Let those who read this narrative doubt not its veracity. There be much
in Nature that we wot not of, and many strange countries to explore.
The monsters who roamed the earth in ancient times, as their fossil
bones attest, are still to be seen in those regions hitherto unvisited
by white men, and in the fathomless depths of uncharted seas leviathans
find a home.

Peter Ecoores Van Bu was born upon the island of Urk, in the Zuider
Zee, in the year 1596, and was brought up a fisher-lad until the coming
to the island of a priest, to whom my parents, ambitious for my
advancement, entrusted my education in the arts of reading and writing,
accomplishments in little vogue at this time. Hence it comes that I am
able to set down here a record of perils and adventures by sea and land
which may prove entertaining reading to those who have never travelled
beyond the limits of their own countries.

My parents, who had stinted themselves to provide my education, placed
me when I was eighteen years old in a merchant's office at Amsterdam,
where I became acquainted with Dirk Hartog, a famous navigator, who, a
year later, invited me to become his secretary and engraver of charts
on board the ship "Endraght", being then commissioned for a voyage of
discovery to the South, and having obtained a reluctant consent from my
master, De Decker, the merchant, to Hartog's proposal I gladly
abandoned the office desk for the sea.

The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 had given rise
to a theory that a vast continent known as Terra Australis existed in
the South, and Portuguese and Spanish ships had made report from time
to time of this southern land. It was to confirm or dispel this belief