The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The finger is usually pointed at a certain Cristóvão de Mendonça, who (it is argued) explored the waters south of Indonesia as early as the 1520s. He is known to have taken fourteen ships to south-east Asia, setting out from Lisbon in 1519; the theory that he was sent to block Magellan’s Spanish fleet from passing through Portuguese-dominated waters does not stand up, since, as has been seen, Magellan had not intended to return to Spain by way of the Indian Ocean. No one really knows why Mendonça was sent on his voyage or where his ships went.20 But it has long been argued that a shipwreck found in 1836 on a remote Australian beach on the coast of Victoria by two men who had gone out to catch seals was none other than one of Mendonça’s ships; supposedly made of mahogany, its timbers had disappeared by 1880. Mendonça has been found everywhere, but nowhere does the identification convince: a stone hut well to the south of Sydney, a set of iron keys found near a bay in Victoria, and so on. South-eastern Australia is surely the wrong place to look; later, Dutch ships would sometimes be shipwrecked off western Australia, as they tried to cut across the Indian Ocean to the East Indies, although a swivel gun found in the sands near Darwin, in the north of Australia, might well be from a Portuguese ship, date unknown.21 These reports, like the discussions of the Dieppe maps, offer plenty of opportunity for semi-informed fantasy. Perhaps the most bizarre of the claims is that a sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscript carried an illustration of a kangaroo. That said, it is highly likely that Portuguese ships were occasionally blown on to these shores, though if they were wrecked it is quite possible that their crews went down with their ships, or died on land, and news of these chance encounters failed to reach the Portuguese bases in Java and elsewhere.

  Speculation about a great southern land turned into reality when the Dutch began to take a shorter route across the Indian Ocean, allowing the Roaring Forties, which had carried their ships out of the Atlantic and past the Cape of Good Hope, to blow the ships still further eastwards, so that somewhere below the underbelly of Java they could wiggle through the Sunda Strait and arrive in Batavia (Jakarta), the Dutch centre of operations. This became regular practice after 1611, after Hendrik Brouwer sailed 4,000 miles across the ocean to reach Java directly from southern Africa.22 In many ways this was a safer route than one further to the north, since the Malacca Strait was a notorious haunt of pirates, besides which the Portuguese still controlled Melaka until 1641, when it fell to the Dutch (the red-coloured Stadthuys, or town hall, is the oldest Dutch building in the Far East).

  Speculation about who reached Australia first from Europe comes to an end with the Dutch. The Duyfken, or ‘Little Dove’, is the first of the Dutch ships known to have arrived in Australian waters. Twenty metres long, this was what the Dutch called a jacht, or yacht, and she would have carried no more than twenty sailors. After a successful trip to the East Indies under the patronage of the VOC, during which she had engaged in battle with a Portuguese flotilla off the island of Bantam in December 1601, she already had a record of trading successfully in eastern spices. Her captain was Willem Jansz, or Janszoon, and he took her back to the Indies in 1603, from where she was sent south to see what might lie underneath Indonesia. Along the coast of New Guinea there were some ugly encounters with the inhabitants, and the same happened when the ship turned south and landed off the shore of Australia – a sailor was killed after being stuck through with an Aborigine spear. Legends that circulate among one of the native peoples, the Wik, tell of a large wooden ship and of their encounter with those on board, who needed help in digging a well, and who showed the Aborigines how to use metal tools. It seems the Dutch interfered with local women, and then the Wik decided they were unwelcome, so they watched until the Dutchmen had climbed down into the wells they were making, and then set upon them and killed them. Clearly this is a confabulation drawn from many tales and visits, but the story is widespread in several versions.23

  It became increasingly obvious that the, or a, southern continent had been discovered, as more and more ships, travelling in the wake of Brouwer, ended up willy-nilly on the shores of western Australia or its offshore islands and kerries. The VOC ship the Eendracht, captained by an old Baltic and Mediterranean hand named Dirk Hartog, was one of the lucky ships whose landfall in October 1616 took place in relatively calm conditions. Hartog even inscribed a flattened pewter dinner plate with the date and the names of the senior crew and supercargo and left it on an island near the westernmost point of Australia. The plate was seen by another Dutch visitor in 1697; he replaced it with his own, which is now in a museum in Fremantle, Western Australia.24 Yet a claim to Dutch lordship was not thought worth pursuing. As reports came back of the desolate land (most of the ships visited the bleak, dry edges of Western Australia), it became obvious that this southern continent could supply neither gold nor spices. It was searingly hot and inhabited by unfriendly people whose technology was the simplest one could imagine, in modern terms Palaeolithic peoples, ‘a dry cursed earth without foliage or grass’.25

  The Dutch were not alone in being cast upon these shores. The English traders who were trying to insert themselves into the spice trade took the same risk, crossing the Indian Ocean and occasionally striking land too far south, in Australia rather than in the Indonesian islands. They knew of the new route across the Indian Ocean, tried it successfully and thought that they could repeat the crossing in a straightforward way; but in May 1622 the Tryall, or Trial, a newly built English East India ship, still out in what seemed to be open water off Australia, ran aground on sharp rocks concealed beneath the waves, and began to break up. About two thirds of those on board, who may have numbered 150 souls, had to be left to their dismal fate after the captain and other crew members used the ship’s two small boats to reach Java. Trial proved to be an appropriate name: its captain, John Brookes, was accused of negligence – of failing to post a watch, of concealing the evidence that the ship was off course, and of abandoning most of the crew to a certain death. It seems that he lied about the location of these rocks, which meant that they remained a hazard to shipping for a couple of centuries. Disputes about what had happened and about how far Brookes was liable generated vast reams of paper, and reached the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. However, the evidence is even richer than that: a wreck found off Western Australia in 1969 by not terribly scrupulous treasure-hunters is probably that of the Tryall, and exploration of the site, sometimes conducted with explosives rather than with a trowel, yielded anchors and cannon. If this is another ship, then it only proves that Brookes’s refusal to indicate exactly where the dangerous rocks lay had further tragic consequences long after his own death in poverty and obscurity. The leader of the team who found the wreckage, Alan Robinson, became known as the ‘gelignite buccaneer’. He was arrested for interfering with the site of the Tryall, found not guilty, and later arrested again for murder; by then he had had enough of life, and hanged himself in gaol.26

  Knowledge of the continent gradually grew, as stretches of its northern coasts, around the Gulf of Carpentaria, were sketched; but none of the European visitors saw any profit in a desolate land inhabited by often hostile people who entirely lacked the luxurious sophistication of the native rulers encountered in Java. The most famous shipwreck, because of the high drama that followed, remains that of the Batavia, a VOC vessel that set out from Holland in October 1628, in a fleet of eight ships bound for Java. On board was the supercargo François Pelsaert, who was the brother-in-law of Brouwers, the man who had discovered the fast route to Java and was now a much-respected director of the VOC; and the ship carried 600 tons of cargo, including twelve chests full of silver with which to pay for the spices of the East Indies. Pelsaert was on his way to join the cabinet of the governor of Batavia, the irascible Jan Pieterszoon Coen, and there were whole families on board – about 300 people.27

  The Batavia had become separated from the rest of the convoy, but the ship was confidently ploughing through the seas en route to Java in June 1629 when, duri
ng a night watch, the ship’s lookout saw what he thought was surf spray. Since he knew they were nowhere near land, the captain decided that this was just an effect of the moonlight and that they should carry straight on – which bore the Batavia on to a coral reef. Pelsaert felt the keel and rudder grind against the reef; ‘I fell out of my bunk,’ he reported.28 There was no hope for the ship; it could never be refloated or repaired, but it was not heading for the bottom of the sea quite yet, so there was time to prepare a proper evacuation of those who had not been washed overboard already, using the ship’s boats. And the good news was that, with the dawn, scattered coral islands came into view, so that the whole day was spent ferrying the crew and passengers towards a couple of these islands. It was a slow process, and by the evening seventy people were still stuck on board the disintegrating ship. A few saved themselves by swimming to the coral islands, but many drowned; and the islands did not, in any case, have much to offer: there was wildlife, including both wallabies and pythons, but no water.

  Desperate for a supply of water, Pelsaert and Jacobsz, the captain of the Batavia, spied out what seemed to be mainland, and took a longboat across to what was the western shore of Australia. They saw a few Aborigines, but found virtually nothing to drink:

  We there began to dig in various places, but the water was salt; a party went to the high land, there by luck they found some holes in a rock, where sweet water from the rain had been left … Here we quenched a little our great thirst, since we were almost at the end of our endurance, and since leaving the ship had had only one or two small measures a day.29

  The problem was that the captain, the supercargo and their small group of men were moving further and further from the survivors camped near the wreck of the Batavia. They decided that they would head for Batavia, rather than the Batavia, in their longboat, report to Governor Coen and request help for the survivors. Coen, unimpressed by what had happened, flung the captain in gaol and sent Pelsaert back; the issue was not simply human lives, for the cargo of silver had been huge, and could not be left lying around for anyone in the world to pilfer. But Pelsaert and Jacobsz had deliberately put the recovery of people above the recovery of cargo; invoking God’s name, they had drawn up an agreement in which they stated their ‘utmost duty to help our poor companions in their distress’, by appealing to the governor.30

  Pelsaert’s ship took a couple of months to find the survivors, arriving at the coral islands in September 1629. Pelsaert was not clear in his mind where the wreck lay, and the weather did not help. Remarkably, some of the crew and passengers were still alive. However, the conditions under which they lived were alarming, not just because of the inadequate supply of food and water. Pelsaert’s deputy, Jeronimus Cornelisz, had taken charge and had gathered together on the largest atoll those he thought most reliable. Others were sent to outlying coral reefs, where the chances of surviving were thought to be slim (though some of them found quite generous supplies of food and water before long). That left him with 140 men, women and children under his command. Cornelisz saw every mouth that had to be fed as a liability. He unleashed a psychopathic reign of terror. It has been suggested that his fury stemmed from the fact that he belonged to an extreme wing of a dissident Protestant sect, the Anabaptists, and that he believed that the murder of ungodly folk was licit.31 But this seems a weak explanation of his crazed behaviour. He would dress up in fancy robes, stolen from Pelsaert’s sea chest, as if he were king of his little realm, while his followers adopted a uniform of red cloth trimmed with gold lace, all of which had been recovered from the hold of the wrecked ship.

  Cornelisz’s followers happily executed anyone who resisted his orders. A Dominee, or minister, of the Dutch Reformed Church was travelling out on the Batavia with his wife and seven children; most were massacred by Cornelisz’s men, though the Dominee and one daughter were allowed to live, so long as they did not show any grief at what they had witnessed. The daughter was forced to enter into a mock marriage with one of Cornelisz’s toughs, which at least guaranteed her survival; other women were made the common property of the gang, but the number of murders is thought to have reached 115. When Cornelisz discovered that about fifty of those he had sent to another island (now known as Hayes’ Island) were surviving quite well, he launched an invasion, though he was captured and his men were nearly all killed. This did not stop his followers from waging war on the defenders of the other island. So when Pelsaert arrived he found chaos, death and stories of horrifying barbarity.32

  It was not difficult to establish the truth. Cornelisz himself was recovered from captivity on Hayes’ Island, where he was still wearing the grand robes that Pelsaert had brought along on the voyage. However, they were filthy by now: he had been kept in a hole in the ground, and was forced to pluck the feathers off birds captured for their food. As a result the beautiful robes were now covered in guano and bits of feather. He was sentenced to be executed, after his hands had been chopped off, and most of his troop of followers were hanged. Seventy-seven people deemed loyal to the VOC remained, to be taken to Batavia. There was another task to perform: Pelsaert set to work recovering the cargo of silver, and, remarkably, ten of the twelve chests were brought up from the sea. A couple of offenders, Pelgrom and Loos, who were guilty of appalling crimes, had somehow gained Pelsaert’s mercy, perhaps because he wanted to show that he was quite unlike the vengeful and violent Cornelisz, and they were put ashore on the mainland, along with items of truck – bells, beads, wooden toys, mirrors – to be used in trade with the native population. They were ordered to search for information about sources of gold and silver, and to watch for any VOC ships that were passing, so they could send smoke signals and be picked up. This confirms that there was already regular traffic along the shores of Australia; it was just that the Dutch did not believe there was any profit to be found in the new continent.33 His handling of the situation should have earned Pelsaert some credit, but instead he lost his place on the governor’s council, and went off to fight the Portuguese in Sumatra, dying soon afterwards. As for Pelgrom and Loos, they never managed to hitch a ride on a VOC ship, and must have died somewhere along the coast of Western Australia, the first Europeans to inhabit this strange land.

  The Batavia had an afterlife: its wreck was found in 1963, and the islands were explored, leading to the recovery of guns, coins and other bits and pieces from Hayes’ Island, where a simple stone ruin is now celebrated as ‘Australia’s earliest European structure’. A number of skeletons have also been found, mostly in mass graves, and many of the bodies bear witness to the extreme violence of Cornelisz and his cronies: one victim was hit over the head with a sword by a right-handed attacker who stood directly in front of him. The sword left a two-inch mark on the victim’s skull. The victim was unable to defend himself by raising his arms, which showed no cut marks, suggesting that he was tied up and awaiting execution. The preferred method of execution was to smash open the skull of the victim.34 These remains of a ship and of murdered people stand as testimony not to an act of colonization, but to the passionate hope of those who resisted Cornelisz that before long they would be taken as far away from Australia as possible.

  IV

  The wrecking of the Batavia and other early experiences of Australia did nothing to encourage interest in a continent that would, nonetheless, soon become known as ‘New Holland’. There was, on the other hand, quite a strong interest in mapping the shores of Australia, and in identifying reefs and shoals that could threaten ships plying along Brouwer’s route; and that would mean more expeditions along its shores. Dutch ships even penetrated along the southern shores of Australia; in 1626 the ship beautifully named ’t Gulden Zeepaert, ‘The Golden Seahorse’, reached what is now the state of South Australia, and its course was duly noted on VOC charts. This meant that half of the southern shoreline of Australia had been mapped.35 Moreover, the assumption remained that a great southern continent would surely lie to its south, and would be a far more attractive place, wit
h a temperate climate and plenty of riches worth exploiting. Australia, however, was seen as the very negation of the type of place that the Europeans hoped to exploit and colonize, a nightmare world inhabited by black folk who were caricatured as less than human, cannibalistic and (this at least was true) lacking any knowledge of the advanced technology that could be found in the East Indies, or even in the relatively undeveloped societies of the Polynesian islands.

  Not surprisingly, then, the aim of two famous expeditions to Australia in the mid-seventeenth century was not the further exploration of the barren continent, but the continuing search for places where the Dutch could trade profitably, particularly a land supposedly rich in gold that had come to be known as ‘Beach’, a name whose origins went back to Marco Polo’s fantasies about the Indies.36 Abel Janszoon Tasman was a forty-year-old Calvinist who set out from Batavia on a wide sweep of southern latitudes in 1642. He enjoyed his drink; later in his career he was deprived of his command after he hanged a troublesome sailor while he was drunk, not bothering to go through the due process of a trial.37 He came in sight of Tasmania, not realizing that it is a large island lying off the coast of Australia, and sailed around the bottom, demonstrating that this was not, alas, part of the great southern continent. He was keen to honour the governor-general of the Dutch Indies, so he named this land ‘Anthonio van Diemens Landt’ after him. He also claimed it for the Netherlands. There was no sight of the inhabitants, the Tasmanian Aborigines who were eventually wiped out by white Australians, but there was good evidence that the land was inhabited: sailors set on shore reported thick smoke rising out of the forest, and for some reason Tasman concluded that ‘there must be men, of unusual height’ – the usual tropes about giants, monsters and savages were being wheeled into place.38 Southern Australia, like western Australia, was, frankly, a disappointment.