THE FAR EAST AND THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA
In the meantime the Portuguese had at last won the sea route to India
by way of the Cape of Good Hope, through the agency of Vasco da Gama
(1464–1524), a native of Sines. He started from Lisbon in July, 1497.
He was accompanied by a pilot who had been with Diaz, and he had a map
on which the Portuguese discoveries on the African coast were shown so
far as they extended. On November 22 he sailed round the Cape of Good
Hope; by Christmas he reached a point beyond the furthest limit of
Diaz, and named it Natal. Continuing northerly along the coast he met
with a number of Arab settlements and a hostile reception from some of
them; but from one he obtained a pilot across the Indian Ocean, and he
reached Calicut on May 20, 1498, after a voyage of ten months and ten
days. This is not the place to discuss the commercial and political
difficulties which supervened upon the endeavours of the Portuguese
to draw to themselves a share of the rich trade of the Indies; but
Gama made a second successful voyage with this object in 1502–03, and
subsequently became viceroy in India in the year of his death.
In 1511 the important town of Malacca was taken by the Portuguese, and
became the starting-point for many journeys in all directions--first
to Sumatra, Java, and the Philippines; in 1512 to the Moluccas, and
in 1516 to Canton, and by 1520 a Portuguese embassy was established at
Peking. After that exploration proceeded apace in the Malay islands
and on the coast of China; and Borneo, New Guinea, and Celebes rapidly
became important trade centres, though Japan was not reached till the
beginning of the following century, when in 1542 a Portuguese sailor,
Antonio de Mota, was driven to its shores. Some years later a mission
was sent there by St. Francis Xavier, which brought back the first
trustworthy accounts of the new country.
The Portuguese and Spanish ascendancy in the Malay Archipelago lasted
until 1595; in the following year a Dutch fleet, under Cornelis
Houtman, came to blows with the Portuguese off the coast of Java;
in 1602 the Dutch East India Company was incorporated, and during
the following decade Dutch influence was strongly established in the
Archipelago. With this epoch in far eastern history is connected
the discovery of Australia. At what early period the native peoples
of the east--Malays, and even Chinese--had acquired knowledge of
Australia, and what was the extent of that knowledge, it is impossible
to determine; but Marco Polo had happened upon rumours of a southern
continent. In the following chapter we shall discuss the early European
conception of that continent, which gave rise to a wider problem in
which the discovery of Australia is merely incidental.
A landing on Australian soil has been claimed for the French navigator
Paulmyer, Sieur de Gonneville, in 1503, and Guillaume le Testu of
Provence is asserted to have sighted the coast in 1531. There were
certainly, about 1527–39, French pirates in the Malay Archipelago.
There are similar early Portuguese claims to the first view of the
island-continent. When Torres had passed through the strait which
bears his name, south of New Guinea, in 1606, and when, in the same
year, the crew of a Dutch vessel, the _Duyfken_, effected a landing in
the Gulf of Carpentaria, the first definite steps were taken towards
the exploration of Australia. By 1665 the Dutch had worked out and
charted a general sketch of most of the western seaboard; in 1696
William de Vlamingh re-charted a large part of it with fair accuracy.
In the meantime, in 1642, Abel Janszoon Tasman had sailed from Batavia
to Mauritius, thence south-eastward, till he struck the southern and
eastern coasts of Tasmania, whence he passed on to obtain the first
sight of New Zealand. The exploration of the Australian coasts from the
direction of the Pacific belongs to following chapters.
During this period England began to interest herself in the East Indian
trade, and the great efforts which were made to reach Eastern Asia by
way of the arctic region will be discussed in the following chapter. In
1591 James Lancaster made an adventurous voyage to the Malay Peninsula;
the formation of the East India Company followed. In 1600 Lancaster,
in its employ, started again for the East, and laid the foundations
of English commerce in the Spice Islands, visiting the Nicobars,
Sumatra, and Java. He was accompanied on this voyage by Davis, famous
for his work in the Arctic, who was killed on a further voyage in
Eastern waters in 1605. The work of the East India Company led to the
undertaking of many important voyages of discovery. In 1607 Captain
Hawkins travelled to Agra and the court of the great Mogul, and a
factory was started in Japan in 1613. The men in the employ of the East
India Company were not, however, the first Englishmen to reach Japan:
William Adams, a trader, had been forced to anchor off the island of
Kiu-shiu in 1600. He had been very kindly received, but had not been
allowed to return home. Permission, however, was at length granted to
him, and, after helping to found an English settlement in Japan, he
spent the rest of his life in the service of the East India Company. On
one of the early expeditions sent out by the trading company in 1612,
under Captain Best, the first foothold of the British in India was
gained by the establishment of factories.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Englishmen were also
playing a prominent part in the gradual lifting of the veil which
lay over Central and Western Asia. Between 1558 and 1579 traders in
London made great efforts to open up to commerce the countries round
the Caspian Sea, of which vague reports had been brought back by
travellers, and embassies were sent to Bokhara, Persia, and Russia.
Anthony Jenkinson did much to advance the knowledge of Persia by his
journey as an accredited representative of Queen Elizabeth in 1579;
Christopher Burroughs traded across the Caspian Sea at the end of the
century, and Sir Anthony and Robert Shirley stayed at the court of the
Shah of Persia. During the seventeenth century Persia, Syria, and Asia
Minor were visited by many travellers, who brought back many tales
of the new and strange countries, but added little to the store of
geographical knowledge.
Up to the end of the seventeenth century, the only people to bring
any news of China and Tibet were missionaries, of whom several made
adventurous journeys from India. Tibet had been visited by Friar Odoric
in 1325; but the next European to enter it was Antonio Andrada, in
1624. Between 1685 and 1687 P. Tachard journeyed to Cochin-China and
Tongking, and made a number of astronomical observations, from which
he was able to prove the gross errors in the longitudes of Ptolemy,
which were still in use. After permission to enter the empire of China
was granted in 1553 to the Jesuits, much valuable geographical work
was done by them throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
During the seventeenth century the Russians were gradually pushing
towards China by way of Siberia. In 1581 a Cossack made himself master
of the country round the lower course of the River Irtish; early in the
next century the Sea of Okhotsk was reached by Russian hunters; in the
middle of the century the River Amur was navigated to the sea; and by
its end Kamchatka had been explored, and a treaty had been concluded
with the rulers of China. In 1768 and the following years an organized
exploration of the whole of the Russian Empire was undertaken. Both the
coasts and the inland provinces of Siberia were surveyed from Novaya
Zemlya as far as the Sea of Okhotsk.
By the end of the seventeenth century the general outlines of the
coast of Asia were known, though much of the interior was still
unexplored. Such knowledge of central Asia as was acquired during that
and the preceding century was mainly due to the travels of European
missionaries following Andrada--Fra Desideri and Fra Freyre (1715), and
Orazio della Penna (who was in Lhasa from 1735 to 1747), were among
those who entered Tibet, while others actually carried out surveys
in China in 1708–18 under the direction of the Emperor Kang-hi. The
Dutchman Samuel van der Putte passed thirty-seven years of his life in
Asia, and travelled widely, but at his death (1745) left no narrative.
At the close of the century English missions began to make their way
into Tibet from India. George Boyle led one in 1774, and Captain Turner
another in 1783. English and French traders were opening up Persia in
the eighteenth century, and in Arabia the principal journey was that
of Carsten Niebuhr (1762–67), sole survivor of a Danish scientific
mission.