THE SOUTHERN LAND. 23
the southern contment. And in other ishinds which Pedro Fernandez de Quiros discovered in the same voyage, long before he discovered that of Taumaco, he stated that he saw- some boys as fair and ruddy as Flemings, amongst the natives of the islands who were almost swarthy, and they said by signs that they brought those whites from a more southern latitude. Nearly the same thing was met with by the adelantado Alvaro de Mendaaa, in some island which he discovered before he reached San Christobal and Santa Cruz, as in those which he called the four Marquesas de Mendoza and others, in which there were the same reasons for pre- suming that they could not have been peopled from the coasts of Peru and Mexico, but from the southern land ; not only from the distance from those countries, but from the great difference of the natives from the Indians of Peru and Mexico, and because when questioned by signs they had no knowledge of any land towards Mexico or Peru, and all seemed to point towards the south.
It is of great importance towards the same argument, to take into consideration the often confirmed indications given by the Indians of Taumaco of there being a deep and spa- cious, populous and fertile continent towards the south. The land also of the Baia de San Felipe y Santiago showed very great signs of its being the coast of the southern continent, as much by its great extent as by there being visible from it, looming at a great distance, cordilleras of very lofty moun- tains of very agreeable aspect ; and by the fact of two rivers falling into the bay, one as large as the Guadalquiver, and the other not quite so broad, all signs of a continent, or at least of a very spacious and deep country approaching to a continent.
jNIany spacious rivers were also seen to discharge them- selves along the coast which the pilot Juan Fernandez dis- covered, from which and from the signs of the natives, and from the people being so white, so well clad, and in all other
