Land must be nearby.
They furled the sails, trying to sail as slowly and cautiously as they could under a grey sky, through fog, and then fog with hail and snow. But the relentless wind still drove them westwards, far too fast for safety. Any moment the ships might hit reefs or rocky islands. All they could do was keep up the lookouts and hope. The fog and snow continued. The men, noted Tasman briefly, were cold. They headed north again, trying to find respite from the wind.
Day after day they sailed north, rock weed still floating about the ship. At last now the fog lifted; the wind was a breeze, not a gale. Tasman could once again see the sun and stars, and calculate (not quite accurately) where they were. But they had no way of knowing what dangers lay between them and safety.
At last, on the afternoon of 24 November, they saw high green mountains, perhaps fifteen kilometres away. But how dangerous was the coast? It would be dark by the time they reached it. Again the ships’ captains conferred. They would head south, away from land, into what they hoped was safety, unless there were reefs or islands. They’d approach the unknown coast in daylight. They let down the sounding line and found the sea was two hundred metres deep, a sandy bottom covered in shells. They let down the line once more and found black pebbles, but still enough depth for safety.
When day dawned they were becalmed and had to wait till noon for a wind. Tasman made a note warning future sailors who came this way to run before the wind in a storm – the land appeared abruptly. The weed indicated that there might be small islands that could wreck a ship.
At last the breeze rose. The ships headed north towards the land, taking soundings as they went. Tasman named the bit of land he could see Van Diemen’s Land after Batavia’s colonial governor. Then the haze came down again. Tasman sailed on cautiously, as slowly as possible. The fog deepened and the rain was hard and cold, the day too dark to see. They kept sailing with most sails furled, peering out to try to map the coast. But there were no harbours, not even inlets that might offer safety.
On 29 November Tasman found what might be a safe passage to the shore. At 5 p.m. they attempted to sail into it, but the harsh north wind forced them away again and again. By now they were desperate. They needed fresh water, firewood, stores, and grass for the ships’ pigs and goats. But there was no harbour to be found, just a straight coast backed by forbidding mountains.
On 1 December their luck changed. An hour after sunset, in the dim light of dusk and with accommodating winds, they managed to find a fine harbour with a sandy bottom and a safe forty-metre depth, within rowing distance of the shore. The captains and the crew gave thanks to God for their deliverance ‘with grateful hearts’.6
Early the next morning they rowed the ship’s boat around a sandy point, drew her up on the shore and looked around. The land was high, but level; the trees tall and straight, not cultivated, but ‘growing naturally by the will of God’. There was a wild plant, not unlike edible samphire, and a freshwater stream, but so shallow that only a small bowl could scoop it out.
But there was something else that terrified them. The trees had notches about one and a half metres apart, cut as though they were handholds to allow men to climb up them. Some looked to be no more than four days’ old. Under the trees were the tracks and spoor of tigers. Far off among the trees they could hear sounds that seemed human, music and perhaps a gong.
This was a land of giants – and tigers too.
They left, swiftly. Large amounts of smoke from various points convinced them that it was not safe to linger.
But one task still had to be completed: they must fix a plate on a tree to formally claim this land of giants for the Dutch. They tried to row the boat ashore again, but the surf and wind prevented them. Finally, heroically, the ship’s carpenter swam to shore, through the breakers, pushing the pole and flag in front of him. The flag was flown and the plate fixed to a tree at what is now North Bay on the southeast coast of Tasmania. Tasman made a note of the tree to which the plate was fixed: this ‘new’ land, and its giants and tigers, was officially Dutch. The carpenter dived into the waves again and finally made it safely to the rowboat.
Tasman finds the Land of Gold
The two ships of the fleet sailed on, mapping the land but not landing. They saw smoke, but no boats, and assumed the giants had none. They tried to keep sailing north, but the strong wind forced them east – far further east than Tasman realised.
On 5 January they sighted the ‘giants’ they’d been expecting to see walking along the shore, armed with sticks or clubs. At last, on 19 December 1642, there it was, the land of rich gardens they’d expected, with orchards of fruit that smelled delicious and tall but definitely not giant warriors of brown and yellow skin wearing what seemed to be mats, their hair dawn back in the Japanese manner. The warriors weren’t wearing gold-plated armour, but there could still be no doubt: Tasman had found the massive Great South Land.
Except, of course, he hadn’t. Tasman had landed on the South Island of Aotearoa, or what is now New Zealand. But Tasman believed that he had reached a vast continent that stretched all the way to Staten Land, east of Cape Horn: the Land of Gold at last.
How could such a competent man get so much of what he saw so wrong?
Imagine you are at sea in the lurid and blinding whiteness of the fog. The wind hurls you forward, even with furled sails, or leaves you becalmed, so that none of your skill can manoeuvre your ship to safety. Without the stars or even the sun to guide you, you have no accurate way of telling how far you have come apart from lengths of knotted ropes, almost impossible to use in rough seas. Day after day the ships of your fleet are pushed who knows where, unable to hear anything beyond their two ships except the howl of wind, the clatter of hail or the eerie silence of the snow, knowing only that land, rocks or reef were nearby. Your stores are low, as is the supply of fresh water and firewood. And then the crew saw tiger tracks and scats, almost certainly that of Tasmanian tigers – savage enough to eat an ailing lamb, but not to attack grown men. But you would not have known that. Then those axe marks in the tree at North Bay hacked by giants – or foot and hand holds to collect sweet sugarwood sap, almost a body length apart, instead of more close together as footholds alone might be. (Or, if Tasman really did see giants, then there is a corner of Tasmanian history that no one else has come across.)
The crew were scared: scared to the point of hysteria and delusion. They had been scared for weeks, and terror is contagious. They expected giants, and that is what they saw. Tasman expected a Great South Land, and assumed he had found the tip of it.
Tasman mapped more of what he thought was his ‘new’ continent, then sailed back to Batavia via Tonga and Fiji, around the north of New Guinea. His journey had been a magnificent failure. He had brought his two tiny ships through some of the world’s most treacherous seas and along unknown and dangerous coasts, but he had found nothing that his Dutch masters valued.
He had, however, proved that what was now known as ‘New Holland’ wasn’t connected to Antarctica, as some maps had shown it to be, and that it was physically possible, although dangerous, to sail south of New Holland to get from the Indian to the Pacific Ocean. From now on, most new maps would refer to Australia as New Holland, recognising the Dutch claim to the land.
Tasman had also stirred up the dreams of gold. Just as Tasman had been so sure that there were giants lurking in the forests beyond the fog that had engulfed his ship that he did indeed see giants, the dream of ‘Beach’ and its gold needed no real evidence to keep spreading through the centuries. The new land that Tasman had touched on – even if he saw no evidence of gold there – might be the tip of a land of treasure. Terra Australis and its fortunes had to be out there somewhere in the vast blue of the southern hemisphere’s oceans.
Van Diemen hurriedly ordered a new expedition to secure the mythical Terra Australis for the Dutch before anyone else could settle there. In 1644, Tasman set out on his second voyage to map his Great South Land, amo
ng other instructions. Not surprisingly he was unsuccessful, as the land he was searching for didn’t exist, and the land he had found – New Zealand – didn’t stretch most of the way to Cape Horn. Setting off from Batavia, he travelled along the south coast of New Guinea into Torres Strait, which he assumed was only a bay and impassable, then returned along the coast to map most of northwestern Australia. His orders had been to explore the east coast too, and find out if New Holland was one great land or two. Instead he found reefs and rough weather. The east coast remained unmapped. Like James Cook more than a century later, Tasman regarded his voyages as failures.
The Dutch, pragmatically, stopped looking for the land of gold that wasn’t there. They already had a prosperous empire to run, after all.
But Tasman’s mistaken belief that he had found the tip of the Great South Land would be instrumental in sending yet another explorer out to survey Tasman’s ‘new’ land again – James Cook, who would then decide to disobey his orders and sail on to New Holland/Australia to map the east coast that would be chosen for England’s next supply fort in the Pacific, colonised by convicts.
And voyagers still crashed upon the coast of western Australia now and then on their way north to Batavia.
The publicity-hungry pirate
William Dampier would not have described himself as a pirate. He was an English privateer, someone who had permission from the king or queen to plunder other ships and give a proportion of their loot to the Crown. This made piratical murder, theft, pillage and rape on the high seas entirely respectable.
Dampier’s naval career wasn’t illustrious, but it is well known – he kept detailed memoirs and used them to publish a sensational book about his exploits. He and the rest of the pirate crew of the Cygnet were on their way to raid the Dutch East Indies when they beached the ship near what is now King Sound, Western Australia, to repair it. Pirate ships didn’t have easy access to shipyards so had to maintain their ships in out-of-the-way places – and a beach in the west of New Holland was about as remote as it got.
After a hair-raising trip involving being marooned by the captain of the Cygnet on the Nicobar Islands, a capsizing canoe, storms and other adventures, Dampier arrived back in England with only his journals and two tattooed slaves he’d purchased, who may or may not have been the prince and princess of the southern lands he claimed them to be. Dampier published his journals as A New Voyage Round the World,7 and exhibited his royal slaves both as publicity for his book and to make a living.
Dampier’s account of Australia is possibly the most damning of any European who had visited here. He claimed that the inhabitants were the most miserable people on the earth, who kept their eyes half-closed to keep the flies out. They had no houses, tools or religion, nor any roots or grains to eat or weapons except for ‘wooden swords’. The soil was dry and sandy with no trees that bore fruit or berries, few fish but many manatees and turtles. The inhabitants weren’t even any use as servants. The sailors had given some of the men old ragged clothes, hoping they’d carry the water barrels for them, but the new ‘servants’ just grinned. They took the clothes off while the sailors lugged the water barrels back to the ship.
Almost all of Dampier’s assumptions were wrong. The people he saw did have tools, weapons and religion – and far better-quality food and an easier lifestyle than most people in Britain at the time. But his book became a bestseller in 1697, and his descriptions of a barren land populated by miserably poor and wretched people effectively deterred any deliberate exploration or settlement of Western Australia for many years.
His description of the unwilling servants also illustrates another reason why there seem to have been no expeditions into Australia’s interior. To make a fortune from growing spices back then you needed cheap or even slave labour. An expedition usually needed ‘natives’ to carry supplies for vast distances; Dampier’s would-be servants wouldn’t even carry water to their ship.
But Dampier, too, and the British Admiralty, believed that the Great South Land of gold still waited for them, and that Tasman really had touched the edge of what must be a large, rich continent. Dampier was given command of an ageing English navy ship, the leaking, rotting Roebuck, so he could chart the east coast of New Holland.
Dampier headed back to New Holland via the route taken by Dutch sailors to the Spice Islands, then sailed along the west coast from what he called Shark Bay, where he shot a local man while looking for fresh water before heading further north. His opinion of New Holland didn’t improve.
By the time Dampier reached New Britain, his ship was leaking so badly he had to turn back towards England before even reaching Australia’s east coast. The Roebuck sank off Ascension Island in the Atlantic on the way back. Dampier was court-martialled and found guilty of cruelty, having had his lieutenant jailed in Brazil on the voyage. He was dismissed from the navy, his pay withheld for the voyage, and he was refused permission to ever captain a navy ship again. He published another book, the damning Voyage to New Holland, and went back to a pirate career. The English privateers concentrated on robbing the Spanish ships that carried silver from Mexico to the Philippines, well away from the routes to Australia.
Tasman’s misinterpretations of the land he’d seen would eventually bring James Cook to Australia, and then a colony. Dampier’s scathing assumptions were possibly the reason why it took the English almost another hundred years to send an explorer like Cook to investigate further.
Better land, but no safe harbour found
Visitors continued to bump into the west coast from time to time. In 1696 the Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh went to look for any survivors of the Ridderschap van Holland, which hadn’t been seen since it left Cape Town in 1694 and had probably been shipwrecked on the Abrolhos Islands off the West Australian coast. De Vlamingh gave the most favourable account so far on the land in the southwest. He found giant hopping rats (quokkas) on the island he named Rottnest (rat’s nest), now a popular island resort near Perth, and fragrant timber from sandalwood trees. He also explored up the Swan River, delighting in white cockatoos, blue and green parrots and two strange black swans, thus proving the predictions of those northern hemisphere naturalists who had stated that all swans must be black in the south, the opposite of swans in the north. This country was more fertile than the land to the north. The river provided fresh water and rudimentary shelter for a ship, but there were still no gold, spices, pigs, coconuts or bananas to stock the ships, nor was the Swan River a safe enough harbour to base a supply port there. Coconuts and bananas could be planted, pigs could be left to breed (as Cook would later do, thereby launching a feral pest in north Queensland). But the Swan River couldn’t easily be turned into a safe harbour.
De Vlamingh sailed up the coast and found the plate left at Dirk Hartog Island eighty years before, taking it and nailing up another in its place to show that this land still belonged to the Dutch. (When De Vlamingh brought it back to Batavia, the governor sent it on to Holland to prove the Dutch had claimed the land, along with a watercolour painting showing where it had been found, a bit like taking a photo today.) Finally the ship sailed away with a volley of shot to celebrate leaving what even he called ‘the wretched south land’.
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A return voyage for the plate
In 1801 French explorer Louis de Freycinet found de Vlamingh’s engraved plate on Dirk Hartog Island but was ordered to return it by his captain after making a copy of the inscription. He returned in 1818 to recover it and take it to France, where it was eventually delivered to the Académie française via a shipwreck on the Falkland Islands. After the liberation of Paris in World War 2 the plate was discovered on a bottom shelf among other dusty old plates, and presented to Australia as a gesture of goodwill in 1947. It is now in the Maritime Museum in Fremantle.
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Abandoned for riches elsewhere
The world’s far south was still a place of mystery, possible home to the unexplored land of gold (which Tasman may
have landed on) or even another great continent further east. It was even the site as the imaginary world of Lilliput, in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels.
But there were riches elsewhere. The English were carving out empires from the existing principalities of India and Pakistan. The Dutch had their spices in the East Indies. The Spanish were busy in South America. The French had their territories in North America, and the Chinese ruled their own empire.
Two more East India Company vessels were shipwrecked off the west coast of Australia in 1712 and 1727, and two more Dutch expeditions followed in 1705 and 1756. By 1700 most of the western, northern and large parts of the south of the continent had been mapped. Most maps had New Guinea as part of Australia as it had been tens of thousands of years earlier when the seas were lower during the previous Ice Age.
Only the east coast was unknown territory for Europeans. The most obvious place to approach it was from the north, but the Great Barrier Reef acted as exactly that – a barrier to further exploration. And why bother? Why think that the east was any better than the deserts, scrub, or the land of tigers and giants already mapped?
The trepang trade
From about 1720 Indonesian fisherman sailed their praus to northern Australia each year to spear or net trepang. They boiled them, removed their guts and boiled them again in big pots with mangrove bark to give them a better colour and flavour. After that the trepang were dried in a smokehouse and taken back to the mostly Chinese merchants in Macassar, who exported them to China where they were used in soup or valued as an aphrodisiac.
The trepang fisherman set up big camps along the coast, usually in places that could be defended from attack, like promontories or small islands. They never ventured further inland as the land was strongly defended by the local people. The trepang fishermen, too, may have been deterred from travelling further east by the hidden teeth of the Great Barrier Reef.
Let the Land Speak Page 10