Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia: / A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.

The volume assembles translated documents, manuscript-map extracts, official reports, voyage journals, and shipwreck narratives that record early European contact with the southern continent prior to Cook. An editor’s introduction contextualizes cartographic evidence and documentary gaps, and the selections present navigators’ observations of coasts, search and rescue expeditions, and successive coastal surveys, accompanied by contemporary maps and binding instructions. The material exposes uncertainties in attribution, instances of concealment or lost records, and evolving geographic knowledge as crews charted and revisited the island and adjacent lands. Readers are offered primary-source testimony illustrating how seafaring reports, maps, and administrative dispatches combined to shape early understandings of the region’s coastline.