for a portion of the mainland the island now known as Mornington Island;
the same mistake he made as regards Maria Eiland in Limmensbocht. For the
rest however, the coast-line also of the south-coast was delineated with
what we must call great accuracy if we keep in mind the defective
instruments with which the navigators of the middle of the seventeenth
century had to make shift. The west-coast of the gulf, too, was skirted
and surveyed in this voyage; Tasman passed between this coast and the
Groote (Van der Lijn's) eiland.

[* See my Life of Tasman, pp. 115-118, and especially chart No. I of the
Tasman Folio. Much information may also be gathered from chart No. 14 of
the present work, since it registers almost the whole amount of Dutch
knowledge about Australia circa 1700.]

The entire coastline enclosing the Gulf of Carpentaria had accordingly
now been skirted and mapped out. The value of Tasman's discoveries in
this part of Australia directly appears, if we lay side by side, for
instance, the chart of the upper-steersman De Leeuw [*], who formed part
of the voyage of 1623, or Keppler's map of 1630 [**]; and Tasman's chart
of 1644 [***], or Isaac De Graaff's made about 1700 [****], which last
gives a pretty satisfactory survey of the results of Tasman's voyage of
1644 so far as the Gulf of Carpentaria is concerned. Although Tasman's
expedition of 1644 did not yield complete information respecting the
coast-line of the Gulf, and although it is easy to point out
inaccuracies, the additions made by this voyage to our knowledge on this
point are so considerable that we may say with complete justice that
while the discovery of the east-coast of the Gulf is due to Jansz. (1606)
and Carstensz. (1623), it was Tasman who made known the south-coast and
the greater part of the west-coast.