Discovery of Australia by de Quiros in the Year 1606

Pedro Fernandez de Quiros was the least of the brilliant galaxy of Portuguese and Spanish explorers who throughout two centuries, by their maritime skill and enterprise, won immortal fame for their respective countries, and extended far, to the east and to the west the limits of Christian civilisation. He was a Portuguese by birth, but at the period of which we treat Portugal and Spain were united under the Spanish sceptre, and hence it was under the Spanish flag and by the aid of the Spanish court that he achieved his discoveries.
The most famous or his expeditions was that which led to the discovery of the Great Austral Land in 1606. The original sources, however, which would serve to illustrate this expedition were little better than a sealed book to English readers, till Mr. W. A. Duncan, Fellow of St. John's College, published in Sydney, in 1874, the Spanish text and translation of an interesting Memorial, addressed by De Quiros to the Spanish monarch. A few years later Don Zaragosa, a distinguished Spanish ecclesiastic, published at Madrid in three volumes the same Memorial, together with several other invaluable con-temporary documents illustrative of De Quiros's voyage. The learned president of the Hakluyt Society, Sir Clements Markham, has published in two volumes in London, for the Hakluyt Society, in 1904, a translation of these important records, with a valuable introduction and several interesting notes.
Till within the last few years the opinion very generally prevailed that the Island of Santo, the chief island of the New Hebrides, was the Great Land discovered by De Quiros. In the History of the Catholic Church in Australia I ventured to dissent from that opinion, and since then several papers bearing on the subject have appeared in the public press and in the Proceedings of the Geographical Society of Melbourne.