The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  There was plenty of evidence towards which sixteenth-century geographers could confidently point: biblical texts, of which more in a moment; classical texts, culminating in Ptolemy’s world map; and also Peruvian legends of an Inca ruler named Tupac Inca Yupanqui who set out across the sea and discovered lands of great wealth; he supposedly brought back gold and slaves, as well as providing encouragement, centuries later, to the bizarre theories of Thor Heyerdahl about trans-Pacific navigation. Although the first map to name America, by Waldseemüller, showed no southern continent, certainty that it existed grew in the next thirty years. Mercator’s first world map, from 1538, included a massive southern continent, of which he could only say: ‘that land lies here is certain but its size and extent are unknown’; however, its northern tip reached as far as the Magellan Strait, and when he issued a more famous world map in 1569 he had not changed his mind. When Abraham Ortelius published his own world map in 1570 he could not improve on this. For him this was the ‘Southern Land not yet known’, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita.2

  The series of Spanish voyages across the Pacific that followed the Spanish capture of Mexico and Peru brought European ships deep into the Polynesian islands. In 1542, for instance, the commander Villalobos set out from Navidad, which lay along the Pacific coast of Mexico, a little to the north of Acapulco, searching for the islands visited by King Solomon – the distant land of Ophir mentioned in the book of Kings. The idea grew that the gold vessels of Solomon’s Temple had been made out of beaten gold from Ophir.3 Villalobos’s journey took his ships towards what therefore became known as the Solomon Islands, amid many hazards: a whale swam underneath the flagship, almost heaving the galleon out of the water before it swam on and the galleon rocked back to normal. In the event, the voyage ended up in the Philippines, and only the fringes of Polynesia had been penetrated. Back in Seville the notion that Ophir lay not somewhere in the Red Sea or western Indian Ocean but across the world in the southern Pacific had gained a certain amount of purchase; Columbus, in his Book of Prophecies, which was really a scrapbook of biblical, classical and patristic quotations, had been dreaming of finding Solomon’s islands by sailing west. The learned introduction to a Spanish translation of Marco Polo’s book of travels, widely circulating by 1530, placed Ophir somewhere in that vast space between Japan and the Moluccas that was still a matter of pure conjecture. A series of Spanish voyages set out from 1567 onwards, looking for a great southern land, or rather for a series of islands that were believed, rather like the West Indies, to lie close to the unknown continent and to offer great riches. The spirit of scientific enquiry was clearly subordinate to the greedy search for gold and spices, though there may have been some hope of bringing the Catholic faith to heathen peoples. The whole enterprise was strikingly reminiscent of that of Columbus over seventy years earlier. As in the Americas, the assumption was that Spain would lay claim to this land, whether it was populated or not, and establish a colony there.

  The commander of the first expedition, Álvaro de Mendaña, took his two ships on a conservative route out from Callao, in Peru, and then across a wide space of water until he reached what are now Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands. Mendaña had to face the hostility of the islanders, and just as bad as that was the hostility of his colleague Sarmiento, a military man who had been pressing for the expedition to be launched, and resented being passed over as commander; Mendaña was the viceroy of Peru’s nephew, though the viceroy hoped to use this expedition to send away many of the young adventurers who were clogging the streets of Callao. In the event, the ships carried a motley crew of Spanish, mixed-blood and African men, for slaves who had already crossed the Atlantic were arriving as far away as Peru.4 Sarmiento went along on the voyage, although his exact position on board is, and probably was at the time, unclear. Not much was achieved, apart from planting in Mendaña’s mind an obsession with the southern continent and with the supposed riches of the islands he had visited. Mendaña’s detailed report on his voyage was not entirely encouraging: the explorers had not always found it easy to obtain food, although they had managed to trade small amounts of truck with the islanders. They had been taken aback by the evidence that the islanders consumed human flesh, not least when a friendly chieftain offered Mendaña a piece of meat that he identified as the shoulder and arm of a boy (the hand was still attached). The islanders were taken aback when Mendaña declined to eat the arm:

  I accepted the present, and, being greatly grieved that there should be this pernicious custom in that country, and that they should suppose that we ate it … I caused a grave to be dug at the water’s edge and had the quarter buried in his [the native leader’s] presence … Seeing that we set no value on the present, they all bent down over their canoes like men vexed or offended, and put off and withdrew with their heads bent down.5

  Although the practice of both cannibalism and human sacrifice could be used as an excuse to justify European hegemony, the revulsion of the Spaniards was genuine. As Montaigne was aware, they forgot that their own form of human sacrifice, practised in the fires of the Spanish Inquisition, was in some respects comparable.6 Other types of food were hard to come by, and by the time they had returned to America they had even had to consume the white cockatoo which was, perhaps, the only prize they had obtained during their arduous journey.7

  Unfortunately the new viceroy, Toledo, was much better disposed to Sarmiento and much worse disposed to Mendaña than his predecessor, so Mendaña trailed across the world to the court of King Philip II, to whom he had already written a Columbus-style letter exaggerating the attractions of the Solomon Islands. He did not secure what he wanted until 1574, and even then he had to learn patience on an unusual scale. He arrived in Panama a couple of years later, ready to launch his voyage into the unknown corners of the Pacific, armed with an exceptionally generous royal privilege. The king graciously permitted him to take office as governor and marquis of a new colony in the Pacific, with the right to pass these lands on to his heir, and to recruit a native labour force (for distribution among his followers). He could even mint his own gold and silver coins, presumably out of metals mined by his new subjects – as if the tragic lessons of what had happened in Hispaniola had never been learned. He would be provided with sheep, goats, pigs, cattle and horses, as well as Spanish settlers, male and female. He would have to found three cities, though, and he had to post a bond of 10,000 ducats to make sure that he did not renege on his promises.8

  Drake’s entry into the Pacific in 1578 put a spoke in the wheels of Mendaña’s ambitions. The Spaniards had assumed that the wide spaces of the Pacific east of the Spice Islands were Spanish waters, granted by the pope in his division of the world as long ago as 1494. Protestant English privateers had no place in this vast space. The priority became not the launch of a new expedition westwards across the ocean, but the despatch of an armed fleet southwards to prevent foreign ships from slipping into what was still an unguarded space. Sarmiento was sent to the Magellan Strait to bar the way to English shipping. Far from keeping the English out, he was taken prisoner and carried off to London, where he, Queen Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh discoursed together in Latin on the geography of the Pacific Ocean.9

  The infinitely patient Mendaña was not able to leave Peru until 1595, by which time fortune’s wheel had turned again in his favour – there was a new viceroy, who was excited by the plans, and the royal letter of approval made it hard to refuse Mendaña’s requests for help. Mendaña’s first expedition was a failure; this expedition was a disaster. One fundamental problem was that it was easy enough to determine latitude, with the help of the sun, but impossible to fix longitude until precise chronometers were invented in the eighteenth century.10 As a result, he was none too clear where he had arrived, and, after passing through the Marquesas Islands, he installed himself on the outer edges of the Solomon Islands, setting up the colony of Santa Cruz, where his followers managed to hang on for a while until they were defeated by disease and by the hosti
lity of the islanders. Disease carried off Mendaña. In the end the remnant of his settler population sailed off to the safety of the Philippines. The new commander, a capable Portuguese named Quirós, was, however, still impressed by the argument for the existence of a great southern continent. Where, he argued, could the inhabitants of the Pacific islands have come from, if not from some great landmass nearby? South America was too far away. The southern continent must be just over the horizon. This was a gross underestimate of the seagoing capacity of the Polynesian canoes that they kept seeing in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere. They arrogantly assumed that European methods of shipbuilding and navigation were infinitely superior to local ones, seeing local craft as impossibly small and light and failing to understand the extraordinary sophistication of Polynesian knowledge of the seas.11

  Undeterred by failure, Quirós set out again in 1605, accompanied by another explorer, the Spaniard Torres. With Franciscan friars on board, Quirós made plain his desire for evangelization. Once they had left Callao, he and his companions experienced first the emptiness of the broad tracts of open ocean, and then skimmed past uninhabited islands where they deemed it pointless to try to find food and water, let alone people who might direct them towards the great southern continent. Heavy clouds betokened the mainland they sought, or so they imagined at the end of January 1606. Finally they were forced to anchor close to islands thick with foliage, but still uninhabited, where at least they could find fruits and herbs that Chinese sailors on board knew were edible. Water remained the critical problem, though. While up to fifteen jars of water were used each day in normal conditions, Quirós had to cut the quota to three or four.12 Fortunately early February saw them reach inhabited islands where, at the start, they were welcomed by Polynesians consumed by curiosity at their white skins. As always happened, relations with the native people deteriorated, and the voyage through the islands of eastern Polynesia and Melanesia was not easy, a sequence of good and bad encounters with the inhabitants.

  By May 1606 they had reached what is now called Vanuatu, where they found what seemed to be a suitable port, a place that could surely function as the headquarters of a Spanish settlement in these remote islands. The name chosen for the harbour was Vera Cruz, but the name given to the island combined the sacred with the secular: Austrialia del Espiritú Santo. Maybe there was a play on words here, but this was not a direct reference to the Terra Australis, the southern continent. Austrialia commemorated not the Land of the South but the Land of the East, Austria or Österreich, the dynastic home of the Habsburg dynasty, still called las Austrias, ‘the Austrians’, in Spanish history books. Quirós went on to proclaim formally that this land was now in the possession of King Philip II of Spain, after which he appointed a government and founded his own bizarre ‘Order of the Knights of the Holy Ghost’. In the ceremonies that followed, two African cooks were publicly freed from slavery, an act of conspicuous generosity that did not please their owners, so they were made to return to their masters once the festivities had come to an end.13

  It is not surprising that Quirós was keen to celebrate what he was convinced was a great discovery. Otherwise, though, it was the usual story of lots of killing, an occasional baptism, the carrying off of a few young men destined to be baptized, and departure to find other islands, before returning home with the news that the outer edges of a new continent had supposedly been discovered. It was also the usual story of the officers and crew grumbling at Quirós’s behaviour, complaining about his decisions, and trying to get him into trouble on his return, though in the event he was able to travel to Madrid and urge the king to follow up his voyage with new ones, begging him in the name of Christ to do so, since his priority was no longer the discovery of great wealth but the salvation of the souls of the miserable and naked people he had encountered in Austrialia. Polite noises were made about plans for a new expedition, and he headed west to Panama, but died there in 1614 or 1615, with his dreams unfulfilled.14

  Quirós’s colleague Torres did not follow his commander back to Peru; rather, he decided that the search for a southern land had only just begun. He set out westwards and passed to the south of New Guinea through the strait that still bears his name. Australia lay close by, and he saw ‘very large islands, and more to the south’, but he pressed on; he wended his way through the strait and headed through the Moluccas towards Manila. He was satisfied that he had now brought New Guinea under King Philip’s sovereignty, although if he thought the headhunting inhabitants would accept that he was deluding himself.15 From the far-flung islands of Polynesia he and his men had now entered the battleground, for that is what it was, where the Portuguese and the Dutch, not to mention the Spaniards and the English, fought for access to the finest spices of the East, islands far richer in the goods the Europeans sought than those Quirós and Torres had so far discovered.

  The southern continent remained elusive. Mendaña and Quirós had cast themselves in the mould of Christopher Columbus. This was not the best model to follow. What was different was the insistence that there were more continents out there, that the wealth of the East Indies was only a pale reflection of the wealth to be obtained from a temperate Antarctic continent. A southern continent was finally reached at the start of the seventeenth century. However, it took nearly 170 years for its edges to be properly mapped out; and the earliest contact was the result not of deliberate searching, in the wake of Villalobos, Mendaña, Quirós and Torres, but of a series of accidents.

  II

  ‘Captain Cook,’ Graham Seal has pointed out, ‘did not discover Australia, despite what generations of school children were once taught and many still believe.’ He adds that ‘modern Australia was not discovered at all. It was revealed.’16 Obviously the term ‘modern Australia’ needs to be emphasized, since the claim that it was a Terra Nullius, a land with no inhabitants, or at least no inhabitants who could claim rights over its possession, was used in the nineteenth century to justify its acquisition by Europeans, and the denial of rights to the native population – Aborigines were only allowed to vote in all the Australian states and territories from 1965 onwards.17

  The Dutch were the first to reveal that they knew about the existence of what they came to call ‘New Holland’; but the Portuguese had almost certainly seen its shores before them. The debate about which Europeans first reached Australia has not aroused quite as much passion as the debate about which Europeans first reached the Americas, but it is mired in often credulous interpretations of roughly drawn maps. The sixteenth-century Dieppe maps did show an extensive southern continent below South America. One historian of cartography has observed that the southern continent was ‘a special favourite of the Dieppe school’, and that ‘fantasy outweighs reality’ in many of the charts.18 These maps were often beautifully decorated with images of local flora and fauna, or even of native villages in South America and Africa. The warning that the coastlines traced on these maps become less reliable the further they are from anywhere Europeans had adequately explored has not always been heeded. A lively attempt to prove that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Australia was published in 1977 and became standard teaching in Australian schools. The argument was straightforward: early maps, ultimately of Portuguese pedigree, show the coast of Australia. What may be one of the earliest Dieppe maps, the Dauphin Map, most probably dating from the 1540s, was clearly based on Portuguese sea charts. The claim that it shows part of Australia in some detail is based on the appearance of a large chunk of land described as Iave la Grande, ‘Greater Java’, which is shown immediately to the south of plain Iave, Java, separated from Java by a narrow channel, and lying close to spice islands such as Timor. Along its coastline appear such vaguely named places as Coste Dangereuse and Baye Basse. There are some agreeable images of scattered huts and of naked inhabitants.19 Other maps too showed a landmass south of Java or New Guinea. It was simply assumed that the great southern continent reached up towards tropical climates. And as for ‘Greater
Java’, this had already featured in Marco Polo’s account of the East Indies, as part of the confused description of lands he had certainly not visited, whether or not he really lived for a time in China – he muddled up Java and Sumatra, and then he talked of Greater Java as the largest island in the world.

  III

  One way of resolving this issue is to state baldly that the Europeans knew Australia existed even before they had actually touched its shores. Arising out of their theories about a southern continent, and anchored in Marco Polo’s certainties, they were as convinced that a large landmass must exist somewhere south of the Spice Islands as Columbus had been that no landmass could exist between Europe and the Far East; and maybe it was a massive island rather than the world-encircling continent that mapmakers generally preferred to show. A sort of mental discovery actually preceded physical discovery, odd as it may sound. After all, much the same might be said about modern cosmology – dark matter and dark energy, it is claimed, must be there, partly to solve the mathematical equations, despite the fact that nothing has, if the pun can be excused, come to light. The universe has to be in perfect balance, just as the assumption in 1600 was that the earth could only be in balance if the southern continent weighed down the Antarctic pole. Discovery, as has been seen in other cases, such as the Norse arrival in America, was a gradual process that could result both in knowing things and in largely forgetting them; and the European discovery of the world beyond depended crucially on gaining some understanding of what has been found, and on making use of it. The problem with Australia, it will become clear, is that no one was terribly interested in what had been found, for no one had much use for what was there.