After These Follow Schovten And Le Maire, Who Were Fitted Out To
Make Discoveries; And Executed Their Commission With Equal Capacity
And Success.
If Le Maire had lived to return to Holland, and to
have digested into proper order his own accounts, we should, without
question, have received a much fuller and clearer, as well as a much
more correct and satisfactory detail of them than we have at
present:
Though the voyage, as it is now published, is in all
respects the best, and the most curious of all the circumnavigators.
This was, very probably, owing to the ill-usage he met with from the
Dutch East India Company; which put Captain Schovten, and the
relations of Le Maire, upon giving the world the best information
they could of what had been in that voyage performed. Yet the fate
of Le Maire had a much greater effect in discouraging, than the fame
of his discoveries had in exciting, a spirit of emulation; so that
we may safely say, the severity of the East India Company in Holland
extinguished that generous desire of exploring unknown lands, which
might otherwise have raised the reputation and extended the commerce
of the republic much beyond what they have hitherto reached. This
is so true that for upwards of one hundred years we hear of no Dutch
voyage in pursuit of Le Maire's discoveries; and we see, when
Commodore Roggewein, in our own time, revived that noble design, it
was again cramped by the same power that stifled it before; and
though the States did justice to the West India Company, and to the
parties injured, yet the hardships they suffered, and the plain
proof they gave of the difficulties that must be met with in the
prosecution of such a design, seem to have done the business of the
East India Company, and damped the spirit of discovery, for perhaps
another century, in Holland.
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