In 1769 some discoveries of importance were made in the South Seas by a French mercantile adventurer. Two ships were fitted out in Bengal by MM. Law and Chevalier, for a trading voyage to Peru, and were placed under the command of M. de Surville. While he was preparing to embark, news arrived in India that the English had discovered in the South Sea, 700 leagues from Peru, and in lat. 27° S., an island exceedingly rich, and inhabited by Jews. This story gained credit, being congenial to the avaricious cravings of mankind; and even those who suspected fiction in the mention of Jews were still willing to believe that the newly discovered country was eminently rich. Surville, touching at the Bashee Islands, carried off three of the natives to supply the deficiencies of his crew; thus furnishing a conspicuous example of that overbearing violence which has almost universally forced weak and uncivilised nations to regard Europeans as their natural enemies. In running to the south-east from New Guinea he discovered land, to which he gave the name of the Land of the Arsacides, and which was, in fact, a part of that long chain of islands that had already been seen by Bougainville, who gave the name of Louisiade to the portion which he had examined. Surville, in his intercourse with the natives, found them to be of a fierce, intractable, and treacherous disposition, and chose to designate them Arsacides, a name which he supposed to be equivalent to the word assassins.