The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  It made sense, of a kind, to assume that the further south one went, the more grotesque life must become. What demonic freaks, what affronts to normality, might the Southern Continent not produce? And what trials for the mariner? Waterspouts, hurricanes, clouds of darkness at midday, ship-eating whales, islands that swam and had tusks—this imagined country was perhaps infernal, its landscape that of Hell itself. Within its inscrutable otherness, every fantasy could be contained; it was the geographical unconscious. So there was a deep, ironic resonance in the way the British, having brought the Pacific at last into the realm of European consciousness, having explored and mapped it, promptly demonized Australia once more by chaining their criminals on its innocent dry coast. It was to become the continent of sin.

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  THE MAN WHO named the ocean el mar Pacifico and was the first to cross its stupendous expanse was the Portuguese captain Fernão de Magalhães or, as he is known to history, Ferdinand Magellan. During the entire voyage between Portugal and Guam, he glimpsed only two little uninhabited islands near the strait that now bears his name. “Que de seu Rey mostrando se agrauado / Caminho ha de fazer nunca cuidado,” wrote Camoëns in his praise: “Feeling affronted by his King, he took a route unimagined by others before.”2 Having opened the westward way to the Spice Islands with his epic voyage, Magellan was killed at Mactan in the Philippines in 1521.

  Spanish explorers who followed him into the Pacific at the end of the sixteenth century were seeking the glory of God and a Southern Continent full of gold. Sailing out of Peru in 1567, blown by the Pacific trades across the low latitudes between 18° S. and the equator, Alvaro de Mendana brought his ships four-fifths of the way across the Pacific to an island group which—after King Solomon’s fabled gold mines of Ophir—is still known as the Solomons. Perhaps these were the outer markers of the Southern Continent, perhaps not; half-mad with starvation, thirst and scurvy, Mendana and his conquistadors had to retreat. He tried again twenty-eight years later, in 1595, but the Solomons had vanished and no one would find them again for two centuries. They are at about 160° E. longitude; navigational instruments were so inaccurate that their estimated position varied by a full seventy-five degrees, between longitude 145° E. and 140° W.

  Piloted by the young Portuguese Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, Mendana struggled on to the west, finding no continent, only scattered islands. His track lay too far north to encounter Australia. Seven months out of Peru, on the island of Santa Cruz, Mendana died. The great expedition, which was to have claimed terra australis in the name of Philip III, dissolved in a nightmare of violence and malaria, but de Quiros brought its demoralized survivors westward to Manila and then returned across the Pacific to Acapulco and safety.

  This, one might think, would have put anyone off continent-hunting in the Pacific. It did not stop de Quiros. Somewhere to the west, on the blind blue eyeball of the world’s greatest ocean, the Southern Continent must lie, and its discovery would be the climax both of Spanish imperialism and of the Church Militant’s mission on earth. From Acapulco, de Quiros struggled back to Spain and thence to Rome, bombarding the Pope with letters about terra australis and its millions of innocent heathen souls, ripe for salvation. It took him two years to raise the money for three ships and three hundred men from Philip III. In December 1605, de Quiros sailed to find the continent.

  He took a new track, further south than either Magellan or Mendana, well below the Tropic of Capricorn. He ran through the Tuamotu Archipelago, passed north of Samoa and, after five months at sea, saw land to the south and southeast—high mountains, their peaks veiled in clouds, retreating to the horizon. On May 3, 1606, de Quiros’s fleet anchored in a bay. They had reached the New Hebrides group at 167° E., 15° S. De Quiros decided without any further evidence that this must be the southland and, fast succumbing to religious mania, named it Austrialia del Espiritu Santo,* created an order of nobility, distributed taffeta crosses for almost every man-jack on his fleet to wear, christened the stream that ran into the bay the Jordan, and announced in a prophetic ecstasy that the New Jerusalem would be built there among the coral reefs—which, in his feverishly optimistic mind, were already turning into quarries of porphyry and agate.

  All this was an illusion, but de Quiros, convinced of its truth, sailed back to Mexico while Luis Vaez de Torres, the captain of his second ship, pressed on across the Pacific to Manila, passing just north of Australia between Cape York Peninsula and New Guinea through the strait that now bears his name. But he hugged the New Guinea coast and did not see the continent.

  After eight years’ struggle to raise another fleet, de Quiros died in 1614, his quest unfulfilled. There is some intriguing evidence, in the form of the so-called Dieppe Maps copied by spies from secret Portuguese charts and presented to the future Henri II in 1536 (one of which shows a Southern Continent strikingly similar in eastern profile to Australia’s), that the northeast and east coasts of Australia had been found and charted before 1550 by a Portuguese fleet sailing south from the Spice Islands. If this voyage was made, it would have been illicit. Under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Portugal and Spain had agreed to divide the Earth along the great diameter of 51° W. and 129° E. longitude. Thus, everything east of 129° W., which passes through Australia, became part of the Spanish imperium—including the east coast of Australia. Portugal had no rights of exploration there and could well have chosen to keep the results of such a voyage secret. However, the originals of the Dieppe Maps, along with any logs and documents that may have amplified them, were destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. The only other relics of European contact with Australia before 1600 are two Portuguese brass cannon, datable around 1475–1525, found at Broome Bay in northwest Australia—evidence of another voyage, but this time on Portugal’s side of the Tordesillas line.3

  There had been Asian landings in the sixteenth century, but none resulted in colonization. They were made by Makassan traders from the island of Celebes, who ran down the northern monsoons in their slat-sailed praus to what is now Arnhem Land, on the north coast of the continent.4 The goal of their 1,200-mile voyages was a sea slug, the trepang or bêche-de-mer. These creatures, which looked like withered penises when smoked and dried, were Indonesia’s largest export to the Chinese, who esteemed them as an aphrodisiac. Thus, until the nineteenth century, Australia’s sole contribution to the outside world was millions of sea slugs.

  In 1605 the Dutch East India Company in Bantam sent a pinnace, the Duyfken, under Captain Willem Jansz, to see if New Guinea had gold and spices. The little boat entered the Torres Strait, turned south after coasting New Guinea for more than two hundred miles and found a cape that its skipper named Keerweer (“turn back”). The place was wilderness, and “wild, black, cruel savages” killed some of the crew. Jansz had found a northern promontory of Australia.

  In 1616 another tessera was added to the edge of the puzzle by Dirck Hartog, an Amsterdam captain who reached the west Australian coast in his ship Eendracht and nailed up an engraved pewter dish as proof of his visit. In 1618 another vessel on the outward voyage to Java, the Zeewulf, glimpsed more coast to the north.

  The next year, Frederick de Houtman, an outward-bound captain who steered further south from the Cape of Good Hope than most, landed on the west coast of Australia south of modern Perth. In time, more Dutch mariners offered their fragments of information: Jan Carstens in 1623, and Francis Pelsart in 1629. Clearly, the southland seemed to be worth exploring, with the expectation that it held more than sand, reefs and choleric savages. To that end, Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company, organized in 1642 a grand expedition that would map “the remaining unknown part of the terrestrial globe.” Abel Tasman, its commander, was to sail from Batavia to Mauritius, drop south to latitude 54° S. and then sail east until he found the Southland.

  He missed it completely. Tasman’s two vessels, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen, sailed right past Australia without once glimpsing its mainland; his c
ourse had been too far south. The only part of the country he touched was an island in the southwest which he guessed was mainland and named for his patron: Van Diemen’s Land. Two centuries later, when that name had become so tarnished with stories of criminality and cruelty that respectable settlers would no longer endure it, the island was renamed Tasmania after its discoverer.

  It looked poor and wild. No natives showed themselves, although notched trees and traces of cooking-fires were seen. There was little to remark. Tasman sailed east across what is now the Tasman Sea and discovered the west coast of New Zealand. Sailing on into the Pacific he discovered Tonga and Fiji as well, before returning to Batavia in June 1643. The voyage, as far as van Diemen and his merchant colleagues were concerned, was a fiasco. Tasman had found no people to trade with, no commodities to exploit. So they ordered Tasman out on a second voyage, to see if the north coast of Australia held anything worthwhile. Tasman sailed in 1644, but the only people he found on that coast were black, “naked beach-roving wretches, destitute even of rice … miserably poor, and in many places of a very bad disposition.” There would be no trade. With this, the Dutch East India Company’s interest in Australia languished.

  The last seventeenth-century explorer to try the northwest coast of Australia was an English buccaneer, William Dampier, in 1688. He found nothing but the propertyless men of New Holland; his description of them is one of the minor classics of racism:

  The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the World. The Hodmadods [Hottentots] of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are Gentlemen to these … and setting aside their humane shape, they differ but little from Brutes. They are tall, strait-bodied, and thin, with small long Limbs. They have great Heads, round Foreheads, and great Brows. Their Eye-lids are always half closed, to keep the Flies out of their Eyes … therefore they cannot see far …

  They are long-visaged, and of a very unpleasing aspect; having no one graceful feature in their faces.

  They have no houses, but lye in the open Air, without any covering; the Earth being their Bed, and the Heaven their Canopy … The Earth affords them no food at all. There is neither Herb, Pulse, nor any sort of Grain, for them to eat, that we saw; nor any sort of Bird or Beast that they can catch, having no instruments wherewithal to do so.

  I did not perceive that they did worship anything.5

  Such was the Ignoble Savage, orphan of nature. Dampier’s visit to the northwest coast produced no discoveries, but his book was popular in England and its notion of a Southern Continent—still a geographical hypothesis separate from New Holland—struck a responsive chord. The Spaniards and Dutch had failed in the Pacific; the eighteenth century would make it either a French or a British ocean.

  So the direction of approach shifted again, and ships once more began probing the Pacific from the east, coming round the Horn or through the Straits of Magellan: Roggeveen in 1721, Byron in 1764, Wallis and Carteret in 1766, Bougainville in 1766 and 1769. They all sailed too far north in the trade winds to find the Australian coast; only Bougainville kept far enough south and would have discovered Queensland had he not been turned back by its coral rampart, the Great Barrier Reef, and gone north like the rest. They were all resolute men, but there were some problems courage alone could not beat. The first of these was scurvy.

  This disease, caused by vitamin C deficiency, was the bane of every seaman. The victim weakened; his flesh puffed up and his joints were wracked with gouty pain; his teeth loosened while his gums swelled and turned black, so that he could not eat. Scurvy could kill most of a ship’s company on a long voyage. The simple cure for it was fruit (especially lemons or oranges) and green vegetables. Captains did not know this; some had noticed that scurvy victims recovered in port on a green diet, but fruit and vegetables would not keep long at sea. In mid-Pacific, Magellan’s crew had to eat a mixture of biscuit crumbs and rat droppings; then they ate the rats; at last they sucked and chewed the ship’s leather chafing-gear in their desperate need for animal protein. Scurvy afflicted them so badly that to chew their rations, they had to keep slicing the swollen tissue of their gums away. From de Quiros in the sixteenth century to Bougainville in the eighteenth, none of the Pacific explorers suffered as badly from scurvy as Magellan and his crew.

  Scurvy chilled the ambition of every voyage. Because they did not know the causes of the disease, they could not control it. In 1768–71, James Cook first beat scurvy on a long voyage by the regular issue of the proper anti-scorbutics. By then, it was known to be a dietary problem. Dr. James Lind, in 1753, had hit on the right cure: a daily dose of citrus juice. Yet neither Cook (who always worried about the health of his crew) nor the officers of the Admiralty’s Victualling Board read Lind’s treatise, and instead of citrus juice Cook tried other anti-scorbutics: sauerkraut, malt, and half a ton of “portable soup,” made by boiling down meat broth into a gummy cake, the ancestor of the bouillon cube. In combination, these worked. Throughout the three-year voyage of the Endeavour, Cook did not lose a man from scurvy—a feat without precedent in the history of seafaring. Malt-juice and pickled cabbage put Europeans in Australia, as microchip circuitry would put Americans on the moon.

  The other obstacle to Pacific exploration had been finding the longitude. Exploration means nothing unless you know your daily position, but to do this two coordinates are needed. The first is latitude, the measure of one’s distance from the equator. The second is longitude, the distance between a fixed prime meridian (for British navigators, that of Greenwich) and the meridian of one’s position. (A meridian is the shortest line drawn from the north to the south pole on the Earth’s curved surface.) A ship’s latitude was easy to figure and had been since antiquity. But without longitude, one could not determine one’s position with any certainty. Mariners had to make do with guesswork, based on the ocean current, the wind and the speed of the ship. Mistakes of more than 2,000 miles were common on the early Pacific voyages, because accumulated longitude error could not be checked. In calculating the longitude of the Philippines, Magellan’s pilot was wrong by some 53 degrees—more than a seventh of the world’s circumference.

  The more they thought of Empire, the more the British realized the need for a longitude fixing method. As England began to challenge Dutch mercantile supremacy in the Far East, the more urgent this became. In 1714 the British government put up a prize of £20,000, a fortune, for anyone who could come up with a method by which a navigator could fix longitude at sea that would be correct within thirty miles at the end of a six-week open-water voyage.

  By Cook’s time, there were two systems of finding longitude. Both relied on the fact that as the earth spins, local time alters from place to place—thus, when it is noon in London, it is 7 a.m. in New York. The Earth rotates once a day; and as there are 24 hours in a day and 360 degrees of longitude around the equator, an hour’s difference in time represented a shift of 15 degrees in longitude. So if one knew when and at what angle a given astronomical event would be seen at Greenwich, and observed it from, say, a spot in the Pacific at that same angle, the difference in hours multiplied by 15 would yield the longitude in degrees. This constant was the angle between the moon or sun and a fixed star, such as Polaris, and was known as “lunar distance.” The English Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, was the first man to publish a complete tabulation of future lunar distances in relation to Greenwich Mean Time; this was the famous Nautical Almanac, first issued in 1766. Armed with “Mister Masculine’s Tables,” along with some basic trigonometry and some well-made instruments, any captain could now find his longitude. That was the first method. The second was to carry Greenwich Mean Time on board ship, compare it with local time and multiply the difference by 15 as before. That was far quicker, but it required a chronometer, a clock more accurate and durable than any other. If it ran fast or slow, every minute it lost or gained would mean an error of longitude of nearly 20 miles on the equator. It had to stand up to salt, corrosion and the ceaseless pounding
of a ship at sea. Such a chronometer was finally built in 1764 by the great John Harrison.

  For his first Pacific voyage, Cook had no chronometer, preferring to rely on lunar distance calculations. But the Endeavour was well-equipped with other instruments, as measurement rather than discovery was the main purpose of her voyage. Her passengers were to observe from Tahiti the transit of Venus across the Sun’s face. The importance of this celestial event was that, if accurately observed and recorded, it could help establish the earth’s distance from the sun. The last time that Earth, Venus and the sun had come into line was in 1761; the silhouette of Venus on the solar disk was watched and timed by 120 observers scattered across the world from Russia to South Africa, but even so the readings had been fuzzy and the British wanted to improve them. From Tahiti, on the predicted date of June 3, 1769, the whole transit would be seen in daytime, in clear air.

  After Cook completed this task, he could then pursue his explorations. The Admiralty wanted him either to find or to eliminate the Southern Continent. He must do this by dropping south of Tahiti, below the tracks of all previous Pacific navigators, to 40° S. latitude. He must then make a sweep westward, keeping between 35° and 40° S. until he either found the Southern Continent or reached “the Eastern side of the Land discover’d by Tasman and now called New Zeland.”6 One way or the other, a myth that had haunted exploration for centuries would be cleared up.

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