In the meantime the Portuguese had at last won the sea route to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope, through the agency of Vasco da Gama (1464–1524), a native of Sines. He started from Lisbon in July, 1497. He was accompanied by a pilot who had been with Diaz, and he had a map on which the Portuguese discoveries on the African coast were shown so far as they extended. On November 22 he sailed round the Cape of Good Hope; by Christmas he reached a point beyond the furthest limit of Diaz, and named it Natal. Continuing northerly along the coast he met with a number of Arab settlements and a hostile reception from some of them; but from one he obtained a pilot across the Indian Ocean, and he reached Calicut on May 20, 1498, after a voyage of ten months and ten days. This is not the place to discuss the commercial and political difficulties which supervened upon the endeavours of the Portuguese to draw to themselves a share of the rich trade of the Indies; but Gama made a second successful voyage with this object in 1502–03, and subsequently became viceroy in India in the year of his death.

In 1511 the important town of Malacca was taken by the Portuguese, and became the starting-point for many journeys in all directions—first to Sumatra, Java,69 and the Philippines; in 1512 to the Moluccas, and in 1516 to Canton, and by 1520 a Portuguese embassy was established at Peking. After that exploration proceeded apace in the Malay islands and on the coast of China; and Borneo, New Guinea, and Celebes rapidly became important trade centres, though Japan was not reached till the beginning of the following century, when in 1542 a Portuguese sailor, Antonio de Mota, was driven to its shores. Some years later a mission was sent there by St. Francis Xavier, which brought back the first trustworthy accounts of the new country.

The Portuguese and Spanish ascendancy in the Malay Archipelago lasted until 1595; in the following year a Dutch fleet, under Cornelis Houtman, came to blows with the Portuguese off the coast of Java; in 1602 the Dutch East India Company was incorporated, and during the following decade Dutch influence was strongly established in the Archipelago. With this epoch in far eastern history is connected the discovery of Australia. At what early period the native peoples of the east—Malays, and even Chinese—had acquired knowledge of Australia, and what was the extent of that knowledge, it is impossible to determine; but Marco Polo had happened upon rumours of a southern continent. In the following chapter we shall discuss the early European conception of that continent, which gave rise to a wider problem in which the discovery of Australia is merely incidental.

A landing on Australian soil has been claimed for the French navigator Paulmyer, Sieur de Gonneville, in 1503, and Guillaume le Testu of Provence is asserted to have sighted the coast in 1531. There were certainly, about 1527–39, French pirates in the Malay Archipelago. There are similar early Portuguese claims to the first70 view of the island-continent. When Torres had passed through the strait which bears his name, south of New Guinea, in 1606, and when, in the same year, the crew of a Dutch vessel, the Duyfken, effected a landing in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the first definite steps were taken towards the exploration of Australia. By 1665 the Dutch had worked out and charted a general sketch of most of the western seaboard; in 1696 William de Vlamingh re-charted a large part of it with fair accuracy. In the meantime, in 1642, Abel Janszoon Tasman had sailed from Batavia to Mauritius, thence south-eastward, till he struck the southern and eastern coasts of Tasmania, whence he passed on to obtain the first sight of New Zealand. The exploration of the Australian coasts from the direction of the Pacific belongs to following chapters.

During this period England began to interest herself in the East Indian trade, and the great efforts which were made to reach Eastern Asia by way of the arctic region will be discussed in the following chapter. In 1591 James Lancaster made an adventurous voyage to the Malay Peninsula; the formation of the East India Company followed. In 1600 Lancaster, in its employ, started again for the East, and laid the foundations of English commerce in the Spice Islands, visit............