Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TANNA AND ITS MISSIONARIES. IN 1605 Quiros, a Spanish navigator, sailed from the port of Callao, South America, to search for the great southern continent of Australia. Passing through several groups of islands, on the 30th April, 1606, he sighted land to the south-east, which seemed so large that he felt certain that his long-desired goal had been attained. In pious gratitude he named it " The Great Southern land of the Holy Ghost." Australia, however, was yet beyond his horizon, and all that was loaded with his sonorous appellation was but the largest and most northern island of the New Hebrides group. Into a wide bay opening .to the north he and his consort, Torres, sailed. Anchoring near the mouth of a river, which he called the Jordan, he drew up a plan and appointed municipal officers for a city to be built there, and named it New Jerusalem. As one would expect from his manner of dealing with them, he was not very kindly received by the natives. In a short time, skirmishes, fruitless foraging expeditions inland, and the violent illness of many of his people from eating poisonous fish, wore off the glamour of the new discovery, and compelled them to leave. Nothingmore was heard of the islands for about a century and a half, when in 1768 Bouganville circumnavigated Santo and discovered several of the northern islands, which he named the Grand Cyclades. In 1774 Captain Cook entered the group from the north and cast anchor in a harbour on Malekula, which he named after the Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty. He sailed as far south as Tanna, which he describes at length in his interesting journals, and north again to the scene of Quires' discovery. He surveyed the islands so thoroughly, that he considered himself entitled to re-name the whole group as the New H...