The Savage Shore Read online

  Generally, the terms ‘chart’ and ‘map’ are used interchangeably in this book, though there are occasions, such as in the VOC and other cartographical works, where charts have been used to construct large-scale maps and atlases.

  Nationalities

  At the beginning of the period covered by this book, and quite far into it, the idea of a ‘nation’ is generally anachronistic. Apart from Britain and France, much of Europe had not yet been ‘unified’ into the countries we are mostly familiar with today. When the VOC was formed, it operated within a loose confederation of independent provinces. While many of its employees came from these areas, there were also many from other parts of Europe, with different languages, customs and ethnic histories. Even within these areas there were groups—sometimes large and numerous—with different traditions. While recognising these issues, the term ‘Dutch’ is generally used in this book to mean those who worked aboard or were carried by VOC ships. When it is necessary to make distinctions of ethnicity, culture or nationality, this is made clear in the text.

  Indigenous group names

  The indigenous names of local peoples are, as far as possible, those given in the primary sources. These names are often contested by anthropologists, linguists and by indigenous people themselves. For a long time, Norman Tindale’s map of Aboriginal Australia was the most authoritative source for group names but is now often considered inaccurate to a greater or lesser extent. More recent attempts to map territories and languages allow for a large degree of flexibility. Sometimes, lack of precise information means it is only possible to refer to the ‘local people’ or ‘indigenous inhabitants’. In modern times, many indigenous groups have formed collectivities under names such as Koori, Nyungar, Yamadji and Murri, among others (mostly variously spelled).

  Terms for indigenous people

  At the time covered by this book, European words for indigenous people encountered through colonial expansionism are nearly all objectionable today. They included ‘indians’, ‘natives’, ‘moors’, ‘savages’ and, occasionally, ‘kaffirs’. As much of this book is based on original documents from the time, these terms inevitably appear in quotations from the sources. In writing about these matters, some of the period terms are occasionally used to maintain the appropriate sense of time and place in the narrative. In other cases, terms generally acceptable today are used, such as ‘Aboriginal’, ‘indigenes’, ‘Islanders’ (for Torres Strait Islanders) and occasionally ‘first Australians’. In some cases I have followed the geographic precedents set by those who made first contact, such as François Péron who referred to the people he met as ‘Diemenlanders’.

  The names of deceased Aboriginal people will inevitably appear, hopefully causing no distress.

  Place names

  Many places—bays, islands, peninsulas, rivers, etc.—have had different names at different times. For instance, King George Sound was named by Europeans ‘King George the Third’s Sound’ and is also sometimes called ‘King George’s Sound’. This book generally uses what are today the most common names and their rendering.

  In this book the terms ‘Spice Islands’, the ‘East Indies’ or sometimes the ‘Dutch East Indies’ refer generally to the region now known as Indonesia and the Malay Archipelago.

  PROLOGUE

  It is March 1658. Upper steersman Abraham Leeman and thirteen sailors are cast away on the far side of the earth in a vast emptiness called by many ‘the unknown south land.’ Searching for the Dutch East India Company’s Vergulde Draeck, lost two years earlier, Leeman and his men are separated from their ship. The captain has sent them ashore in a small boat to search for survivors, despite the foul weather bearing down on them. The storm hits. Leeman and his crew are trapped overnight on the beach. When the rain clouds clear away next morning, their ship is nowhere to be seen in the infinity of ocean to their north, south and west.

  Leeman has one small boat, hardly any food or fresh water and little equipment. His men are terrified. They look to him and his navigator’s skills to save them. Through the wind and waves, Leeman calls out to his god, time and time again. The choice for him and his men is a lingering death or a desperate dash for survival through treacherous waters along savage shores. After days of prayer and soul-searching, Abraham Leeman decides what he will do.

  1

  Imagining the unknown Southland

  A fabled southern landmass has existed in the world’s imagination from ancient times. A mysterious continent was seemingly conjured from the earliest human attempts to record the world and its geography. The blurred lines between legend and fact were the first feature of the Southland and continue to influence our understanding of it. Sometimes, the myths turned out to be not so far from the truth. But even if not factual, the myths have persisted anyway.

  Ancient myths

  From at least the fifth century BC, the Greeks were aware that the world was a globe and speculated about a large landmass in the extreme south to balance the lands they knew in the northern hemisphere. Around the late fourth century BC, a writer known as Euhemeris claimed to have travelled to a mysterious island in the Indian Ocean known as Panchaea, a land rich with precious metals and the home of a people born of the soil. Also living on the island were said to be a number of different ethnic groups from the ancient world. One of these groups had been led from Crete to Panchaea by the Greek god Zeus, an early version of the lost tribe legend. Euhemeris was perhaps the first writer of travel fiction, but he was not the last. His fantasies were refined and embroidered down the following centuries, feeding into a vast mythology of unknown lands somewhere to the south.

  The Romans followed the Greeks but embroidered the legend of a lost land by imagining it was peopled by strange beings who survived in great heat and necessarily walked upside down. By the second century AD, it was widely accepted that there was a southern landmass, probably inhabited, and laying at the bottom of the world—somewhere. Ptolemy (Klaudius Ptolemaios) drew a map at that time on which a large southern section appeared. Then, in the fifth century, a Roman known as Macrobius wrote about an uninhabited world to the south.

  The ancient Muslim world also believed in the existence of the southern continent and maps that seem to represent some of its northern coastline were produced in the ninth century AD. These documents have led to suggestions that Arab explorers discovered the mysterious ‘fifth continent’, even as early as 1300AD.1

  But recent research suggests an even earlier contact. In 2013 a scientific study provided genetic evidence suggesting that Australia may have been colonised by Dravidian people from India as early as 23,000 BC. As well as the genetic evidence, there are some indications of technological and biological changes at this time, including the possible introduction of the dingo to Australia.2 Not surprisingly, these suggestions have been controversial, especially as the genetic testing on which they were based relied on a very small sample.

  Using evidence based mainly on rock formations, skeletal remains and interpretations of indigenous mythology, it has also been asserted that an advanced Stone Age society called ‘Uru’ existed in Australia.3 Claims have also been made that the Phoenicians, a seafaring empire established in the Middle East from around 1200–539BC, reached the southern land and established at least one colony here.4 Such speculations have generally been met with scepticism, not necessarily because they seem incredible but because they lack substantive and verifiable evidence to support them. But their existence does highlight the extent to which the strange southern continent was wreathed in myth and speculation from its earliest appearances in recorded history. The tradition continues today with some even more intriguing possibilities combining history and folklore.

  Consider what Leading Aircraftman Maurie Isenberg found on a remote beach in 1944. He was manning a radar post on the Wessell Islands off the Northern Territory.5 One day he went fishing and stumbled on a cache of ancient coins. Five of the coins were copper, dating to the tenth century sultanate of Kilwa, an
island near modern Tanzania in East Africa. Even more amazingly, found with these coins were four Dutch coins from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Isenberg packed his treasure away and thought no more about the coins until 1979 when he took them to a museum where they were identified. As if from the script of a folktale, Isenberg also provided a map marked with an ‘X’ at the spot where he made his find. Then the coins were again completely forgotten for the next thirty years or so.

  In 2013 a group of researchers mounted an expedition to the Wessell Islands to investigate the coins further. The Yolgnu people of the area hold oral traditions about possible contact with Indian Ocean traders and fishermen long before Europeans entered the region, probably via a trade route that operated between Kilwa, Great Zimbabwe, Arabia, Persia, India and islands in present-day Indonesia. In another echo of lost treasure lore, this story comes complete with a legend of a secret cave somewhere near the place the coins were found. It is said to contain old weapons and, of course, many more coins.6 The 2013 expedition found no coins, but did turn up evidence of early shipwrecks and depictions of sailing ships preserved in Aboriginal rock art. Whatever the truth of these intriguing tales turns out to be, they hold tantalising possibilities for the unknown discovery of Australia. And there are many more.

  The Chinese

  In one highly controversial theory, it may have been the Chinese who first recorded the southern continent in 1421, but Marco Polo also wrote of a previously unknown south land in his account of his travels between 1271 and 1295. He described two uninhabited islands said to lie seven hundred and fifty miles south west of Java as

  an extensive and rich province, that forms a part of the main land, and is named Lochac. Its inhabitants are idolaters. They have a language peculiar to themselves, and are governed by their own king, who pays no tribute to any other, the situation of the country being such as to protect it from any hostile attack. Were it assailable, the Grand Khan would not have delayed to bring it under his dominion. In this country sappan or brazil wood is produced in large quantities. Gold is abundant to a degree scarcely credible; elephants are found there; and the objects of the chase, either with dogs or birds, are in plenty.7

  The famous explorer went on to provide even more specific directions about a land of plenty named Pentam, a further five hundred miles south, ‘the coast of which is wild and uncultivated, but the woods abound with sweet scented trees’. Only another thirty miles further ‘you arrive at an island, in itself a kingdom, named Malaiur, which is likewise the name of its city. The people are governed by a king, and have their own peculiar language. The town is large and well built. A considerable trade is there carried on in spices and drugs, with which the place abounds.’8

  Marco Polo is not writing of the land we now call Australia but probably of somewhere around modern Cambodia. But so little was known of geography at the time that his description stood for centuries, further contributing to the mystery of the missing southern continent and also bolstering the notion that the Chinese had earlier discovered it and inspiring a latter-day claim to that effect.

  According to Gavin Menzies in his book 1421, The Year China Discovered the World9, several large Chinese treasure fleets set sail at that time under the command of Admiral Zheng He. One of these fleets was said to have reached the east coast of the continent and to have travelled along what is now the coast of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. They did not seem to have ventured ashore, at least according to the extensive, if circumstantial, array of cartographic, nautical and archival material that Menzies presents in support of his contention.

  Menzies’ theory that Australia (as well as America and many other places) was discovered by the Chinese has been roundly and widely discredited, dissected and effectively destroyed by a host of academics and other specialists. It appears to be a hoax, or at least a misguided accretion of pseudo-evidence, speculation and assertion. In short, it is a fairly typical product of the fantabulism that has always been associated with Terra Australis Incognita. Menzies’ methodology and scholarship have been criticised on many grounds by historians such as Robert Finlay: ‘The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous.’ Nevertheless, Finlay did see some use for the book, conceding: ‘It may have some pedagogical value in world history courses. Assigning selections from the book to highschoolers and undergraduates, it might serve as an outstanding example of how not to (re)write world history.’10

  But we should not entirely suspend our incredulity in relation to this theory. Better to read it as a parable, a moral tale that highlights the murky nature of Australian pre-history and its propensity to produce folkloric red herrings. There has always been unsubstantiated information and speculation masquerading as fact in relation to the island continent,11 but some of these threads do finally lead to historically and scientifically verifiable conclusions.

  Northern contacts

  Certainly there were early contacts between indigenous Australian people and the fishermen and traders known as Macassans from Sulawesi and other islands now part of Indonesia. The Macassans came in praus, sailing craft of around 25 tons. They sought trepang, or sea cucumber, for the Chinese market and carried on extensive trade and other contacts with the Yolgnu and other indigenous people along the northern coast of Australia from at least the early eighteenth century. Archaeological evidence from Arnhem Land suggests the possibility that Macassan contact began much earlier. At a place known as Djulirri in the Wellington Range, about 20 kilometres inland, is a gallery of rock art. The gallery contains paintings of sailing ships, both European and Macassan. Radio carbon dating of beeswax images painted over the Macassan praus gives an age in the mid-seventeenth century, meaning that the images beneath must be even earlier.12 While this is not definitive, it does suggest that Macassan contact might be very old indeed.

  The Macassans had yet another name for what Europeans generally called the Southland—they called it Marege, meaning ‘the wild land’. The remains of their camps and processing plants have been found in these northern coastal regions, together with artefacts, Aboriginal rock art and linguistic evidence of extensive interactions over a considerable period. During this time it seems that there was some cultural impact on Australian indigenous society and culture, with the adoption of trepanger dugout canoes and aspects of Islamic religion into ritual and custom.13

  The oral traditions of the Yirritja moiety of the Yolgnu tell of a people called the Baiini (or Bajini) who came to the land in sailing ships. These people were light brown in colour, built houses of stone and cultivated rice. The women, noted for their great beauty, dressed in sarongs and wove brightly coloured cloth. It is said that, after settling for some considerable time, the Baiini returned to their homelands, far away to the west, perhaps the Celebes. Although the tradition is that the Baiini were Dreaming figures, it is thought that the stories represent a more recent group of settlers who arrived perhaps as early as the fifteenth century and made their homes in the Kimberley, Arnhem Land and Cape York regions. As well as their stories, the Baiini influence can be seen in Yirritja art and craft.14 The trepangers were banned from colonial Australian waters in 1906, severing trade and cultural ties with the Yolgnu. It was not until a 1988 Bicentennial project when a prau named Hati Marege sailed into northern Australia that contact was re-established and ongoing joint activities mounted.15

  The other indigenous Australians, the Torres Strait Islanders, probably settled the northern waters around 3000 years ago. They are a Melanesian, seafaring people who also hunted and cultivated their lands and were effectively a cultural bridge between what is now Papua New Guinea and the mainland inhabitants of Cape York and, perhaps, further inland. As far as we know, these contacts were primarily for trade, ceremony and occasional warfare. The first European settlement in the Torres Strait region was in 1863, though Dutch and Portuguese ships threaded thei
r way through from at least the early seventeenth century, often seeking a passage to the Pacific Ocean.16

  Terra Australis was still undiscovered by Europeans in the fifteenth century, though a map showing the landmass was printed in 1483. Five years later the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias (Bartholomew Diaz) rounded the Cape of Good Hope. As far as is known, he was the first person to do so. This opened the way for European navigators to explore the mysterious southern seas that lay beyond Africa. But the southern continent would not appear to explorers, even partially, for more than another 120 years. Unless the fantastic story of the voyage of the Espoir and its long aftermath can be believed.

  The French claim

  On 24 June 1503 the Norman noble and navigator Binot Paulmier de Gonneville sailed from the port of Honfleur aboard the Espoir. With a well-equipped ship and sixty seasoned crewmen, de Gonneville had also taken the trouble to include two Portuguese merchants among the company. They were there for trade, of course, but were also thought to possess the best intelligence about trade routes to the Indies as these had been pioneered by the Portuguese Vasco da Gama six years earlier.

  The French sailed for the Cape of Good Hope, reaching its approximate latitude after five months. The ship was subsequently caught in a massive storm that blew unabated for three weeks. It was not until just before Christmas that the weather-beaten seafarers were able to take stock of their position in calmer, but unknown waters. In search of fresh water for their depleted supplies, de Gonneville followed the path of migrating seabirds south towards what he hoped would be a landing. Shortly after New Year’s Day of 1504, the Espoir sighted land. They sailed up a large river into a lush green tropical region where they came upon a band of local inhabitants.