Posted on 03/20/2007 5:28:36 PM PDT by blam
Captain Cook is scuppered by book
By Nick Squires in Sydney
Last Updated: 9:02am GMT 20/03/2007
The image of Captain Cook stepping onto the shores of Botany Bay has been a staple of British history books for generations but now it seems the explorer may have been beaten to Australia by the Portuguese, who arrived 250 years earlier.
A new appraisal of 16th century maps offers evidence that a small Portuguese fleet charted much of Australia's coast as early as 1522.
It has long been known that Cook was preceded by Dutch navigators, whose ships were wrecked on the coast of western Australia as they made for their colony of Batavia - present day Jakarta - in the 1600s.
The Portuguese thesis was put forward yesterday by historian and journalist, Peter Trickett, in his book Beyond Capricorn. It describes how Portuguese adventurers secretly discovered and mapped Australia and New Zealand 250 years before Captain Cook.
Eight years ago he stumbled on a portfolio of reproduced maps from the Vallard Atlas, a priceless collection of charts which represent the known world in the early 16th century.
The maps, now kept in a vault in the Huntington Library in California, were based on Portuguese charts but drawn up by French cartographers.
Modern scholars had noticed that one of them closely resembles the coastline of Queensland, aside from a point where it suddenly shoots out at a right angle for a distance of about 900 miles.
After studying the map himself, Mr Trickett came up with a new theory - that the French map-makers had wrongly spliced together two of the Portuguese charts they were copying from.
With the help of a computer expert, he divided the map in two and rotated the lower half by 90 degrees.
Suddenly the chart fitted almost exactly the east coast of Australia and the south coast as far as Kangaroo Island, off present day South Australia.
"I know it s very hard to believe because this was taking place decades before the birth of William Shakespeare," he told ABC radio.
"But the maps show the entire east coast of Australia, virtually the entire west coast and a very large part of the south coast, as far as Kangaroo Island and the Great Australian Bight, which the Portuguese called Golfo Grande." Mr Trickett believes the charts were made by a Portuguese seafarer, Christopher de Mendonca, who was sent from the Portuguese fort at Malacca, in present day Malaysia, to search for a fabled land of gold alluded to by Marco Polo.
His secret mission took him along Australia's north coast, down the eastern seaboard and around the bottom of the continent. He then sailed back to Malacca via the North Island of New Zealand.
The maps were kept secret because the Portuguese wanted to keep the discovery to themselves.
"The Portuguese were obsessed with secrecy because of their rivalry with Spain," Mr Trickett said. "They didn't colonise Australia because they didn't have the manpower or the resources, and then their empire started to collapse."
He believes his theory is backed up by the discovery in 1976 of a lead fishing sinker, unearthed by scientists from the sands of Fraser Island, off Queensland.
An analysis of the lead showed that it came from Portugal or the south of France and was made around 1500. "It ties in with what the map tells us," he said.
GGG Ping.
Entirely believable. The Portuguese actually attempted to colonize Labarador in 1521.
There is also speculation that the Portuguese also reached North America before Columbus' expedition that discovered America.
I find it possible as well. The Portuguese were some world class navigators way early on. Only problem was they kept everything so secret that their accomplishments are not widely known and very difficult to prove.
Having said that Captain James Cook was second to no man, before or since, a Master Navigator an explorer who produced charts so accurate they were still being used in WWII.
Cook introduced new measures to fight the plague of all ancient long distance sailors, scurvy. He gave his men fruits including limes. This is how Jack Tar earned the moniker, "Limey".
Regards.
It'd been much better to eat seals. Their skin is very high in Vitamin C.
Then there were the Japanese Zen Buddhists who discovered Arizona in the 1300s.
What I like about this story is that authenticates a very serious REDISCOVERY, and one involving hundreds of years between the first and second events.
Blam might be interested ~ I have a SECOND picture of a second Bird Stone in Brown County, Indiana. The other Bird Stones were found in Mongolia in the 1930s and have been dated to thousands of years ago.
Hey, hey, hey! Lets keep this discussion PG-13!!! It's still family hour out on the west coast!
Really ... I know Cook was always on a constant search for the best source of Vitamin C. He made his crew eat cabbage for example. He did spend time in areas with a lot of seals. It would be surprising if they didn't use seals when available as a good source of fresh meat and inadvertently, an even more useful source of Vitamin C!
Regards.
Can you post pictures?
The likehood is that since the ice age people from both Europe and Asia have reached America.
btt
I expect before the end of the Ice Age. Probably as long or longer than 25,000 years ago.
So how'd the seals get the vitamin C? Eating limes?
Regards.
The Portuguese probably didn't set up a colony because they didn't find any gold. The Dutch found gold on New Guinea and made it part of the Dutch East Indies.
That's more like it. Both England and Portugal were deep in trade with North and South America respectively long before Columbus, and that is practically current events.
The Portugese were in Brazil 50 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Columbus may have reached Labrador in 1477, but in those days they didn't release any logs or maps to anybody
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