Mr. A. Tasman Discovers Australia

(His photo appears in “Pacific Report”, this issue.) It was a happy thought of Trans Australia Airlines when they were taking delivery of their first Fokker Friendship turbo-prop aircraft from a Dutch factor? in April, to offer a free trip to Australia to a descendant of the great navigator who discovered Tasmania in 1642. 8 And it is probably appropriate enough that the current Abel Tasman 28 is a nuclear physicist—nuclear physicists being just as important in this age as navigators were in the days of Abel Tasman I.

Mr. Tasman is not a direct descendant of the first Abel (born 1603 died about 1660 leaving only one daughter), but of Captain Cornelius Tasman, a cousin or brother, of Abel. ♦u * D u rin f hiS C ° Uple *° £ we f ks * n Australia he has been seeing a lot of places that his famous ancestor missed—such as the 4,000 or 5,000 miles of the south and east coasts—and returned to Holland at end of April by KLM The first Abel discovered a number of Pacific Islands—such as Tonga which he found, too, like Cook to be Friendly Islands (in contrast to New Zealand where he considered the Maoris were a lot of murderers); and Fiji But his masters in Batavia were not too pleased with the result of his first voyage, and sent him off on a second—one purpose of which was to see whether New Guinea was joined to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania)!

However, when somewhere north of NG, the weather (as they sav in the Territory) “got up no good”, so Tasman returned to Batavia round the north if Netherlands New Guinea and it was many moons before anyone else ventured mt to find that NG was not joined to Tasmania, or to anywhere else ventUred