Throughout the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company maintained their monopoly of the cloves and nutmegs of the Moluccas, and great consternation was caused when the English tried to obtain these spices direct by sending ships to the Papuan islands. The Moluccas were protected by forts and their harbours safe, therefore in order to prevent the English from obtaining the spices outside the sphere of direct Dutch influence, all trees producing spices were destroyed.
The most important of the English voyages was that of Capt. William Dampier in the _Roebuck_. He sailed by Brazil and the Cape of Good Hope to Western Australia and thence to Timor. On January 1, 1700, he sighted the mountains of New Guinea; he landed on several islands near the coast, captured Crowned pigeons and many kinds of fishes, which he described in his book. Rounding the N.W. corner of the island he sailed along the North coast and discovered that New Britain was separated from New Guinea by a strait to which he gave his own name.
After the voyages of Philip Carteret, who proved that New Ireland is an island, and of de Bougainville in 1766 the most important is that of Captain James Cook in the _Endeavour_. He sailed from Plymouth in August 1768, rounded Cape Horn, reached and charted New Zealand, reached the East coast of New Holland (Australia) in April 1770, and sailed along the coast to Cape York, which he named. Looking Westward he decided that there was a channel leading from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, and after sailing through it he came to the coast of New Guinea to the N.W. of Prince Frederick Henry Island, where he was attacked by natives and thence he sailed to Batavia. Thus Captain Cook by sailing through his Endeavour Strait, now called Torres Strait after the original navigator, repeated the discovery of Torres after an interval of more than a century and a half, and the general position and outline of New Guinea became known to the world.
After the voyage of Cook many important additions were made to the charts of New Guinea and its neighbouring islands, notably by the voyages of La Perouse (1788), John MacCluer (1790-1793), D’Entrecasteaux (1792-1793), Duperrey (1823-1824), D. H. Kolff (1826), and Dumont d’Urville (1827-1828).