The sixteenth century had belonged to Portuguese and Spanish explorers, the seventeenth to the Dutch. In the eighteenth the English and the French took up the story. Between the Age of Discovery and the Age of Curiosity there is a difference in climate.

The Age of Discovery was the active aftermath of the Renaissance, just as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were its spiritual aftermath. It was a time of contradictions, of idealism, faith and fantasy, of avarice and bloodshed. Its feet were amongst the myths, its head among the stars, and its hands were picking up gold and silver.

The Age of Curiosity is modern, the curiosity is scientific. It was often heroic, for the means of exploration and voyaging called for heroism; it was also practical and prosaic, but rarely avaricious. The Dutch were really a buffer between the two well-defined ages. They wanted El Dorado, they were credulous about the Great South Land, Messer Marco Polo and all that, but they went about the business of exploration by sea in a dogged and common-sense fashion. Of Englishmen Drake, the circumnavigator, belonged to the Age of Discovery and Dampier (b. 1652) was a precursor of the Age of Curiosity, also called the Age of Reason.

Dampier was a buccaneer by trade--quite an honourable one, given the right time and place--a seaman, and by cast of mind an observer. In 1686 he was with Captain Swan in Cygnet, ranging the Pacific. In the course of the voyage Swan evolved a plan of entering the spice trade in opposition to the Dutch (the enemy) and founding a factory in the Philippines. Dampier liked the idea, thinking that pirates should make good merchants, and adding his own rider that on the way to the Philippines they should explore "Nova Hollandia", as the quondam Great South Land, or Terra Australis Incognita, was now commonly called. Instead they went to Timor and then south to see what Australia "would afford us". They were on the nor-west coast at Cygnet Bay early in 1688. The group of islands off the coast were later named Buccaneer Archipelago in honour of the landfall.

Dampier grew tired of Cygnet and at the Nicobar Islands he deserted. After many adventures he returned to England in 1691. There in 1697 his journal was printed and attracted the attention of the President of the Royal Society (founded 1660). The Admiralty, with qualified generosity, gave him a very old ship of 290 tons burthen, the Roebuck, and sent him out to voyage, to discover, perhaps even to establish trade. He intended to investigate the eastern coast of Australia, but the weather was hostile, the season wrong. He sailed instead from the Cape of Good Hope to the Australian coast as the Dutch had done, and he sighted it very much where Dirk Hartog had. He coasted northwards and saw much what the Dutch had seen, but he did note that the bush flowers were beautiful, strange, and sweet-smelling.

He had Tasman's charts, but doubted if what he saw was a solid coastline. It might be no more than a labyrinth of islands with a way through. He could not find out because he ran out of water and provisions and had to hurry to Timor. Refreshed there, he was able to visit New Guinea, which he saw first on New Year's Day 1700. He discovered New Britain and sailed through Dampier Strait. He had some idea of circumnavigating the continent, but his ship was not fit for it, nor was his crew willing. The poor old tub finally fell to pieces and Dampier made his way home to face a court martial. He did not add very much to the world's knowledge of Australia, but his journals brought the country alive for the first time. Perhaps he was the first man to look at it for its own sake and not with an eye to possible advantage. His journals were read, but they did not, to the men of his time, seem to have any practical application.

The Dutch were not pleased by English interest. What if the land they had discovered had possibilities at present not apparent? The English were a colonizing nation and might step in and take what really belonged to Holland. There were those, Jean Pierre Purry, for example, who used to say that the Dutch East India Company should set up trading posts on the most likely part of the Australian coast, the southern shore discovered by the ship Gulden Zeepaard and called by her master Nuytsland. It was not only possession of the land that had to be considered. An enemy, French or English, could establish himself there and prey on Dutch shipping. Ships heavy-laden with spices from the Indies would be prizes worth taking. The canny Dutch East India Company thought about it, but decided not to take action. After all, New Holland might not be Terra Australis Incognita. Tasman had discovered New Zealand, Staten Landt as he named it, and it might be a northern promontory of the Great South Land.

One more great Dutch voyager, Roggeveen, set out with three ships and the backing of the Dutch West India Company to look for another, better Australia. He rounded Cape Horn far to the south and crossed the Pacific west and north. He found a vast sea studded with islands but no continent. He did not come anywhere near New Zealand or the east coast of Australia. He added very little to the voyage of Le Maire in 1616 and the knowledge he gathered was negative. The Pacific was vast, there was still hope that it hid a rich continent.

In particular England, coming late, was anxious for a new sphere of influence and trade. Of all the ocean-seas there was only the Pacific left. It had been crossed, but it was not known. In 1744 John Campbell was urging colonization in the Pacific. He was what we should probably call today a publicist. He published a collection of voyages and used them as propaganda in an effort to arouse merchants to take up the opportunities still open to them. He and the Dutchman Purry had similar ideas. Campbell went so far as to suggest that the Dutch decried their discoveries in order to discourage anyone else from visiting them.

The French were also becoming interested. They had their own legend of a rich, idyllic South Land accidentally discovered by de Gonneville in 1505 and then mislaid. They, too, had an East India Company and in 1738 it sent out two ships under Captain Bouvet to find the elusive land and harness it to trade. Bouvet thought that he discovered the misty outlines of a continent south of the Cape of Good Hope, but the season was so foggy that he could not be sure of anything.

Theorists like Maupertuis and Charles de Brosses pounced on the idea, the latter wrote his History of Navigations ( 1756) in which he listed fortyseven voyages in the South Seas and drew his own morals from them. France, from motives of philanthropy, national pride and business acumen should take advantage of the opportunities awaiting her in the South Seas. The more interested France became the more likely was her hereditary enemy, England, to turn her attention to the South Seas.

The battle for the Pacific was waged on paper. John Callander in his Terra Australis Cognita ( 1766), rehashed de Brosses's facts and arguments, directing them, of course, to the English reader. Alexander Dalrymple, the hydrographer and servant of the East India Company, took a hand and in 1767 published Discoveries in the South Pacific to 1764.

His researches had unearthed the secret voyage of Torres through the strait north of Australia. He believed fervently in a South Land and brought a great many arguments to bear on the problem.

The time for action was slowly ripening. In 1764-5 Commodore the Honourable John Byron, with two well-found ships, crossed the Pacific from Cape Horn to Batavia. It was the old story of a north-westerly passage, sea and islands.

In 1766 Captain Samuel Wallis, in Byron's flagship Dolphin, followed with variations much the same course. Philip Carteret was the second in command on this expedition and in his ship, Swallow, a slow and untrustworthy vessel, was soon separated from Wallis and made his own laborious way across the Pacific somewhat to the south of the routes taken by Byron and Wallis. It was a terrible voyage in a leaking ship, the crew racked by scurvy and weakened by hunger. Native spears accounted for some of them and it was only the doggedness of the commander that brought the ship at long last to Batavia, having discovered, amongst other islands, New Ireland and the strait between it and New Britain.

Also in 1766 the French had two ships in the Pacific under de Bougainville. He had endeavoured at his own expense to found a strategic colony in the Falkland Islands to guard the entry to the Pacific. England and Spain both claimed these islands. Bougainville was ordered by his Government to hand them over to Spain and himself to make a voyage of exploration across the Pacific. Owing to delays it was not until 26th January 1768 that the Pacific voyage actually began. Bougainville was able to hold a more westerly course than any of his predecessors and actually reached the outer fringe of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland. Every sign told him that he was close to a great land mass, perhaps the desired continent. The chivalrous Frenchman, whose aim was scientific knowledge rather than commercial gain, might well have had the honour of discovering the east coast of Australia, but sickness was rife in his crew, provisions were running short, and, worst of all, the coastline was so dangerous, with its hidden coral reefs that could tear open the hull of a ship, that he too was forced to turn north, and, missing Torres Strait, zigzag through the Louisiade and Solomon groups, and make his way round the north of New Guinea, through the Moluccas to Batavia.

The wonder-book of the Pacific was open. Some of its pages were bloodstained, others scarred by incredible hardship. Stories were brought back to the old world as colourful and stimulating as any Marco Polo had had to tell. And these were true stories. The age of credulity had gone . . . well, it had receded as far as it ever does. King's ships were being employed and men skilled in observation and cultivated of mind. Dampier had been a brilliant amateur, now professionals were exploring and charting the last great ocean. Not only was the popular imagination stirred, but the scientists of the world were enlisted.

The Age of Curiosity reached its consummation in the first voyage of Captain James Cook, 1768-71. He was a Yorkshireman who had joined the Navy as an able seaman in 1755 and by sheer ability had worked his way up to the command of a King's ship. Not only was he a fine sailor, he was also a skilled cartographer and a competent astronomer. He was known to the Admiralty, and when for the honour of the nation, the Crown decided to finance an expedition to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus there on 3rd June 1769, it was quite natural that he should be chosen to command H.M.S. Endeavour, which was to carry the scientific expedition and then to proceed on a voyage of discovery.

Cook followed the old route round Cape Horn, sailed to Tahiti, and thence, unlike any other sea-voyager of the Pacific, turned south, then west, till he fell in with the coast of New Zealand. He circumnavigated the two islands, proving once and for all that they were not the peninsula of a continent but free in the ocean. From New Zealand he crossed the stormy Tasman Sea and found, as he expected, the coast of New Holland, not as far south as he had intended, but at Cape Hicks, later called Cape Everard. He refitted in Botany Bay, and Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist of the expedition, gathered strange plants. Endeavour sailed north, falling foul of the treacherous coral reef inside the Barrier Reef. Cook careened his ship near what is now the site of Cooktown, repaired her, sailed on through Torres Strait, and home round the Cape of Good Hope, having circumnavigated the world.

Except for part of the southern coast, the outline of Australia was now known. The Great South Land had shrunk to the size of the largest island in the world. Its wealth lay buried in the future. But curiosity was satisfied. Only one minor problem was left--was Van Diemen's Land part of New Holland or a separate island? Cook had meant to settle that question, too, but the winds and the currents had carried him northward of his objective.

It was at 6 a.m. on 20th April 1770 that the east coast of Australia was first seen.

In two later voyages Cook combed the seas south and east of New Holland and laid the ghost of Terra Australis Incognita.