ing the arms of Queen Elizabeth, before the unicorn of Scotland had displaced the dragon of England.
In the article "Terra Australis," in Cornelius Wytfliet's Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum, Louvain, 1598, we find the following passage:—
"The 'Australis Terra' is the most southern of all lands, and is separated from New Guinea by a narrow strait. Its shores are hitherto but little known, since after one voyage and another, that route has been deserted, and seldom is the country visited unless when sailors are driven there by storms. The 'Australis Terra' begins at two or three degrees from the equator, and is maintained by some to be of so great an extent, that if it were thoroughly explored, it would be regarded as a fifth part of the world."
The above significant statement was printed, it will be remembered, before any discovery of Australia of which we have an authentic account.
But while examining these indications of a discovery of Australia in the sixteenth century, it will be asked what explorations had been made by the Spaniards in that part of the world in the course of that century. From the period of the voyage of Don Alvaro de Saavedra to the Moluccas in 1527, already alluded to, we meet with no such active spirit of exploration on the part of the Spaniards in the South Seas. Embarrassed by his political position, and with an exhausted treasury, the emperor, in 1529, definitely renounced his pretensions to the Moluccas for a sum of money, although he retained his claim to the islands discovered by his subjects to the east of the line of demarcation now confined to
