Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This compilation by R. H. Major of the British Museum (published in 1859) brings together various manuscript and published sources, some of them anonymous, which provide a picture of European exploration in the Southern Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It includes passages from the writings of William Dampier, who not only surveyed part of the coast of Australia (‘New Holland’), but also made detailed notes of the fauna and flora he encountered there.