Page:History of West Australia.djvu/13



CHAPTER I.

THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA

HE world was old before Australia was wrested by navigators from her primal gloom and obscurity. Throughout the long roll of centuries of ancient greatness the oceans were unexplored. Their refluent, rippling, glassy vastnesses were even more impenetrable than the densest forest thicket. The Christian era was well advanced when men were bold enough to seek to fathom their mysteries. The ancients believed their little world contained the whole habitable globe. A little knowledge of the laws of the universe made them fear bottomless precipices which bounded the earth, and, therefore, they cared not to go out to the rising sun and over to the twilight. A few were curious, and their prophetic verse, picturing great distant continents, we still possess.

Until the end of the fifteenth century, maritime adventure was confined to the seas between and round the known parts of the continents, Great Britain and the islands south of Japan and China. In previous centuries travellers had gone through Asia to India and China, and learnt that Timor and the Molacca Islands, north-west of Australia, were centres of Eastern trade. In their dahows and junks the EastenersEasterners [sic] constantly visited these islands, and gained from them what wealth they could. Marco Polo, a famous Venetian traveller of the thirteenth century, had many remarkable adventures in China, Japan, Sumatra, Java, and Ceylon, and his accounts of new races astonished beyond measure those who read them. Nothing was known of an ocean route to these beautiful regions.

But sailors began to look with curiosity, mixed with superstition, to the horizon of the Atlantic, and some on the Canary Islands had said that they could dimly see a great land stretched before them.

In 1487 a few ships beat down the west coast of Africa and discovered the Cape of Good Hope. But no one voyaged far on the pathless Atlantic until Columbus had grown to man's estate. On an eternally memorable day he set out to find a westerly route to the Molaccas and Java. His companions, courageous enough at the outset, were soon stricken with awesome fear, but the stout-hearted navigator—the father of all oceanic navigators—persisted, and finally reached America. A new and greater era for humanity then began. The spacious seal of the Atlantic was broken; mariners went out in every direction and for many years every decade heralded new discoveries, which begot new sensations and imaginings to the privileged dominant races of men.

The success of Columbus, and the discoveries of gold in America by Hernando Cortes, so excited European imagination that mariners prepared to go out in every direction in search of new countries which would quickly make them rich. Soon after Columbus, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English navigators coasted down Africa, and eagerly scanned the horizon for some magic land. They groped their way over the interminable liquid expanse, and on each voyage they studied the oceans and acquired more knowledge of local laws of winds and currents. Finally they boldly sailed into the unknown. These men possessed many heroic virtues but their sterling bravery and energy, amid apparently insuperable obstacles, require no comment. Their boats were quite unfit for such long voyages, and their knowledge of ocean sailing was comparatively limited. Their ingenuity and resource were shown in their forcing a path in the "dark-heaving, boundless, endless" oceans. They were heroes among men.

Gradually their thoughts and energies were drawn towards a southern continent, which now promises to affect the destinies of mankind to an incalculable degree. That mystic land was known by turns as the Great South Land, Magellanica, Great Java, Terra Australis Incognito, and New Holland. By a peculiar coincidence classic poets and writers, in moments of inspiration, foreshadowed the existence of such a country, and even pretended to give information concerning it. Mr. R. H. Major, F.S.A., appropriately prefaces his work, Early Voyages to Terra Australis, with the lines—

taken from the Astronomicon of Manilius, probably published in the time of Tiberius. Aristotle, Aratus, Strabo, and Geminus opined that there were segments of land below the torrid zone as large as those above it but these and other references by early writers were evidently prophecies, and nothing more. More practical, however, are maps of the eighth, tenth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, which refer to an "opposite earth." Every effort to discover MS. bearing on these has failed. Marco Polo advanced Chinese claims to the discovery of Australia. Their trade with the East India Islands had been established centuries earlier than the voyages of the Old World navigators, and they, with some justification, held that during their voyages they had seen a Great South Land. In comparatively recent times an antique wooden globe was found which bears the inscription that the Terra Australis was discovered in 1499. This curious relic of other days is preserved in the Geographical Department of the Paris National Library. Mr. Henry Harris, author of The Discovery of North America believes it to date from 1535. Notwithstanding classic writers, geographers, hydrographers, and Chinese, the wall of the unknown surrounds Australia as securely as ever, and the discovery was tedious and took centuries to consummate.

After Columbus, mere conjecture, however, was displaced by something more solid. Early in the sixteenth century, Portuguese