The Savage Shore Read online

  The search for the great south land began in ancient times and was a matter of colourful myth and cartographical fantasy until the Dutch East India Company started sending ships in the early seventeenth century.

  Graham Seal tells stories from the centuries it took to discover Australia through many voyages by the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Macassans. Captain Cook arrived long after the continent had been found. This is a gripping account of danger at sea, dramatic shipwrecks, courageous castaways, murder, much missing gold, and terrible loss of life. It is also a period of amazing feats of navigation and survival against the odds.

  We now know the Dutch were far more active in the early exploration of Australia than is generally understood, and were most likely the first European settlers of the continent.

  ‘It is great to have a book that covers the whole, truly amazing, story of the maritime discovery of Australia. It also adds great insight into the mostly tragic clash of cultures between the Europeans and indigenous people.’ - John Longley AM, Chair of the Duyfken Foundation.

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Graham Seal 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  All attempts have been made to locate the owner of copyright material. If you have any information in this regard please contact the publisher at the address below.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 107 6

  eISBN 978 1 92526 764 8

  Internal and cover design by Lisa White

  Cover image: The Gust (circa 1680) by Willem van de Velde the Younger (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).

  Map by MAPgraphics

  Index by Puddingburn Publishing Services

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Introduction

  Notes on usage

  Prologue

  1 Imagining the unknown Southland

  2 First encounters

  3 'More like monsters'

  4 Blood islands

  5 Paper voyages

  6 Death of the dragon

  7 Cliffs of fire

  8 The ship of doom

  9 Skeleton coasts

  10 Empires collide

  11 The unknown coast

  12 The last legend

  13 Surviving the Southland

  Afterword: With the bones; Picture section

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  Captain Cook did not discover Australia, despite what generations of school children were once taught and many still believe. The fact is that Cook only charted the east coast of the continent then claimed it in the name of the British Crown. Modern Australia was not discovered at all. It was revealed. Very slowly, through the mists of time and space and the explorations of many, the location, size and shape of the great southern land was uncovered.

  This book is not so much about discovery as about encounters—first contacts with the landmass we now know as Australia. As the unknown continent at the end of the world emerged from myth into history and from speculation into geography, so it was found to have further secrets to reveal. These were not only about strange plants, animals and insects but also about its people and their beliefs and customs.

  The southern landmass was first settled over 50,000 years ago by the peoples now called ‘Aborigines’. Over this extensive time they evolved a diverse and complex society, linked by mythology and profound spiritual connection to the land. Then, perhaps 2000 to 3000 years or more ago, another group of people occupied the Torres Strait Islands, and they, too, developed into a defined society.

  When Europeans did arrive in the south, the consequences for these groups of first Australians were almost unrelievedly bad. Compared with European society, indigenous Australia was seen as primitive and, initially at least, as having little of worth for trade or colonisation. For their part, the indigenous people were often uninterested in almost everything that Europeans handed them in the form of trade goods, trinkets and clothing. The gap between these cultures was immense. But subsequent history meant that the indigenous and colonialist story would inevitably become the same story.

  Although this book is about the continent—and island—of Australia, its scope is global. It begins in ancient pagan, Christian and Muslim legends about a great landmass at the far end of the earth. It embraces the epic voyages and migrations from the old world to the new worlds of the East Indies and the Americas then, finally, to modern Australia. The effects of these many acts of exploration and colonisation by mariners in search of trade, treasure and scientific glory are still being worked out today. As new discoveries come to light, unexpected possibilities arise that reveal a very different view of the past. Surprising connections of trade, culture and even genetics are being found, or credibly suggested, between peoples previously thought to have had no contact with each other.

  The consequences of these collisions and connections have not always been happy ones. The lure of rich trade and possession of new lands that energised the extraordinary mercantile expansion of Europe through the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries led often to violence against indigenous peoples, including abduction, murder and, most ruinously, the destruction of age-old cultures and the languages that carried them.

  On the other side of the unbalanced ledger, 300 or more Europeans were unlucky enough to be cast away on the alien shores of the southern land, and this was more than two centuries before the First Fleet anchored at Botany Bay in 1788. There may well have been many more. A few of these hardy souls were lucky enough to escape. Most did not, and the only notions we have of what their fates might have been are bound up in mystery and legend. In part, this book tells some remarkable stories of endurance and survival. But extreme as the fates of those still-missing castaways are likely to have been, their sufferings contributed to the gradual revelation of the unknown southern land from the ignorance and myth that had kept it hidden it for so long.

  Through this larger narrative run many other threads. One, illustrated here in some magnificent cartography, is the development of ‘the secret atlas’. Ships’ masters and navigators laboured to chart the southern coasts and waters in which they found themselves, sometimes catastrophically. These carefully preserved charts, logs and journals were sent back to Europe where an efficient cottage industry produced new maps of the world, including all these hard-won details of cliffs, bays, estuaries, rivers, reefs and islands, to help other mariners plot safer courses to wherever their destinations might have been. In an important sense, modern Australia is the product of those immensely risky labours by so many people over many centuries.

  Another, perhaps unforeseen, thread of the tale is the role of religious belief. Until relatively recent times, the large majority of human beings have worshipped one or more gods, along with attending to whatever practices and expressions of dogma were required of such beliefs. Here, we are brought hard up against the powerful faiths of Catholics, various forms of Protestantism, as well as a unique indigenous belief system. In those times and in those places, such beliefs controlled and shaped the way people saw the world and their place in it. As always, such beliefs also determined to a great extent how they would deal with those ‘others’ who were not of their faith but so obviously different in appearance, language, manner and almost all other vestiges of human identity.

  This worked in both directions. Not only did Aboriginal peoples coming into contact with questing Europeans react to them in ways consistent with their spiritual beliefs, so of course did Europeans react to the ways of the ‘natives’ or ‘indians’, as they often called them. In ships’ journals, official records and private documents, we read continually of the chasms of mutual incomprehension that separated those already in occupation and the newcomers. We also read how Europeans often justified their actions in the name of their god. These activities included ‘the skin trade’, the matter-of-fact abduction of indigenous men and women and the souveniring, display and study of their body parts. They also included the appropriation of anything the indigenous people held that the explorers thought valuable, as well as the legal possessioning of their lands by proclamations, pieces of paper and parchment, and a range of inscribed pewter plates, wooden plaques and messages in bottles.

  Religion was also important in other ways. This was a time of European religious reform, even revolution, in which the new Protestant beliefs were challenging the orthodox views and practices of the established church of Rome. In these circumstances, people tended to adopt—sometimes under coercion—especially firm convictions of one kin
d or another. They were often sustained by these beliefs and prayers through incredible hardship and seemingly hopeless circumstances. As well as having a positive result, overzealous adherence to a particular creed produced one of the world’s most horrific sagas of shipwreck, mutiny, rape, murder and bloody retribution. The consequences of that same belief system have also played into a remarkable pre-1788 genetic connection between Australian Aboriginal people and those escaping to North America from religious persecution in reformation Europe.

  The baser end of the human spectrum is also represented in the form of greed for sunken treasures and exploitation of natural resources. But tales of dynamiting, arson and shadowy syndicates intent on plundering wrecks of their valuable cargoes are counterpointed by the efforts of those wishing to study and preserve these heritage sites for future generations and for research. These activities are ongoing and are continually throwing up intriguing new possibilities in the story of the ‘Southland’.

  And in the end, there remain the legends. These include shipwrecks and pirates, sunken and buried treasures and their sometimes colourful hunters, lost colonies of Europeans wandering in the arid outback, as well as mysterious stone circles and other objects, inscriptions and artefacts allegedly stumbled upon by early and latter-day explorers, escaped convicts or pioneers. All these yarns are part of the largely untold story of Australia’s hidden pre-1788 history. Together, they tell how the southern continent was, as poet Bernard O’Dowd wrote in his 1900 poem ‘Australia’, the ‘Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space’.

  NOTES ON USAGE

  The timespan of this book and the numerous nations and cultures which appear in it means that many systems of writing and measuring time, distance and weight were in use. For the sake of readability, these have usually been standardised in the closest possible approximation to current usage in accordance with the following notes.

  Spelling

  During the period covered by this book, the spelling of almost every word of more than a few syllables could be wildly divergent, even when written by the same hand in the same document. Generally, variant spellings in quotations from primary sources have been regularised and correlated with any other mention of that word or name, other than in verbatim quotations from original documents.

  Time

  In 1582 it was finally decided that the prevailing Christian calendar, originally introduced by Julius Caesar, was unacceptably inaccurate. The modern, or Gregorian, calendar of 365 days, with a leap year every fourth year, was adopted. As with most innovations, effective change was a long time coming and there was a lengthy transition period in which both systems were in use. (The Julian calendar is still used by many orthodox churches.) Unless otherwise noted, all dates from this period have been regularised in accordance with the modern calendar.

  Personal names

  Dutch male surnames were usually ended in ‘soon’ or ‘zoon’, meaning ‘son of’, as in the English language ‘Johnson’ and so on. Thus, the first European thought to have walked on Australia was Willem Janszoon, though his name is usually rendered as ‘Jansz’ in modern usage. It was common practice for the suffix to be dropped, except in official usage (and even then the practice was not consistent). Generally, I have retained the most common version of the name that appears in quotations from the primary source documents on which this book is substantially based (though these can vary wildly as well, even within the same document). Unless the longer form has become closely associated with a particular individual, the shorter form is used.

  The names of many French and some British navigators were sometimes extravagantly lengthy. I have usually preferred the short versions by which they are generally known to history.

  ‘Australia’

  Names for what we now know as ‘Australia’ were many. They included Terra Australis (southern land), Terra Australis Incognita (the unknown south land), ‘Beach’, the ‘Great South Land of the Holy Spirit’ (Espíritu Santo), the ‘Great South Land’, ‘New Holland’, even ‘Terre Napoléon’, as well as others bestowed by various navigators from Willem Jansz to Matthew Flinders. Unless referring specifically to one or more of these original designations, the form ‘Southland’ is generally used to refer to the whole island continent.

  Van Diemen’s Land was renamed Tasmania in 1856, an official recognition of its European discoverer, Abel Janszoon Tasman.

  Ships and boats

  Readers may be slightly bewildered by the many different types of ships and boats mentioned in primary sources quoted here, particularly those related to the Dutch East India Company (VOC). There are yachts, galiots, skiffs, flutes, pinnaces and a host of others. There is no point trying to regularise these as they were not used consistently either by sailors or VOC officials at the time, nor by anyone since, including translators. It is not uncommon to find the same ship referred to by two different types in the same document, and sailors themselves would often use more than one term to describe their craft. Worse, few of the Dutch-type terms coincide with any English language equivalents, contributing to the confusion.

  Here is a rough guide to the styles of vessel mentioned in the text:

  flute (fleut, fluyt)—a merchant ship, usually with three square-rigged masts and multiple decks

  caravelle—a small and manoeuvrable Portuguese sailing ship corvette—a small to medium armed sailing ship, probably of French origin

  retourschip—not a type of ship so much as a term for larger VOC ships that made the outward and homeward journey from the Netherlands to the East Indies and back; Zeewijk, Batavia and the Zuytdorp were of this class.

  jacht (jagt)—a smaller and faster vessel than the retourschips; the Vergulde Draeck was classed as a jacht.

  Smaller boats belonging to the ships were of similarly varied types and are also described inconsistently. They included:

  cock-boat—usually a small ship’s boat

  longboat—often, but not always, the same as a whale boat, both being open boats with oars and, sometimes, sails

  galiot—originally a vessel with oars as well as sails, later a general term for a smaller trade ship

  gig—a term that could be used for almost any small boat used to convey people to and from larger vessels

  pinnace—usually a smaller sailing ship, but the term could also be used to describe a rowboat or small sailing boat

  skiff—a small boat, much like a dinghy

  skow or scow—improvised vessel, or raft.

  Dutch weights, measures and distances

  Dutch documents mention many different terms for the carrying capacity of ships, bottles, crates, casks and so forth. Not only could these terms vary from region to region, they could also vary from occupation to occupation. Where there is a need to indicate any of these weights and measures, I have given the approximate equivalent in modern metric form (though interpretations of these can vary).

  Distance was usually measured, by Dutch mariners at least, in miljen, known in English as a ‘Dutch mile’ (milj). This is usually said to be roughly 5 kilometres, though some sources say it is as short as 1 kilometre. Such measurements have been left as they appear in the primary sources. In general discussion, they are approximately converted to their modern metric equivalents, as are English miles.

  Longitude and latitude

  It was not until the end of the period covered by this book, and even later in some instances, that mariners had reasonably accurate chronometers. The deficiencies of earlier instruments meant that otherwise carefully calculated degrees of longitude were wrong, sometimes fatally, as the number of apparently avoidable shipwrecks attests. Unless there is a need to do otherwise, on those occasions where a position of longitude and latitude is given, it is in the corrected form.

  Charts and maps

  A ‘chart’ is usually defined as a nautical representation of coasts and waters, including conditions beneath the water, and used for navigation purposes. It is distinguished from a ‘map’ which mainly locates surface physical features of land. It is often said that a chart is a working document by which a course can be plotted, while a map is a static representation of places, topography and distances and so cannot be used for finding one’s way.