metal plate to record his visit; and Dirk Hartog Island is the name it
bears to this day. The plate remained till 1697, when another Dutchman,
Vlaming, substituted a new one for it; and Vlaming's plate, in turn,
remained till 1817, when the French navigator, Freycinet, took it and
sent it to Paris.

After Hartog reported his discovery, the Dutch directors ordered their
ships' captains to run east from the Cape till they sighted the land.
This would enable them to verify their whereabouts; for in those days the
means of reckoning positions at sea were so imperfect that navigators
groped about the oceans of the globe almost as if they were sailing in
darkness. But here was a means of verifying a ship's position after her
long run across from the Cape, and if she found Dirk Hartog Island, she
could safely thence make her way north to Java.

But ships did not always sight the Australian coast at the same point.
Hence it came about that in 1619 J. de Edel "accidentally fell in with"
the coast at the back of the Abrolhos. Pieter Nuyts, in 1627,
"accidentally discovered" a long reach of the south coast. Similarly, in
1628, the Vianen was "accidentally," as the narrative says, driven on to
the north-west coast, and her commander, De Wit, gave his name to about
200 miles of it. In 1629 the Dutch ship Batavia was separated in a storm
from a merchant fleet of eleven sail, and ran upon the Abrolhos Reef. The
captain, Francis Pelsart, who was lying sick in his cabin at the time of
the misadventure, "called up the master and charged him with the loss of
the ship, who excused himself by saying he had taken all the care he
could; and that having discerned the froth at a distance he asked the
steersman what he thought of it, who told him that the sea appeared white
by its reflecting the rays of the moon. The captain then asked him what
was to be done, and in what part of the world he thought they were. The