Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Probably the next to ‘discover’ Australia were the Portuguese. Once the Pope had divided the newly discovered world outside Europe into halves in 1494 – half for Spain and half for Portugal – the Portuguese quickly spread across ‘their’ half. The North navigation constant, the Pole Star, isn’t visible in the southern hemisphere. By the late 1400s Portuguese navigators used the new tables that gave the sun’s maximum altitude for every day or the year at every latitude, calculated by Professor Abraham Zacuto of Spain, translated into Hebrew, Latin, and then Portuguese. This allowed Portuguese navigators to venture south, not with confidence, but at least knowing where they were, even if they didn’t know what they might hit next. Portugal was also relatively wealthy from the sugar trade using West African slave labour, and the gold captured in West Africa.

  By the 1520s the Portuguese had discovered a route to the Spice Islands, sailing their ships past Timor and most likely even within sight of Australia. They would certainly have seen smoke, birds they knew had flown from land or even debris from storms. It is extremely likely that Portuguese navigators decided to see what lay to the south, and we can infer that they did by the small bits of almost accurate mapping that found its way onto the English and French maps, including references to a ‘danger coast’ that probably refers to the Great Barrier Reef. Any ship that struck that – literally or metaphorically – would have warned other ships that this land had teeth. But there’s no definitive evidence that any Portuguese ship actually sailed here.

  Our early maritime history is a wonderfully empty space for theorists. Did the Portuguese nobleman and explorer Cristóvão de Mendonça land here after 1521 when he searched for the Isles of Gold that lay beyond Sumatra? There are even theories that the mysterious Mahogany Ship that may – or may not – have sunk at some unspecified date off the coast of Victoria was Portuguese. But the wreck, if it ever existed, vanished. Did Portuguese Captain Gomes de Sequeira discover the ‘Java le Grande’ that appears in several maps of the early sixteenth century, and is Java le Grande really an inaccurate portrayal of north Australia, or any equally bad map of parts of Java or one of several other possible places? Did the Portuguese keep their explorations of Australia secret, in case it had spices or riches?

  Most likely the Portuguese navigators did keep most of their maps secret so that others wouldn’t find the best routes to Sumatra. (It would be several hundred years before shipping maps were regarded as public knowledge, not private information to be sold to the highest bidder.) And as for Australia – like travellers for the next few hundred years, if the Portuguese did see our coast, they probably decided that it was not worth bothering about.

  The land of gold

  But there was another large land in the far south that was deeply, gloriously enticing: terra incognita, the Great South Land of gold. The land mass known to be below Java (Australia) was obviously useless. But the Great South Land was a prize – or would be, if anyone could find it.

  Each era has its own dreams. In the 1600s the dream was either of gold or the fountain of youth that would give eternal life – and possibly both at the same time. For centuries Europeans had been discovering new lands and riches: Newfoundland and its vast cod banks; South America and the treasures of gold; the Spice Islands, source of vast quantities of pepper and cinnamon; China and its silk; India and its cotton and other riches. Navigators and dreamers studied the old maps of the Pacific – somewhere, in all that vast blue, there had to be a land of gold. It was a glorious myth, too enticing to give up for lack of evidence, and it drew ships way beyond the normal trade routes.

  The myth of the Great South Land was possibly begun by mistranslations of Venetian trader Marco Polo’s Book About the Variety of the World, published after his successful trading trip to China, returning in 1295.4 Whether or not Marco Polo did actually get to China, or only went part of the way and repeated travellers’ tall stories, the book was an extraordinary success, translated from its original French into many languages. Marco Polo spoke of deserts, legends, palaces, but also fascinatingly about Kublai Khan and vast treasures of gold south of China.

  This rich south land was not Australia – Marco Polo also said it was also rich in elephants. Australia has a conspicuous absence of elephants. But little was known about the southern oceans. There was a southern blob of land added in maps since map maker Claudius Ptolemy (circa AD 80–165) created a picture of the world that would influence mapmakers for the next 1400 years. There was also Polo’s assertion that there was a land of gold south of China. Conclusion: somewhere down south there was a new land of gold to be found. And why not? Explorers had been discovering wealth for millennia, even if the wealth was slaves, rather than treasure. Today many assume that industrial growth can continue indefinitely. Back then, it must have seemed that there would always be new rich territory to discover.

  One of the first explorers who set out deliberately to find this mythical unknown golden land was the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, who in 1605 was sent by the king of Spain to find the Great South Land and claim it – and its gold – for Spain and the Church. Instead he found what was later called the New Hebrides (now the nation of Vanuatu) and named it Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. Unfortunately for de Quiros, the New Hebrideans didn’t agree that they had suddenly become Spanish. He and his men were driven off, but his journey helped to fuel the rumour that the rich land of Terra Australis Incognita was down there – somewhere.

  One of the ships in de Quiros’s expedition passed through the strait that now bears the name of the ship’s captain, Luis Vaez de Torres. Over a hundred years later Alexander Dalrymple, who also dreamed of finding the Great South Land and had studied ancient maps, gave Sir Joseph Banks copies of two maps that showed a strait between Australia and New Guinea. Banks showed the maps to James Cook.

  That map’s existence would change the history of the land we call Australia.

  The Dutch bump into Australia (and don’t think much of it)

  Spain annexed Portugal in 1580, which more or less got rid of the great ‘half to Spain and half to Portugal’ divide. But Spain was too preoccupied with the vast – and real – treasures of the Americas to bother exploring unmapped lands in the south. At the same time, the Dutch lost the access they had had to Lisbon, the centre of the spice trade. The Dutch traders needed direct access to the valuable spices found just to the north of Australia.

  In 1595 the first Dutch fleet to sail beyond Europe rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossing the Indian Ocean from Madagascar to Java, and began to trade directly with Java and Bali. More fleets followed, trading with other islands as well. From this time until the Japanese conquered the area in 1942, and then the Indonesian National Revolution after the Japanese surrender at the end of World War 2, with eventual independence, much of what is present-day Indonesia became known to Europeans as the Dutch East Indies.

  This time, at least some of the ships that explored the Spice Islands did map parts of Australia, and their maps still exist. The first voyage to Australia ever recorded, that of Dutch captain Willem Janszoon, sailed from Java and Timor on a voyage of exploration on the Duyfken. In 1605 to 1606 he entered the Gulf of Carpentaria, although he assumed he was charting the coast of New Guinea. In all, Janszoon charted three hundred kilometres of Australian coast.

  In 1632 the Dutch ships Pera and Arnhem sailed from Ambon. Captains Carstensz and van Colster also charted the Gulf of Carpentaria, and also assumed it was part of New Guinea. This time they nailed a board up on a tree to claim the land for Holland, but they didn’t think much of the new ‘Dutch’ territory. Carstensz declared that it had no fruit-bearing trees or anything that man could make use of, the most arid and barren region that could be found on the earth. Actually the area is rich in native fruits, but not any Carstensz would have been familiar with, like coconuts or bananas, or animals like pigs that the ships of the time loaded up as provisions from Southeast Asian ports.

  The north of Australia
had been seen – and most definitely rejected. Over in the west, the Dutch were finding and rejecting Western Australia, too.

  Captured by the trade winds

  It’s no accident that Australia’s first wind farm was sited at Albany. The day we went to look at it, the wind was so strong that four of us had to link arms just to walk against it, the spray from the sea five hundred metres away spitting in our faces. Every time I have been to Albany that wind has blown, hard, fast and reliable, and to truly understand what happens next in this story, you need to keep the overpowering wind of southwestern Australia in mind.

  The direct route between Madagascar and Java often left ships becalmed in the tropics, without wind to fill the sails or water to drink. Every sailor had stories of coming upon ships empty of crew or manned only by skeletons, victims of the doldrums, the windless ‘lands’ of the ocean. Without wind a ship couldn’t manoeuvre, and might drift onto the rocks or be unable to make its way over or around the vast freak waves the ocean winds created. Knowledge of the world’s winds was as valuable as maps of land.

  In 1611 a Dutch captain accidentally discovered that if he made a dogleg to a latitude of about forty degrees south he could use the strong west winds in the southeast ocean to push a ship due east for about three thousand kilometres before turning north to Java; these ‘trade winds’ are now called the roaring forties. It is entirely counterintuitive, but by going the long way round ships could get to Java faster, and with far greater certainty.

  There was just one problem: Australia. Go too far east before you headed north and you crashed into it. The roaring forties are so strong that you might find yourself literally on Australia in the dark of the night, or without enough room to manoeuvre your ship away. And in those days before longitude could be accurately calculated, there was no precise way for shipmasters to work out how far east they had sailed.

  Only five years after the new route was discovered, Dutch sailor Dirk Hartog did sail too far before he turned north, although he may not have been the first to find himself accidentally on the west coast. But we remember Hartog because he left proof that he had landed, hammering in a post at what is now Shark Bay in Western Australia and nailing an inscribed pewter plate to it that proclaimed his ship had landed there on 25 October 1616. Another Dutch explorer, Willem de Vlamingh, landed at the same spot in 1697, put up another plate and took the original back to the Netherlands, thus preserving the first written evidence of a European landing in Australia. It is also, presumably, the first formal European claim to the land. Hartog sailed his ship, the Eendracht, back to Java after naming the land Eendrachtsland for his ship. (As eendracht means concord, Australia should possibly be called Concordia, or even Consensus Island.)

  But Hartog didn’t find harbours, grass or even abundant fresh water. A settlement in the south of Western Australia would have been useful to supply Dutch ships, or even to construct a lighthouse to warn ship crews they were nearing land. But without a harbour – and grass – there was no way to do so. Southwestern Australia does have a stunning harbour at Albany, but, like Sydney Harbour, it has a narrow entrance and is easy to miss, especially as it doesn’t have a river large enough to be noticeable from the sea to attract attention to it.

  No harbour. No grass. No easy fresh water. A land that from the sea was sandhills, rocks, cliffs or desert. Not even bananas, coconuts and pigs. Why bother when the Dutch East Indies offered riches?

  More Dutch captains accidentally sailed their ships to Eendrachtsland. In 1619 Frederik de Houtman landed on the islands off the West Australian coast and named them after himself; today they are still known as Houtman Abrolhos (Houtman Lookout). Captain van Hillegom arrived and left in May 1618, Lenaert Jacobszoon in the Mauritius in July 1618, and de Houtman, again, and Jakob Dedel in 1619. In 1622 the ship Leeuwin, skippered by an unknown Dutch captain, rounded the southwesterly cape that still bears its name. In 1627 François Thijssen and Pieter Nuyts followed the West Australian coast eastwards too and mapped it for about a thousand kilometres, after their ship, t’Gulden Zeepaerdt, was separated from the fleet. But neither of these ships landed: no safe harbours, no coconuts, no pastures of grass, no rivers of fresh water.

  Yet that dream of a southern land of gold was still there. The south was supposed to have riches, like the gold of the Aztecs, the spices of what is now Indonesia, and the finely wrought jewelled treasures of the kingdoms of present-day India and Pakistan. By now most of Australia’s western and north coast had been observed, and something more interesting than coconuts and pigs was conspicuously lacking: architecture and uniforms. In European minds, palaces and armies were strongly linked with the wealth of a land. Riches need defending. The Aztecs had their emperors, what are now India and Pakistan their sultans and palaces, Beijing its astonishing Forbidden City, Japan the armour-clad samurai with their superb weapons. Australia had parties of young men fishing with spears, or families picnicking on the beach waiting for the fish to swim into their fish traps. No armies or palaces must mean no gold.

  There is no evidence that gold was prized by any of the Indigenous cultures of Australia, although in the 1850s Indigenous people would helpfully show gold hunters where they might find it. Why bother with gold? Gold has an extremely limited range of uses, unlike hard diamonds. Most isn’t even used for jewellery but locked up as reserves. The value the modern world places on gold is arbitrary – we could have hit upon rare green ochre instead.

  But unlike green ochre, gold gleams even in shadow, or dimly lit medieval palaces. Its value is still almost entirely symbolic: gold crowns, gold wedding rings, pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, gold medals. Even now, when electric light makes cheaper metals look good, gold is still valued as a safe investment when the stock market crashes, even though an empty factory is more useful than a bar of gold.

  Europe dreamed of gold. Spain had found treasure troves of gold in South America, therefore another gold land must be somewhere south in the Pacific. Besides, when Marco Polo wrote of his trip to China back in the thirteenth century, he described the southern kingdom of Locach where gold was so plentiful that no one who hadn’t seen it would believe it. Myths are often more powerful than reality, and the speculations about a golden land were enough to send whole expeditions in small ships across vast oceans.

  That land of gold obviously wasn’t Australia, or Eendrachtsland, so it must be somewhere else. Dutch mapmakers now put an accurate west coast of Australia on their maps, but they still included the mythical unknown south land, Terra Australis Incognita, far to the east.

  The hunt continued. And then Abel Tasman found the land of giants.

  The land of giants

  In 1642 Anthony van Diemen, colonial governor of the Dutch East Indies, sent Captain Abel Tasman of the Dutch East India Company, with the talented pilot, hydrographer and surveyor Frans Jacobszoon Visscher, on two ships to search for Terra Australis, the unknown south land, and all the provinces of ‘Beach’ (possibly a mistranslation of reference to ‘Locach’ in Marco Polo’s work).5 Tasman was also supposed to find a southern passage from the East Indies to the Pacific, so the Dutch could attack the Spanish settlements in South America.

  Hopefully this new land would be as rich in spices as the Spice Islands but healthier for the colonisers and traders. Dutch-held Batavia was known as the white man’s graveyard: colonists died from malaria, typhus, cholera and other tropical diseases. The malaria was home grown, but cholera, dysentery and typhus were the consequences of the polluted water, stinking cesspools and other poor management by the Dutch East India Company. The spice trade was so rich that many were still prepared to risk their lives, but it would be convenient if a new colonial acquisition could be in a southern, cooler and less dangerously polluted country.

  Once Tasman found Terra Australis he was to negotiate a treaty with its king to secure all rights for Holland and the Dutch East India Company. Tasman was ordered to keep well south of barren Eendrachtsland (the continent of Australia) a
nd to head east into the Pacific.

  Tasman sailed far enough south to catch the most reliable of the trade winds, the consistently strong winds of the Southern Ocean. These would not only make his voyage swifter but also, he assumed, keep him far south of Eendrachtsland.

  The ships were small, the waves gigantic. If Tasman had been able to keep on his intended course he’d have landed at New Zealand without ever sighting southern Australia. He might even have missed New Zealand altogether and sailed long enough to dispel hope that a new land of gold lurked in the South Pacific.

  But the dense fog, continuous drizzle and vicious winds of the Southern Ocean forced him further north than he intended. The fog continued, so dense that they dared not raise much sail for danger of running into the other boat in their party, or being wrecked on any land that lurked in the whiteness. Where were they?

  On 4 November 1642 the ships’ captains conferred, trying to work out where the wind and currents had taken them. Over the side they could see the type of seaweed that was usually found on rocks, and then a seal.