Australia or Austrialia? A correction.

Cameron-Ash, Margaret, French Mischief: A Foxy Map of New Holland, The Globe, 2011, 68: 1-14.

The paper published last issue contains misspellings of the place-name that Pedro Fernandez de Quiros gave to his Pacific discovery, which did not appear in the author's manuscript.

When Quiros was at Vanuatu in May 1606, he named it Australia del Espiritu Santo. 'Australia' was the spelling recorded in his journal (1) and adopted by the author throughout her paper.

After naming and claiming his imagined 'southern continent', Quiros returned to Mexico where he hoped to win financial backing to further explore and colonize it. When this proved more difficult than expected, he went to Madrid to plead with King Philip III. Over the next seven years, Quiros wrote many memorials to the Spanish king in which, it seems, he played with the word 'Australia' (which comes from the Latin Australis meaning 'southern').

In some extant copies of the memorials, an extra 'i' has been added to the place-name (as well as to other Austral derivatives), creating the word Austrialia. If this extra 'i' was deliberate, then Quiros' intention may have been to flatter the king for his links to the Habsburg family of Austria, which name means 'Eastern Realm' (from the German Osterreich).

Whatever the explanation for the extra 'i', the new name (if such was intended) of Austrialia had little impact. The navigators who came after Quiros retained his original place-name of Australia del Espiritu Santo.

When the French navigator, Louis Bougainville, re-discovered Quiros' land after 162 years, he wrote 'la terre australe du Saint-Esprit' in his journal on 6 June 1768 (2). He also found that it was not a continent, but an archipelago--which he named des Grandes Cyclades.

Two years later, on 14 August 1770, when the Endeavour was briefly outside the Great Barrier Reef, Captain Cook wrote of 'A[u]stralia del Espiritu Santo' situated away to the east (3). Again, on his second voyage, Cook sighted 'the Australia Del Espiritu Santo of Quiros' on 17 July 1774, then renamed the archipelago 'the New Hebrides' (4), which name endured for two centuries.

The author too used Quiros' original spelling. However, during the editorial process, the extra 'i' was added. The editor regrets the changes and apologises for any inconvenience caused.

NOTES

(1) Quiros, P.F., The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, 1595 to 1606, tr. & ed. by Sir Clements Markham, London, 1904, vol. I, p.251. Interestingly, Markham does not comment on the change in spelling between Quiros' journal and memorials, and himself uses 'Austrialia' exclusively in his introduction and index. See also Jack-Hinton, C., The Search for the Islands of Solomon 1567-1838, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969, p. 154, n.1.

(2) Bougainville, L-A: Bougainville et ses compagnons autour du monde, 1766-1769, ed. by E. Taillemite, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1977, v.I, p.352.

(3) Cook, J: The Journals of Captain James Cook on his voyages of discovery, ed. by J.C. Beaglehole, Cambridge, 1955, v.I, p.376.

(4) ibid. v.II, pp.457 and 521.