[The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea by George Collingridge]@TWC D-Link bookThe First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea CHAPTER VI 6/9
This channel, which is left white in the chart I am describing, is painted over in the specimen dated 1550 [see map pp.
68-69], as though it were blocked, and two men are represented with pick and shovel as in the act of cutting it open. Curiously enough, in both maps, the upper silhouette of the landscape in this part defines the real south shore of Java. On the continental part, the Australian Alps, the range of hills on the western and north-western coast, and the great sandy interior of Australia, are also roughly sketched in.
Was it all guess-work? PLACE-NAMES. It will not be necessary, I think, to give an elaborate description of the place-names that occur on this map; those who wish to know more about them may consult my larger work on "The Discovery of Australia." We need not dwell either on those that are inscribed along the northern shores of Java, well-known to the Portuguese twenty years at least before these maps were made. The southern shores of Java are joined to Australia, or, at least, only separated from it by a fictitious river named Rio Grande, the Great River, which follows the sleek curve of the "pig's back" described by D. do Couto, the Portuguese historian. In the Portuguese sphere some of the more salient features of the coast lines bear the following names:-- _Terre ennegade._ Ennegade has no possible meaning in French. It is a corruption of Terra Anegada which means submerged land, or land over which the high tides flow considerably.
It refers to a long stretch of shore at the entrance to King Sounds, where the tides cover immense tracts of country, and which has, in consequence, been called Shoal Bay. _Baye Bresille;_ Brazil Bay, corresponds with King Sound. The islands on the western coast, known as Houtman's Abrolhos,* and those near Sharks' Bay, are all charted with the reefs that surround them, although they bear no names on this map. [* _Abrolhos_ is a Portuguese word applied to reefs; literally, it means "open your eyes."] Lower down, there is a strange name, that has led to some stranger mistakes; it is LAMA, or LAME DE SYLLA, written HAME DE SILLE on another of these maps.
It is a curious jumble that I have not been able to decipher; it occurs close to the mouth of the Swan River of modern charts. Later French and Dutch map-makers took it for the name of an island in that locality. Now, in those days, navigators and geographers were constantly in search of certain more or less fictitious islands, among which, the "Island of Men" and the "Island of Women," had been sought for in vain. Could this be one of the lost islands? The old-fashioned letter s, resembling an f, made _Hame de sille_ look like _Hame de fille_, and a French geographer jumped at the conclusion that the word was _fille_, and that he had found the long lost island. He called it accordingly _I.
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