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Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook. — John Shaqi

History

Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.

Name: Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.
Author: Major, Richard Henry

Major, Richard Henry

Australia -- Discovery and exploration; Discoveries in geography -- Portuguese; Voyages and travels

The severity which the king Don John exhibited on this occasion,
  sufficiently shows the value which he attached to the papers which
  had been taken away. It is evident that they were of the greatest
  importance. They were secret papers; and may they not have been
  those which gave information of the discoveries of the Portuguese?
  Our atlases, therefore, may have been copied from these stolen
  documents; and it only remains for us to discover what has become of
  the originals.

Now, although the theories to which these maps have given rise have been
so complacently accepted by successive geographical writers, the subject
has never yet been minutely investigated by any English writer, nor,
indeed, have the foregoing arguments of the French been ever before
brought together into a focus. The editor, therefore, first proposes to
answer the hypothesis of M. Barbié du Bocage respecting the voyage he
adduces of Gomez de Sequeira, and then, finally, to deal with the
general question of the suggestive evidence of the maps.

With respect to Gomez de Sequeira’s voyage, it is certainly surprising
that M. Barbié du Bocage should have contented himself with referring to
Castanheda and Maffei for a slight and loose description of this voyage,
when it was equally competent to him to have resorted to the more ample
description of Barros, the most distinguished of all the early
Portuguese historians, who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century,
and who has devoted a whole chapter to the minute description of the
voyage in question. (See Dec. 3, liv. x, cap. 5.) So full and ample is
Barros’ narrative that, with a modern map before us, we can track
Sequeira’s course with a nicety which, so far as the main question is
concerned, is not interrupted even by the accidents of the storm and the
unshipping of his rudder. Let the reader for a moment consult any modern
map of the Moluccas and neighbouring islands, and he will find that the
island of Celebes, to which Sequeira directed his course from Ternate,
presents the northernmost of the three horns of its oddly-shaped outline
at a distance of about sixty leagues from Ternate. This is the distance
which Barros states that he had to sail in order to reach that island.
Had he sailed to the nearest of the two other points his voyage would
have been, instead of sixty leagues, more than twice that distance;
whereas the very nearness of the island was a leading inducement for
undertaking the voyage, as the object was to relieve the immediate
necessities of the settlement at Ternate. Upon landing at the point thus
shown to be the northernmost one, the fact of his having carried with
him stuffs for barter being discovered by the natives, converted the
friendly feeling with which they had at first received him into
hostility, as, having heard of some previous acts of greediness on the
part of the Portuguese, they immediately concluded that the visit was

Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia:: A Collection of Documents, and Extracts from Early Manuscript Maps, Illustrative of the History of Discovery on the Coasts of That Vast Island, from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Time of Captain Cook.

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