This is the first English edition of a novel that is little known outside Dutch literary circles, but is an interesting example of popular fiction and radical thought about science and society in its day - not only in the Netherlands, but throughout Western Europe. It formed a bridge between the rationalist seventeenth century and the Age of Enlightenment, and was also a lively story in itself. It was rather less than imaginary, moreover, being linked to seventeenth to seventeenth-century Dutch activities in Australia and the first real knowledge about the legendary southern continent. Among...

How did Europeans view the unknown region at their antipodes in early times, before the explorations of Captain Cook and others made it well known? Throughout the ages it has evoked fantastic images which affected the arts and sciences, and the evolution of the novel in the century prior to the major discoveries was influenced in the same way. The eighteenth century was also a critical phase in European social history, a time when many modern patterns of economic life and international relations were formed. Distant explorations and discoveries bore implications for that process, which tended...