AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS--TASMAN AND COOK
If one looks at the west coast of Australia one is struck by the
large number of Dutch names which are jotted down the coast. There
is Hoog Island, Diemen's Bay, Houtman's Abrolhos, De Wit land, and
the Archipelago of Nuyts, besides Dirk Hartog's Island and Cape
Leeuwin. To the extreme north we find the Gulf of Carpentaria,
and to the extreme south the island which used to be called Van
Diemen's Land. It is not altogether to be wondered at that almost
to the middle of this century the land we now call Australia was
tolerably well known as New Holland. If the Dutch had struck the
more fertile eastern shores of the Australian continent, it might
have been called with reason New Holland to the present day; but
there is scarcely any long coast-line of the world so inhospitable
and so little promising as that of Western Australia, and one can
easily understand how the Dutch, though they explored it, did not
care to take possession of it.
[Illustration: TERRES AUSTRALES. d'après d'Anville. 1746.]
But though the Dutch were the first to explore any considerable
stretch of Australian coast, they were by no means the first to
sight it. As early as 1542 a Spanish expedition under Luis Lopez de
Villalobos, was despatched to follow up the discoveries of Magellan
in the Pacific Ocean within the Spanish sphere of influence. He
discovered several of the islands of Polynesia, and attempted to
seize the Philippines, but his fleet had to return to New Spain.
One of the ships coasted along an island to which was given the
name of New Guinea, and was thought to be part of the great unknown
southern land which Ptolemy had imagined to exist in the south
of the Indian Ocean, and to be connected in some way with Tierra
del Fuego. Curiosity was thus aroused, and in 1606 Pedro de Quiros
was despatched on a voyage to the South Seas with three ships.
He discovered the New Hebrides, and believed it formed part of
the southern continent, and he therefore named it Australia del
Espiritu Santo, and hastened home to obtain the viceroyalty of
this new possession. One of his ships got separated from him, and
the commander, Luys Vaz de Torres, sailed farther to the south-west,
and thereby learned that the New Australia was not a continent but
an island. He proceeded farther till he came to New Guinea, which
he coasted along the south coast, and seeing land to the south of
him, he thus passed through the straits since named after him, and
was probably the first European to see the continent of Australia.
In the very same year (1606) the Dutch yacht named the _Duyfken_ is
said to have coasted along the south and west coasts of New Guinea
nearly a thousand miles, till they reached Cape Keerweer, or "turn
again." This was probably the north-west coast of Australia. In the
first thirty years of the seventeenth century the Dutch followed
the west coast of Australia with as much industry as the Portuguese
had done with the west coast of Africa, leaving up to the present
day signs of their explorations in the names of islands, bays,
and capes. Dirk Hartog, in the _Endraaght_, discovered that Land
which is named after his ship, and the cape and roadstead named
after himself, in 1616. Jan Edels left his name upon the western
coast in 1619; while, three years later, a ship named the _Lioness_
or _Leeuwin_ reached the most western point of the continent, to
which its name is still attached. Five years later, in 1627, De
Nuyts coasted round the south coast of Australia; while in the
same year a Dutch commander named Carpenter discovered and gave
his name to the immense indentation still known as the Gulf of
Carpentaria.
But still more important discoveries were made in 1642 by an expedition
sent out from Batavia under ABEL JANSSEN TASMAN to investigate
the real extent of the southern land. After the voyages of the
_Leeuwin_ and De Nuyts it was seen that the southern coast of the
new land trended to the east, instead of working round to the west,
as would have been the case if Ptolemy's views had been correct.
Tasman's problem was to discover whether it was connected with the
great southern land assumed to lie to the south of South America.
Tasman first sailed from Mauritius, and then directing his course
to the south-east, going much more south than Cape Leeuwin, at
last reached land in latitude 43.30° and longitude 163.50°. This
he called Van Diemen's Land, after the name of the Governor-General
of Batavia, and it was assumed that this joined on to the land
already discovered by De Nuyts. Sailing farther to the eastward,
Tasman came out into the open sea again, and thus appeared to prove
that the newly discovered land was not connected with the great
unknown continent round the south pole.
But he soon came across land which might possibly answer to that
description, and he called it Staaten Land, in honour of the
States-General of the Netherlands. This was undoubtedly some part
of New Zealand. Still steering eastward, but with a more northerly
trend, Tasman discovered several islands in the Pacific, and ultimately
reached Batavia after touching on New Guinea. His discoveries were
a great advance on previous knowledge; he had at any rate reduced
the possible dimensions of the unknown continent of the south within
narrow limits, and his discoveries were justly inscribed upon the map
of the world cut in stone upon the new Staathaus in Amsterdam, in
which the name New Holland was given by order of the States-General
to the western part of the "terra Australis." When England for a
time became joined on to Holland under the rule of William III.,
William Dampier was despatched to New Holland to make further
discoveries. He retraced the explorations of the Dutch from Dirk
Hartog's Bay to New Guinea, and appears to have been the first
European to have noticed the habits of the kangaroo; otherwise
his voyage did not add much to geographical knowledge, though when
he left the coasts of New Guinea he steered between New England
and New Ireland.
As a result of these Dutch voyages the existence of a great land
somewhere to the south-east of Asia became common property to all
civilised men. As an instance of this familiarity many years before
Cook's epoch-making voyages, it may be mentioned that in 1699 Captain
Lemuel Gulliver (in Swift's celebrated romance) arrived at the kingdom
of Lilliput by steering north-west from Van Diemen's Land, which he
mentions by name. Lilliput, it would thus appear, was situated
somewhere in the neighbourhood of the great Bight of Australia. This
curious mixture of definite knowledge and vague ignorance on the
part of Swift exactly corresponds to the state of geographical
knowledge about Australia in his days, as is shown in the preceding
map of those parts of the world, as given by the great French
cartographer D'Anville in 1745 (p. 157).
These discoveries of the Spanish and Dutch were direct results
and corollaries of the great search for the Spice Islands, which
has formed the main subject of our inquiries. The discoveries were
mostly made by ships fitted out in the Malay archipelago, if not
from the Spice Islands themselves. But at the beginning of the
eighteenth century new motives came into play in the search for
new lands; by that time almost the whole coast-line of the world
was roughly known. The Portuguese had coasted Africa, the Spanish
South America, the English most of the east of North America, while
Central America was known through the Spaniards. Many of the islands
of the Pacific Ocean had been touched upon, though not accurately
surveyed, and there remained only the north-west coast of America
and the north-east coast of Asia to be explored, while the great
remaining problem of geography was to discover if the great southern
continent assumed by Ptolemy existed, and, if so, what were its
dimensions. It happened that all these problems of coastline geography,
if we may so call it, were destined to be solved by one man, an
Englishman named JAMES COOK, who, with Prince Henry, Magellan, and
Tasman, may be said to have determined the limits of the habitable
land.
His voyages were made in the interests, not of trade or conquest,
but of scientific curiosity; and they were, appropriately enough,
begun in the interests of quite a different science than that of
geography. The English astronomer Halley had left as a sort of legacy
the task of examining the transit of Venus, which he predicted for
the year 1769, pointing out its paramount importance for determining
the distance of the sun from the earth. This transit could only
be observed in the southern hemisphere, and it was in order to
observe it that Cook made his first voyage of exploration.
There was a double suitability in the motive of Cook's first voyage.
The work of his life could only have been carried out owing to the
improvement in nautical instruments which had been made during
the early part of the eighteenth century. Hadley had invented the
sextant, by which the sun's elevation could be taken with much
more ease and accuracy than with the old cross-staff, the very
rough gnomon which the earlier navigators had to use. Still more
important for scientific geography was the improvement that had
taken place in accurate chronometry. To find the latitude of a
place is not so difficult--the length of the day at different times
of the year will by itself be almost enough to determine this, as
we have seen in the very earliest history of Greek geography--but
to determine the longitude was a much more difficult task, which
in the earlier stages could only be formed by guesswork and dead
reckonings.
But when clocks had been brought to such a pitch of accuracy that
they would not lose but a few seconds or minutes during the whole
voyage, they could be used to determine the difference of local
time between any spot on the earth's surface and that of the port
from which the ship sailed, or from some fixed place where the clock
could be timed. The English government, seeing the importance of
this, proposed the very large reward of £10,000 for the invention
of a chronometer which would not lose more than a stated number of
minutes during a year. This prize was won by John Harrison, and
from this time onward a sea-captain with a minimum of astronomical
knowledge was enabled to know his longitude within a few minutes.
Hadley's sextant and Harrison's chronometer were the necessary
implements to enable James Cook to do his work, which was thus,
both in aim and method, in every way English.
James Cook was a practical sailor, who had shown considerable
intelligence in sounding the St. Lawrence on Wolfe's expedition,
and had afterwards been appointed marine surveyor of Newfoundland.
When the Royal Society determined to send out an expedition to
observe the transit of Venus, according to Halley's prediction,
they were deterred from entrusting the expedition to a scientific
man by the example of Halley himself, who had failed to obtain
obedience from sailors on being entrusted with the command. Dalrymple,
the chief hydrographer of the Admiralty, who had chief claims to
the command, was also somewhat of a faddist, and Cook was selected
almost as a _dernier ressort_. The choice proved an excellent one.
He selected a coasting coaler named the _Endeavour_, of 360 tons,
because her breadth of beam would enable her to carry more stores
and to run near coasts. Just before they started Captain Wallis
returned from a voyage round the world upon which he had discovered
or re-discovered Tahiti, and he recommended this as a suitable
place for observing the transit.
Cook duly arrived there, and on the 3rd of June 1769 the main object
of the expedition was fulfilled by a successful observation. But
he then proceeded farther, and arrived soon at a land which he
saw reason to identify with the Staaten Land of Tasman; but on
coasting along this, Cook found that, so far from belonging to a
great southern continent, it was composed of two islands, between
which he sailed, giving his name to the strait separating them.
Leaving New Zealand on the 31st of March 1770, on the 20th of the
next month he came across another land to the westward, hitherto
unknown to mariners. Entering an inlet, he explored the neighbourhood
with the aid of Mr. Joseph Banks, the naturalist of the expedition.
He found so many plants new to him, that the bay was termed Botany
Bay.
He then coasted northward, and nearly lost his ship upon the great
reef running down the eastern coast; but by keeping within it he
managed to reach the extreme end of the land in this direction,
and proved that it was distinct from New Guinea. In other words,
he had reached the southern point of the strait named after Torres.
To this immense line of coast Cook gave the name of New South Wales,
from some resemblance that he saw to the coast about Swansea. By this
first voyage Cook had proved that neither New Holland nor Staaten
Land belonged to the great Antarctic continent, which remained
the sole myth bequeathed by the ancients which had not yet been
definitely removed from the maps. In his second voyage, starting
in 1772, he was directed to settle finally this problem. He went
at once to the Cape of Good Hope, and from there started out on
a zigzag journey round the Southern Pole, poking the nose of his
vessel in all directions as far south as he could reach, only pulling
up when he touched ice. In whatever direction he advanced he failed
to find any trace of extensive land corresponding to the supposed
Antarctic continent, which he thus definitely proved to be non-existent.
He spent the remainder of this voyage in rediscovering various
sets of archipelagos which preceding Spanish, Dutch, and English
navigators had touched, but had never accurately surveyed. Later
on Cook made a run across the Pacific from New Zealand to Cape
Horn without discovering any extensive land, thus clinching the
matter after three years' careful inquiry. It is worthy of remark
that during that long time he lost but four out of 118 men, and
only one of them by sickness.
Only one great problem to maritime geography still remained to be
solved, that of the north-west passage, which, as we have seen,
had so frequently been tried by English navigators, working from
the east through Hudson's Bay. In 1776 Cook was deputed by George
III. to attempt the solution of this problem by a new method. He
was directed to endeavour to find an opening on the north-west
coast of America which would lead into Hudson's Bay. The old legend
of Juan de Fuca's great bay still misled geographers as to this
coast. Cook not alone settled this problem, but, by advancing through
Behring Strait and examining both sides of it, determined that
the two continents of Asia and America approached one another as
near as thirty-six miles. On his return voyage he landed at Owhyee
(Hawaii), where he was slain in 1777, and his ships returned to
England without adding anything further to geographical knowledge.
Cook's voyages had aroused the generous emulation of the French,
who, to their eternal honour, had given directions to their fleet
to respect his vessels wherever found, though France was at that
time at war with England. In 1783 an expedition was sent, under
François de la Pérouse, to complete Cook's work. He explored the
north-east coast of Asia, examined the island of Saghalien, and
passed through the strait between it and Japan, often called by
his name. In Kamtschatka La Pérouse landed Monsieur Lesseps, who
had accompanied the expedition as Russian interpreter, and sent home
by him his journals and surveys. Lesseps made a careful examination
of Kamtschatka himself, and succeeded in passing overland thence
to Paris, being the first European to journey completely across
the Old World from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. La Pérouse
then proceeded to follow Cook by examining the coast of New South
Wales, and to his surprise, when entering a fine harbour in the
middle of the coast, found there English ships engaged in settling
the first Australian colony in 1787. After again delivering his
surveys to be forwarded by the Englishmen, he started to survey
the coast of New Holland, but his expedition was never heard of
afterwards. As late as 1826 it was discovered that they had been
wrecked on Vanikoro, an island near the Fijis.
We have seen that Cook's exploration of the eastern coast of Australia
was soon followed up by a settlement. A number of convicts were
sent out under Captain Philips to Botany Bay, and from that time
onward English explorers gradually determined with accuracy both
the coast-line and the interior of the huge stretch of land known
to us as Australia. One of the ships that had accompanied Cook on
his second voyage had made a rough survey of Van Diemen's Land,
and had come to the conclusion that it joined on to the mainland.
But in 1797, Bass, a surgeon in the navy, coasted down from Port
Jackson to the south in a fine whale boat with a crew of six men,
and discovered open sea running between the southernmost point and
Van Diemen's Land; this is still known as Bass' Strait. A companion
of his, named Flinders, coasted, in 1799, along the south coast from
Cape Leeuwin eastward, and on this voyage met a French ship at
Encounter Bay, so named from the _rencontre_. Proceeding farther,
he discovered Port Philip; and the coast-line of Australia was
approximately settled after Captain P. P. King in four voyages,
between 1817 and 1822, had investigated the river mouths.
[Illustration: THE EXPLORATION OF AUSTRALIA.]
The interior now remained to be investigated. On the east coast
this was rendered difficult by the range of the Blue Mountains,
honeycombed throughout with huge gullies, which led investigators
time after time into a cul-de-sac; but in 1813 Philip Wentworth
managed to cross them, and found a fertile plateau to the westward.
Next year Evans discovered the Lachlan and Macquarie rivers, and
penetrated farther into the Bathurst plains. In 1828-29 Captain
Sturt increased the knowledge of the interior by tracing the course
of the two great rivers Darling and Murray. In 1848 the German
explorer Leichhardt lost his life in an attempt to penetrate the
interior northward; but in 1860 two explorers, named Burke and Wills,
managed to pass from south to north along the east coast; while, in
the four years 1858 to 1862, John M'Dowall Stuart performed the
still more difficult feat of crossing the centre of the continent
from south to north, in order to trace a course for the telegraphic
line which was shortly afterwards erected. By this time settlements
had sprung up throughout the whole coast of Eastern Australia,
and there only remained the western desert to be explored. This
was effected in two journeys of John Forrest, between 1868 and
1874, who penetrated from Western Australia as far as the central
telegraphic line; while, between 1872 and 1876, Ernest Giles performed
the same feat to the north. Quite recently, in 1897, these two
routes were joined by the journey of the Honourable Daniel Carnegie
from the Coolgardie gold fields in the south to those of Kimberley
in the north. These explorations, while adding to our knowledge
of the interior of Australia, have only confirmed the impression
that it was not worth knowing.
[_Authorities:_ Rev. G. Grimm, _Discovsry and Exploration of Australia_
(Melbourne, 1888); A. F. Calvert, _Discovery of Australia_, 1893;
_Exploration of Australia_, 1895; _Early Voyages to Australia_,
Hakluyt Society.]