Port Famine to Falkland's Islands
Index
Search
Contact us
1764, as appears by Pernetty’s account of their voyage. It has been suggested that the latitude of Pepys’s Island might, in the M.S. from which the account of Cowley’s voyage was printed, be expressed in figures, which, if ill made, might equally resemble forty-seven, and fifty-one; and therefore as there is no island in these seas in latitude forty-seven, and as Falkland’s Islands lie nearly in fifty-one, that fifty-one might reasonably be concluded to be the number for which the figures were intended to stand: recourse therefore was had to the British Musaeum, and a manuscript journal of Cowley’s was there found. In this manuscript no mention is made of an island not before known, to which he gave the name of Pepys’s Island, but land is mentioned in latitude forty-seven degrees, forty minutes, expressed in words at length, which exactly answers to the description of what is called Pepys’s Island in the printed account, and which here, he says, he supposed to be the islands of Sebald de Wert. This part of the manuscript is in the following words: "January 1683, This month wee were in the latitude of forty-seaven degrees and forty minnetts, where wee espyed an island bearing west from us, wee having the wind at east north east, wee bore away for it, it being too late for us to goe on shoare, wee lay by all night. The island seemed very pleasant to the eye, with many woods, I may as well say the whole land was woods. There being a rock lying above water to the eastward of it, where an innumerable company of fowles, being of the bignesse of a small goose, which fowles would strike at our men as they were aloft: some of them wee killed and eat: they seemed to us very good, only tasted somewhat fishly. I sailed along that island to the southward, and about the south west side of the island there seemed to me to be a good place for shipps to ride; I
 |
Voyaging Accounts |  |
© Derived from Volume I of the London 1773 Edition: National Library of Australia call no. FERG 7243, page 52, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
To cite this page use: https://paulturnbull.org/project/southseas/journals/hv01/088.html