In the Portuguese sphere some of the more salient features of the coast lines bear the following names:—­

Terre ennegade. Ennegade has no possible meaning in French.

It is a corruption of Terra Anegada which means submerged land, or land over which the high tides flow considerably.  It refers to a long stretch of shore at the entrance to King Sounds, where the tides cover immense tracts of country, and which has, in consequence, been called Shoal Bay.

Baye Bresille; Brazil Bay, corresponds with King Sound.

The islands on the western coast, known as Houtman’s Abrolhos,* and those near Sharks’ Bay, are all charted with the reefs that surround them, although they bear no names on this map.

[* Abrolhos is a Portuguese word applied to reefs; literally, it means “open your eyes.”]

Lower down, there is a strange name, that has led to some stranger mistakes; it is LAMA, or LAME DE SYLLA, written HAME DE SILLE on another of these maps.  It is a curious jumble that I have not been able to decipher; it occurs close to the mouth of the Swan River of modern charts.

Later French and Dutch map-makers took it for the name of an island in that locality.

Now, in those days, navigators and geographers were constantly in search of certain more or less fictitious islands, among which, the “Island of Men” and the “Island of Women,” had been sought for in vain.

Could this be one of the lost islands?  The old-fashioned letter s, resembling an f, made Hame de sille look like Hame de fille, and a French geographer jumped at the conclusion that the word was fille, and that he had found the long lost island.

He called it accordingly I. des Filles,* Island of Girls.  The Dutch translated the name on their charts where a Meisje Eylandt may be seen; but, instead of the girls that they expected to see the island peopled with, they found it overrun by beautiful creatures, it is true, but, alas! of the small wallaby kind, peculiar to the outlying islands of Western Australia.

[* See Vangondy’s map of Australia (1756).]

It goes without saying that they did not know of the term wallaby, and taking those pretty creatures for overgrown rats, they called the island Rat Island or Rat’s Nest, and Rottnest is the Dutch form thereof, preserved to this day.

Let us now turn to the eastern shores of Australia, for we need not trouble about the southern shores as they are connected with the Antarctic continent.

We notice first, Simbana, one of the original names of the island of Sumbawa.