Posted on 10/12/2002 8:09:06 AM PDT by blam
Cook legacy intact after historian's blooper
October 10 2002 at 10:59AM
Sydney - An Australian historian who claimed to have found a Portuguese shipwreck that predated the arrival in eastern Australia of English explorer Captain James Cook has admitted that he jumped the gun.
History teacher Greg Jefferys thought he found cannons from a 17th century Portuguese Man 'O War under a beach off north-east Australia but they have turned out to be hoisting apparatus from a 19th century ship that plied the coast of colonial Australia.
"They're definitely not cannons," said a contrite Jefferys, whose claim threatened to unseat Captain Cook from his pedestal as the first European to "discover" eastern Australia when he landed at Botany Bay, now part of Sydney, in 1770.
Jefferys said divers used high-pressure water jets to remove sand from the buried wreck on Fraser Island, about 200km north of Brisbane, and what they had thought were cannons turned out to be cast-iron davits, equipment used on ships to raise and lower boats.
'I don't give up very easily' "It was disappointing," said the archaeologist.
But Jefferys continues to search for proof that Cook was not the first European to arrive on Australia's eastern seaboard.
He said he had received many calls from old-timers with information about shipwrecks, and one from an Aboriginal woman who said her tribe's folklore traced its ancestry on the tourist resort of Fraser Island back to European shipwreck survivors.
"I don't give up very easily," he said.
Captain Cook is credited with being the first European to arrive in eastern Australia during voyages of discovery that also took in New Zealand and much of the Pacific Ocean.
Spanish navigator Luis Vaez de Torres travelled around the north end of Australia in the early 1600s and the Dutch are credited with charting the west of the continent shortly after.
The Portuguese were famed seafarers long before Britannia ruled the waves, and many historians suspect they mapped Australia.
Their maps, if they ever existed, are thought to have been destroyed in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
Jefferys is also researching the possibility that legendary Chinese Grand Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, who led seven voyages of exploration from 1403 to 1433 in ships that dwarfed their future European counterparts, might also have explored Australia.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.