasts, in order to lay them down with greater certainty in the Dutch charts.
The jurisdiction of the Commandant included the whole of Tasman's Peninsula, with the islands and waters within three miles thereof; and save the making of certain returns to head-quarters, his power was unlimited. A word as to the position and appearance of this place of punishment. Tasman's Peninsula is, as we have said before, in the form of an earring with a double drop.
Major also found in the British Museum copies of charts and a quantity of MS. describing Tasman's 1644 voyage, which, there is reason to believe, were made from Tasman's originals by one Captain Bowrey in 1688, who had spent fourteen years before that date trading in the Dutch East Indies.
Upon examining the body, we found that he had been shot through the heart: He was a man of the middle size and stature; his complexion was brown, but not very dark; and one side of his face was tattowed in spiral lines of a very regular figure: He was covered with a fine cloth, of a manufacture altogether new to us, and it was tied on exactly according to the representation in Valentyn's Account of Abel Tasman's Voyage, vol. 3, part 2, page 50, his hair also was tied in a knot on the top of his head, but had no feather in it.
In the first place, then, it is most evident, from Captain Tasman's voyage, that New Guinea, Carpentaria, New Holland, Antony van Diemen's Land, and the countries discovered by De Quiros, make all one continent, from which New Zealand seems to be separated by a strait; and, perhaps, is part of another continent, answering to Africa, as this, of which we are now speaking, plainly does to America.
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