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A small matter of
centuries
among
the many islands of the vast Pacific, New
Zealand is far from the smallest group. Nor, if you
consider comparative distances from the equator, is it
excessively remote. Dauntingly south, perhaps, for the
early explorers who crossed, criss-crossed and
recrossed the ocean seeking the profits from spices
and minerals, engaging in frequent bouts of piracy, or
trying to locate the mysterious southern continent
which was thought to exist as a counter-balance to the
mass of the northern continents.
These explorers, in
small, wooden ships, ill equipped by today’s
standards,
braved the rigours of
traversing the Strait of Magellan, rounding Cape Horn,
or doubling the Cape of Good Hope. It was those
experiences, possibly, coupled with the prevailing
winds and currents, and the attraction of tropical
latitudes that always led them north so the extent of
the southern ocean remained unknown for centuries.
Most of the
exploratory expeditions survived passages of
incredible distance and time and some of them, with
nationalistic fervour, laid claims to the ocean’s vast
tracts and myriad islands in the names of their
countries. Their limitless possessive sweeps,
obviously, included huge areas of which they were
quite unaware so that unknown New Zealand became at
times under the flags of various European countries.
Parts of New Zealand
were finally discovered, but not identified as three
major islands, before James Cook arrived and planted
New Zealand firmly on the world map as a British
possession and gave it a recognizable shape.
One of the
discoveries the various European expeditions shared
was that, scattered across the Pacific, were island
populations speaking variants of the same language and
with strikingly similar culture and traditions. They
were found throughout a vast triangular area formed by
New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island, the many
islands of which later came to be known as Polynesia.
Linguists and
other specialist scholars agree in general that the
basic language and culture of the New Zealand Māori
derived from Eastern Polynesia and that the Maori
settled New Zealand about 800 years ago.
But were they the
first? Andrew Sharp in his 1956 study, Ancient
Voyagers in the Pacific, contends it is not
necessary to believe they were. The noted New Zealand
scholar says that, while they may have been the first
permanent settlers, there could have been earlier
transient occupations, by men only, or by men and
women, who did not leave descendants or did not stay
or survive long enough to leave any folklore for
succeeding generations to preserve and pass on. Sharp
thought it unlikely that any signs of these temporary
occupants would remain. Except one.
The bones of kiore
(the Polynesian rat) have been dug up at Takaka Hill,
west of Nelson, and in many other parts of New
Zealand. Based on carbon dating, Christchurch fossil
researcher and palaeoecologist Dr Richard Holdaway
produced the intriguing theory that temporary settlers
were here 2000 years ago, around the time of Christ.
Since it is highly improbable that kiore arrived
without human companions, the dating evidence lends
credence to the argument that the generally accepted
date of the first arrivals, the Maori, is out by a
mere 1200 years.
The new belief is
that the kiore may have sailed as stowaways on large
Polynesian sailing vessels as they roamed the Pacific
with, arguably, far greater daring than many Europeans
displayed centuries later.
The theory that
transient settlers arrived at intervals over a long
period of time provides an explanation for the Moriori
problem. That an earlier and different race from the
Māori inhabited New Zealand is a false belief held by
many people. These people confuse early arrivals in
New Zealand with the settlers of the Chatham Islands,
known as Moriori, who were an isolated group of
Polynesians closely related to the New Zealand Maori.
The orthodox belief
among anthropologists is that New Zealand’s settlement
was a planned colonization. They say the successful
introduction of plants and animals points to that
deliberation but the theory presupposes the ability to
navigate long distances. Several eminent scholars have
recently commented on the long-distance navigational
skills of the Polynesians and replica voyages have
attempted to prove that ancient Polynesian mariners
could cross vast distances without instruments and did
not land in New Zealand by accident.
What they have
failed to do is produce any evidence of a credible
system of position-finding which would have enabled
Polynesian migrants or their descendants to sail back
to their homelands and later relocate their remote
discovery. Often overlooked by theorists on the
subject is the fact that the relocation voyage was the
final leg of three legs of voyaging. Accurate records
kept for each leg were needed in the absence of
instruments. Knowing direction without knowledge of
longitude (eastings and westings) was of little value
and there is no evidence that ancient Pacific peoples
understood basic facts of geodesy.
There is no proof
at all that when any early Polynesians sailed away
from New Zealand they had return capability on which a
case for planned settlement could be founded.
Even if there were
an alternative method for getting back to a discovery
deep in the southern ocean, it would still not prove
that prehistoric discoverers of New Zealand did arrive
by design. Sharp believed early Polynesian sailors
controlled their vessels at all times and he opposed
the drift theory. In any case, the drift theory was
discredited by a computer-simulated exercise the
result of which was published in 1973. Sharp's view is
simpler and more acceptable: New Zealand was found and
settled by one-way unnavigated voyages of exiles or
people blown off course while at sea.
Some scholars argue
that evidence of earlier occupation of many so-called
“mystery islands” is proof that these islands were
occupied at a time of regular two-way voyaging. A more
reasonable explanation is that they were occupied from
time to time by males only who arrived by accident and
lived out their lives in celibacy.
Unquestionably,
early Polynesian sailors were experienced and fearless
seafarers who could “read” the sea and the sky and
detect land from a considerable distance off, whether
sailing on short or long voyages. But scholars who
claim they navigated by esoteric means, by following
the stars or employing some sixth sense, ignore the
fact that the combined scientific resources of the
eastern and western civilizations took 5000 years to
master the science of long-distance navigation.[fn1.
The history of navigation is reviewed in "The
development of navigation" - go via Contents
above to Page G-A7 under Section G.] From the ancient
Greeks to 18th century inventors, illustrious
scientific and philosophical intellects such as
Aristotle, Pythagoras, Claudius Ptolemy, Galileo,
Copernicus, Mercator, Plancius, Huyens, Newton,
Harrison and others made major contributions to the
understanding of the problem but no explorer could fix
his position with reasonable accuracy until James
Cook’s second Pacific voyage in 1772-75.
2. The
Polynesians arrive
So where did
New Zealand’s first permanent citizens come from and
how did they get here? It is certain now that the New
Zealand Māori descends from a long succession of
one-way voyagers from Asia, who began migrating out
into the Pacific some 4000 or more years ago,
spreading from New Guinea to Tonga and Samoa. Two
thousand years later, they spread farther east to
settle present-day French Polynesia, Hawaii and Easter
Island and, at the same time, probed south to New
Zealand.
But where was the
immediate homeland of early arrivals who reached New
Zealand? Any answer is speculation but the most likely
points of departure were the Society, Cook, and Astral
Islands although islands in the more distant Tuamotu
and Marquesas groups are possibilities.
The dubious
arguments over the two-way navigated voyages theory
has detracted, unfortunately, from the true
achievements of the early Polynesians. They survived
incredible hardship and brought with them plants,
animals and eastern Polynesian culture to set up new
homes in this country - and that is one of the most
remarkable episodes in early human development
anywhere.
The piecing
together of the land masses and smaller islands of New
Zealand was an extremely drawn out exercise. It seemed
to go on almost endlessly and had a cast of characters
that was so exhaustive that many of them have been
virtually forgotten. The attempt in this book is to
give them some recognition of their courageous ability
to scour huge expanses of ocean, even if their
contribution to New Zealand’s emergence on the world
map was little or nothing.
New Zealand came
together like a giant patchwork quilt, constructed by
dozens of explorers and surveyors working
independently of each other. Some charted great
lengths of the hugely indented coastlines, some
supplied inaccuracies, some filled in only small or
remote corners they chanced upon. Every effort was
subject to the vagaries of wind and weather.
Dutch, English,
French, American and Russian expeditions, sealers,
whalers and timber hunters, Royal Navy cartographers
and hydrographers combined haphazardly, some repeating
work already done, others correcting obvious errors.
It was never easy: The North Island is approximately
826 km from end to end and 470 km from east to west at
its broadest; the South Island is approximately 810 km
from north to south and 300 km across at its broadest;
but deep bays, vast harbours, wide river mouths,
majestic sounds and numerous inlets stretch the
coastline for thousands of kilometres; and the
multitude of small islands added their own confusions
to mislead and handicap navigation and charting from
small, wind-powered ships.
Constantly, the
wild winds and swells joined with the ruggedness of
the coast and pounding surf to deny close and careful
investigation of land features so that peninsulas were
recorded as islands, islands were tacked onto
mainland, straits, channels and harbours remained
hidden during years of regular voyaging.
Numerous entries in the journal of Abel Tasman,
European discoverer of New Zealand in 1642-1643;
graphically detail the difficulties of early
exploration in these waters. Without doubt every other
early explorer who came here underwent the same
tribulations.
3. 1455:
The "Big Bang" in exploration - Portugal's eastward
thrust begins.
One of
the most elusive of the thousands of large and small
lands of the Pacific for European explorers was New
Zealand, tucked away in the south-west corner. Before
it became a British colony, the Portuguese, the
Spaniards or the Dutch could have claimed it - in
fact, some did without having the vaguest notion that
it existed - at any time during the two centuries that
preceded Abel Tasman's discovery of part of New
Zealand's western littoral.
Tasman's success
was not a beginning. It was a virtual ending to a long
process of charting the Pacific that began at the dawn
of a 200-year period of intensive if somewhat random
oceanic exploration. But because of Tasman, New
Zealand, or as much of it as he had seen and charted,
finally got onto the map.
Until the 15th century,
trade between Asia and Europe was by way of the Black
and Mediterranean Seas and was almost entirely in the
hands of the Italian states of Venice and Genoa. But
then other European explorers began tentative probes
into the oceans west and south of Western Europe and
marked the start of two distinct pincer movements,
which, in time, defined the immensity, variety, and
limits of the Pacific Ocean.
Gold, religion and
spices were the magnets which drew the jaws of the
pincers remorselessly together. Exploitation, not
colonisation, was in the minds of those who bankrolled
the earliest of the tiny ships and their crews to
venture farther and farther.
It was, possibly,
fortunate that New Zealand lay beyond the vision of
many of these early searchers. They took life lightly,
more likely to murder the inhabitants of the lands
they found than try to claim them or reclaim them.
Even the attempted imposition of western religious
practices carried with it as much brutality and
misunderstanding as compassion.
The epic figure,
who began the long, slow and hazardous process of
filling in the last parts of the world map, was Prince
Henry of Portugal, the fifth son of King John I and
his queen, a niece of King Edward III of England. He
never travelled farther than North Africa, but he was
given the appellation "The Navigator” and he made a
truly great mark in the history of geographical
exploration - the discovery of a sea passage to India
and the Far East.
Until the advent of
Henry, a tall, blond, muscular Englishman, the
tradition of Marco Polo's 13th century overland
travels reigned. Henry had a manuscript detailing
Polo's geographical information and was strongly
influenced by Polo's accounts of his journeys but he
believed there had to be another way, a sea way, to
more easily reach and exploit the treasures of India,
and reach beyond to the known and suspected riches of
the East. In particular, the spices of the Moluccas
were a major incentive.
The Portuguese also
had an interest, albeit a lesser one, in finding and
converting the heathens who lived in those remote new
lands.
Gradually, Portugal
developed a vessel that was suitable for long ocean
voyages - the caravel, which, by the mid-15th century,
probably did not exceed a hundred tons, varied in
length from 15 to 24 metres and had a beam of five or
six metres. They carried triangular sails on two,
three and later, four masts.
By any standards
"The Navigator’s” progress and success were slow. In
1455, he sent out a Venetian mariner, Alvise da
Cadamosto, the first of a distinguished line of
Italian captains in the service of other states.
Cadamosto reached Gambia, in North Africa; but another
thirty-three years elapsed before, in 1487, the
Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias, guided two
caravels and a storeship, down southern Africa's west
coast and into the southern Indian Ocean. He was on
the brink of a breakthrough but the discontent of his
crew forced him to turn tail and go home.
Portugal's final
arrival in India, by a fleet commanded by Vasco da
Gama, who dropped anchor off Kozhikode (Calicut on the
Malabar Coast), in May 1498, was followed by a
commercial fleet which sailed from Lisbon to Anjediva,
near Goa. Afonso Albuquerque arrived two years later
at Cochin, where he promptly built a fort as a sign of
his belligerent intentions and, from about 1507, the
Portuguese set about taking over the nations on the
northern borders of the Indian Ocean. Goa was captured
in 1510 and remained a Portuguese colony until recent
times.
The following year,
Albuquerque, now governor-general, led a fleet of
nineteen ships which attacked and seized Malacca,
where a large proportion of the spices destined for
Europe were trans-shipped. By 1513, the Portuguese had
penetrated to the Moluccas. Albuquerque's ruthless
programme of territorial acquisition was marked by
extraordinary savagery in the treatment of conquered
races.
The Portuguese
continued expanding their control to the north but,
despite claims made from time to time, no firm
evidence exists that they explored to the south or
found any trace of Australia or New Zealand, although
a brief Portuguese visit was made to the northern
coast of New Guinea in 1526.
The Portuguese arrival at the western rim of the
Pacific was virtually a dead-heat with the arrival of
the Spanish at the eastern rim. But before continuing
this review of the east-west pincer movement of the
two nations, it is necessary to mention the "Line of
Demarcation" declared by Pope Alexander V1, and the
Moluccas.
4. 1493:
Pope Alexander VI draws the line - the Moluccas
The years of probing
east and west by Portugal and Spain were given an
arrogant kind of authority in 1493, soon after America
was discovered, by Pope Alexander V1 (Rodrigo Borgia),
who issued the Bull Inter Caetera, universally
referred to as the Bull of Demarcation. Through
this instrument, the pope settled the rival claims of
the two countries by dividing between them all lands
discovered or to be discovered. To Spain, he allocated
everything west of a meridian passing over the North
and South Poles and a point 100 leagues west of the
Azores; by implication, Portugal acquired everything
found east of this line of demarcation.
The demarcation
line was shifted farther west after a year by the
Treaty of Tordesillas, to a point 370 leagues west
of the Cape Verde Islands at the meridian of 46
degrees 37 minutes west (from Greenwich), which we
know today extends over the poles as the meridian of
133 degrees 23 minutes east.
But the puzzle of
the period was whether the antemeridian of Tordesillas
gave the Moluccas - the prize of the East - to
Portugal or Spain. In any case, the Pacific Ocean,
with all its islands, came within the Spanish sphere.
The Spanish didn't know it but New Zealand became one
of their possessions.
One odd cultural
outcome of this extraordinary division of spoils
whereby the line passed over the eastern bulge of
South America, remains in evidence today. The Spanish
and Portuguese empires have vanished but the people of
South America all speak Spanish with one exception.
The official language of Brazil is Portuguese.
Today, the Moluccas, or "Spice Islands”, form part of
Indonesia, but in the 16th century, the name Moluccas
was generally applied to all those islands immediately
west and south of Halmahera, where spices were thought
to grow. According to early Portuguese writers, the
Moluccas comprised the five volcanic islands of
Ternate, Tidore, Motir, Makyan and Bachin (with their
dependent islets), which stretch in a line from north
to south on the western side of Halmahera.
5. 1513 - Balboa says, “It’s
all for Spain"
Marco
Polo sighted the Pacific Ocean from the eastern shore
of Asia in the 13th century but Spain's Vasco Núñes de
Balboa stands in history as the true discoverer on
September 27, 1513.
An unofficial
Spanish commander, Balboa was accompanied by a large
party of his countrymen and Indians when he crossed
the isthmus between North and South America, from the
Atlantic, and came upon another limitless ocean:
An
unofficial Spanish commander, Balboa was accompanied
by a large party of his countrymen and Indians when he
crossed the isthmus between North and South America,
from the Atlantic, and came upon another limitless
ocean:
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He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien [From John
Keats, Chapman’s Homer.] |
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Advancing alone, Balboa waded into the water from the
beach at the Gulf of St Michael, at the southern end
of the Bay of Panama, and claimed the ocean and all
the continents and islands washed by its tides on
behalf of the King of Spain. Facing south, he named
the ocean "South Sea". He cannot have had the
slightest idea of the extent of the region of the
world he was claiming. Nor, of course, were any Māori
in New Zealand aware that they were now theoretically
Spanish subjects.
6. 1519: Magellan swaps sides
Ferdinand Magellan, in the service
of Charles I of Spain, was a Portuguese but he
obviously knew that major geographical discoveries
were not far away. He had taken part in the capture of
Malacca in 1511 as a navigator in the service of the
Portuguese under Albuquerque but defected to Spain
when he felt his services had not been fairly
recompensed.
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He star'd at the Pacific -
and all his men Look'd at each other with
a wild surmise
Silent,
upon a peak in Darien [From John Keats,
Chapman’s Homer.] |
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Advancing alone, Balboa waded into the water from the
beach at the Gulf of St Michael, at the southern end
of the Bay of Panama, and claimed the ocean and all
the continents and islands washed by its tides on
behalf of the King of Spain. Facing south, he named
the ocean "South Sea". He cannot have had the
slightest idea of the extent of the region of the
world he was claiming. Nor, of course, were any Maori
in New Zealand aware that they were now theoretically
Spanish subjects.
A glance at a globe
or world map today will prove that the treasures of
the Moluccas were some six degrees inside the
Portuguese sphere (see Map 1 above). However,
in the 16th century when the best longitude
calculations placed any remote area, one, two, or a
number of degrees east or west of its true location,
it was pure guesswork as to where the imaginary
antemeridian of Tordesillas extended. Magellan
declared that the Moluccas belonged to Spain with such
conviction that, in 1519, when he placed before the
authorities a plan to send an expedition to seize and
occupy the Moluccas as a rightful Spanish possession,
he was given an immediate thumbs-up.
He also followed a
theory expounded by the great Italian writer Peter
Martyr d’Anghiera by boldly declaring he would follow
a new route to the East Indies by sailing west.
On September 20
that year, Magellan, then 39 years old, left Sanlucan
in command of an expedition of five ships. Rounding
South America, he discovered the strait that now bears
his name. With his fleet dramatically reduced to three
ships, the 100-ton Trinidad, Victoria (85 tons)
and Concepción (90 tons), he headed north into
the South Sea, following the coast of Chile to about
latitude 32 or 34 degrees south before striking out on
a traverse of waters which he found so placid that he
rewarded them with the name Pacific Ocean. In that
sense, he qualifies as the Pacific’s first navigator.
His fleet had
shrunk by two-thirds because his smallest vessel, the
75-ton Santiago, was lost in wintry weather during the
voyage south from Sanlucan and his largest, San
Antonio, of 120 tons, was lost after a mutiny at
the Strait of Magellan.
In 98 days of
Pacific sailing, he sighted only two uninhabited
islands, since identified as Pukapuka, the
north-easternmost island in the Tuamotu Archipelago,
and Caroline, one of the Line Islands. Sailing on, he
reached the southern islands of the Marianas, which he
named the Ladrones because of the thieving habits of
the inhabitants, and the Philippines.
It was 1521 and the
end of the line for Magellan. He became an ally of the
Prince of Cebu, one of the smaller Philippines
islands, in a conflict against the Prince of Mactan,
yet another little island with pretentious ideas. This
time, he chose the wrong side and was killed.
Of his five ships,
only one returned to Spain, Victoria, under the
command of Juan Sebastian del Cano, who steered
through the Moluccas to Timor and then across the
Indian Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope. His
arrival in Seville on September 8, 1522, with 17 other
survivors and a cargo of cloves picked up at Tidore in
the Moluccas, completed the first circumnavigation of
the world. The dashing Magellan would have enjoyed the
honour.
The other two ships
suffered ignominious ends. Since the fleet's
complement had been reduced by starvation, fighting,
and massacre, to about 110 men, only enough to
properly man two ships, it was decided after
Magellan's death to burn the worm-riddled
Concepción at Bohol, and the Trinidad leaked so
badly that she was repaired and sent east to the
Isthmus of Darien. She did not make it, breaking up
and sinking on the voyage.
The celebrated
mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller had postulated the idea
of the Pacific Ocean in his large world map of 1507.
Balboa had sighted the “South Sea” in 1513. But del
Cano and his thinned-out crew were the men who finally
proved that this great ocean linked east and west on
the far side of the globe.
Magellan had contributed little towards solving the
puzzle of the distance across the Pacific between Asia
and America. In fact, one of his pilot’s calculations
was in error by more than 52 degrees. But no other
single voyage, as O. H. K. Spate points out in his
book, The Spanish Lake, has added so much to
the dimension of the world.
7. Mercator’s myth
Although Magellan seemingly made no
serious attempt to find it, the
Terra Australis
theory of a vast southern continent, somewhere, was a
strong motivator for the explorers from his period
onward. All the early major discoveries in the South
Pacific had been considered as either promontories of,
or island groups off, the mystical land mass.
The idea of the
southern continent dates back to Pythagoras, that
remarkable philosopher of the 6th century BC. He was
remarkable because he developed several important
scientific hypotheses which turned out to be correct.
Perhaps his most important theory was that the earth,
instead of being flat or disc-shaped, was spherical.
Greek scholars of
that period were deep thinkers on the theory of the
sphericity of the earth and, as a corollary to the
theory, reasoned that land masses must exist in the
south and west as counterweights to the lands in the
north and east. At the time, this concept was
outrageously advanced but it persisted through western
civilisation and parts of the eastern world for more
than 2000 years. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the
discovery of the huge landmasses of North and South
America fitted neatly into accord with the east-west
counterbalance part of the Pythagorean theory.
In the 15th
century, too, the work of the Alexandrian astronomer
and geographer, Claudius Ptolemy, which he compiled in
the second century, was published. Included in this
work, a world map based on Ptolemy's texts, portrays a
huge southern continent named Terra
incognita.
Right up to the
time of James Cook in the 18th century, it was
believed inconceivable that in the unknown parts of
the southern hemisphere a great continent did not
exist. It was thought by some writers that the
continent existed in a temperate climate, nurturing a
population with whom the initiation of commercial and
social intercourse could serve only the good of
mankind.
Gerard Mercator, the great 16th century cartographer,
expanded the myth of the southern continent when he
published his terrestrial globe in 1541, indicating,
south of Java, a north-pointing extension of a vast
continent with the names “Beach,” “Lucach,” and
“Maletur.” This protrusion probably indicates some
early European knowledge of Australia but the names
derive from Southeast Asian designations, which
Mercator merrily corrupted and misplaced. Equally
happily, many other mapmakers, both contemporary and
succeeding, copied Mercator’s myth, complete with
names, in their productions.
8. 1560s: Mendaña’s dream
Magellan’s pioneer traverse of
the Pacific Ocean sparked several Spanish expeditions,
many instigated by Hernándo Cortés, which sailed west
from the Pacific coast of Mexico. They were not much
help in expanding knowledge because they all failed to
find their way back. Their common mistake was to try
to return along their outward course, in about
latitude 13 degrees north, against the combined
strengths of winds and currents.
The first successful return voyage did not occur until
1565. Miguel López de Legaspi had sailed from Mexico
and established the first Spanish colony in the
Philippines. His chief pilot was Andres de Urdaneta, a
talented monk, who, on the return voyage in June of
that year, found his way through the belt of calm or
light variable winds which girdles the globe at 30
degrees north and south - known as the horse latitudes
-- to the belt of helpful westerlies, in 40 degrees
north. In that latitude he picked up the North Pacific
Current, which carried the ship back to Mexico in
three months.
For the next 300
years, Manila galleons plied Urdaneta’s
Acapulco-Guam-Philippines route. Their interest was
purely commercial and they discovered nothing because
they looked for nothing but profit. They were unaware
of what lay to the north of their trade route -- the
beautiful Hawaiian islands - or far to the south - New
Zealand. However, their regular voyages lured the
English raiders Drake, Cavendish, Rogers and Anson
into the Pacific.
But, as the Spanish
began using their centuries-long trading route, one of
the most fascinating episodes in early exploration
began to unfold - it involved the Solomon Islands.
In Biblical times,
King Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem with gold
from “Ophir.” But where was “Ophir?” Adventurers and
scholars pondered this puzzle for centuries, with only
a vague reference in the First Book of Kings to give
them any clue. A popular viewpoint connected “Ophir”
with two islands to the west of South America, which,
according to Inca tradition, yielded gold and other
treasures to early Peruvian voyagers. The islands were
thought to be outposts of the great continent in the
South Pacific.
Given a new and
most attractive reason for exploring farther south,
Spain, in late 1567, dispatched a two-ship expedition
from Callao, Peru, under the leadership of 25-year-old
Álvaro de Mendaña. Hernán Gallego was chief pilot and
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa commanded the flagship Los
Reyes. The almiranta was Todos Santos.
Exact details of the aims of the voyage are long-lost
but Mendaña was undoubtedly told to look for gold as
well as the southern continent.
Following a course
north of Magellan’s, Mendaña steered west-south-west
for 26 days until he reached latitude 15 ½ degrees
south, which was where he expected to find land. He
actually passed south of the Marquesas Islands, which
he was not to discover until 25 years later, and
missed all the scattered islands of Polynesia until,
on January 15, 1568, he found one small atoll in what
is present day Tuvalu. On February 7, he reached an
island, now named Santa Isabel, in the centre of the
Solomon Islands.
Mendaña spent six
months exploring the Solomons before heading back to
Peru; his discoveries remained unknown to European
explorers until August 1767, two centuries later, when
Philip Carteret, in the Swallow, sighted a
small island in the group. Later, the noted French
navigator A J R Bruni d’Entrecasteaux explored and
identified the Solomons beyond doubt.
The southern continent in the southwest Pacific-- and
New Zealand to the east of it - remained in the realms
of the unknown.
9.
1577: Sea-dogs set loose
The Spanish authorities did not widely publicise
Mendaña’s discovery of the Solomons but the grapevine
eventually carried word of the find to England where
the 31-year-old Francis Drake was planning a voyage
around the world. His English organisers equipped him
with several schemes along the way, including trade
with the “Spice Islands” and a search in the South
Pacific for the mystery land mass. The Spanish hadn’t
found it; perhaps English sailors would be more
successful.
Drake, however, had
completely different ideas; with Queen Elizabeth’s
connivance, he planned a cruising voyage along the
South American coast, with a little piracy for profit.
In the way in which the best-laid schemes of those
days could be wrecked by the elements, neither his
sponsors’ plans nor his own were as successful as
hoped.
Drake left Plymouth
in the autumn of 1577 with five vessels, entered the
Pacific through the Strait of Magellan in September
1578 and was struck by a ferocious gale. Drake’s
flagship, Golden Hind, was forced around Tierra
del Fuego, a diversion which led him to report that
open sea existed in this area with no hint of any
continental land mass.
This contribution
to man’s knowledge of the Pacific helped generously in
the dissipation of the idea of a Terra Australis,
at least in the area south of South America. It was
reinstated much later, when Abel Tasman decided on
somewhat flimsy evidence that New Zealand was possibly
but not certainly part of a great continent whose
eastern coast was Staten Landt at the foot of South
America.
Surviving the gale
with only his Golden Hind left from his
five-ship fleet, Drake sailed north, raiding shipping
up the coasts of Chile and Peru, and eventually
reached the latitude of about Vancouver Island. He
turned back then to San Francisco Bay, where his ship
was careened and overhauled.
Perhaps remembering
something of what he was supposed to be doing, he
relaunched the Golden Hind and made a traverse
of the Pacific, sailing south of the Marshall Islands
to the Philippines and turning south until, in 1579,
he arrived at Ternate, in the Moluccas, and picked up
a cargo of spices. By June 1580, he had crossed the
Indian Ocean and rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
eventually sailing back into Plymouth after an absence
of two years and ten months.
His was only the
second circumnavigation - and the first by an
Englishman - and it fired the imagination of the
English people more than any previous maritime
exploit. Today, it fires the imagination to speculate
on the possible course of events in New Zealand if
Drake, one of the greatest seamen of all time, had
been less interested in chasing cargoes of silver and
harassing Spaniards and more dedicated to his
appointed task of searching for the supposed southern
continent.
Six years later,
another adventurer, 26-year-old Thomas Cavendish, left
Plymouth. It was July 21, 1586, and he was off to
pursue the popular English custom of raiding and
sacking along the west coast of South America. In a
fleet of three, he was on the aptly named Desire.
He passed through the Strait of Magellan in February
1587, had his fill of the conventional raiding and
sacking and then crossed the Pacific between latitudes
12 degrees north and 13 degrees north. One of his
ships was lost but Cavendish carried on, touching at
the Ladrones (now the Mariana Islands) and the
Philippines, squeezing through the narrow strait
between Bali and Java, where he anchored for a time,
crossing the Indian Ocean and eventually completing
the third round-the-world voyage on September 9, 1588.
Once again, the contribution to discovery in the
Pacific was precisely nothing.
10. 1595: Mendaña’s nightmare
In what might be considered making haste slowly,
27 years passed in the life of Álvaro de Mendaña,
discoverer of the Solomon Islands, before he headed
for the Pacific again. On April 9, 1595, he left
Callao with a well-outfitted and ill-fated expedition
of four ships, including the flagship
San Jeronimo
and the almiranta
Santa Isabel, intending
to return to the Solomons to found a great colony in
the western Pacific. The enterprise included 400
people including soldiers and women. With him as chief
pilot was a Portuguese, Pedro Fernández de Quirós.
Mendaña never
rediscovered the Solomons, nor did he found his
colony. But, three months out into the Pacific, he did
find first one then three more islands - the
southernmost islands of the Marquesas group, which he
named in honour of his friend and new viceroy of Peru,
the Marquis de Cañete.
Continuing west,
the expedition found Pukapuka Atoll, in the northern
Cook Islands, on August 20, and nine days later
Niulakita, the southernmost island of Tuvalu.
After five months,
the Solomons remained elusive, then the Santa Isabel
vanished one night and the people on board were never
seen again. Mendaña sailed on and eventually, on
September 7, 1595, more land loomed ahead. He called
it Santa Cruz; it was actually Nendo Island, which is
in the present-day Santa Cruz group. Mendaña began
establishing his planned settlement there but the
fates had other ideas. Fighting with the natives,
mutiny, illness and tragedy combined to defeat
colonisation.
After ten dispiriting weeks, Mendaña died of tropical
fever and his widow, Dona Isabel, sensibly took charge
of the expedition and abandoned the island. Quirós, as
chief pilot, guided the remnants of the crusaders to
the Philippines in the San Jeronimo. There, the
ship was refitted and Quirós followed Urdaneta’s
northern route towards the west coast of America,
reaching Acapulco in early December 1596, continuing
on in another ship to arrive back at Peru in early May
1597.
11. 1595-1602:
Dutch treats
In 5580,
when Philip II of Spain became also King of Portugal,
he was in trouble with the people of the Netherlands,
who were rebelling against his domination. Dutch trade
in spices and other commodities brought by the
Portuguese from the East was suspended and in the last
years of the 16th century the Dutch challenged
Portuguese control of the Indies and made significant
inroads into Portugal’s trade and possessions.
Individual
syndicates organised and financed Dutch voyages until
1602, a period which saw a 1595-97 expedition of four
ships, under the command of Cornelis de Houtman, open
up trade with Bantam, the pepper port on the north
coast of Java. A Dutch factory was established there
when a second fleet sailed out in 1598.
But, in 1602, the
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC -- the United
East India Company) was founded and given a monopoly
of trade and communication with the East, either by
way of the Cape of Good Hope or through the Strait of
Magellan. Batavia was founded on the site of Jakarta,
in 1619 and Malacca was captured in 1641.
A book, with maps,
compiled by Jan Huygen van Linschoten and published in
Amsterdam in 1595-96, has special importance in the
review of events leading up to the eventual discovery
of New Zealand. Linschoten was out of Holland from
1583 to 1592, spending four of those nine years
travelling to and fro from the East and the rest in
India. Throughout this time, he collected, from
Portuguese and Spanish seamen and from Dutchmen in
Portuguese service, all the navigational information
and sailing directions he could for navigating among
the islands of the East, along the coastal waters of
the China mainland and through the East China Sea as
far north as Japan. He also studied the relative
strengths and weaknesses of the Portuguese and Spanish
in the broad world of India, China and the south-east
Asia archipelago.
His Itinerario,
voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan van Linschoten naer
Oost ofte, published in English, German, Latin and
French editions, became the navigator’s vade-mecum for
Eastern seas and a copy was given to each captain
sailing to the East Indies. Linschoten's work
undoubtedly bolstered the confidence of Abel Tasman
and other captains sailing through unknown waters.
One of the pre-East
India Company expeditions exemplified the difficulties
of sailing and navigation in those challenging days.
Olivier van Noort, commanding an expedition mounted by
a north Netherlands group of merchants to “trade in
distant lands,” reached the entrance to the Strait of
Magellan in November 1599 and battled for four months
before he traversed the passage and reached the open
sea to the west. By the time he returned to Rotterdam
late in August 1601, he had lost two of his ships and
all but 45 of his original 248 men. Death and disaster
exacted a fearful toll throughout these years of
exploration and, for most of them, hope rode higher
than achievement. When it is considered that van
Noort, although the first Dutchman to circle the
globe, was yet another who added nothing to Pacific
discovery, futility and frustration must also rank
high among the outcomes.
Two of van
Noort’s ships crossed the Pacific independently. The
Hendrick Frederick reached Ternate in
the Moluccas and van Noort’s flagship, the Mauritius,
reached Guam.
The fifth
circumnavigator, Dutchman Joris van Spilbergen, led a
much better organised expedition from Texel, West
Frisian Islands, in August 1614, but he achieved
nothing of fresh significance. His small fleet entered
the Pacific via the Strait of Magellan. He had the
satisfaction of using some of his fleet to attack
Spanish settlements along the west coast of South
America, which was one purpose of the voyage, but in
his vessel, the Sun, crossed the Pacific to
Guam in seven weeks without sighting land. Van
Spilbergen was in Ternate on March 29, 1616, sailed on
to Batavia and was back in Zeeland on July 1, 1617.
12. 1605: Quirós the inquisitive
Portugal’s navigator-pilot Pedro Fernández de Quirós
had failed to get Mendaña back to the Solomon Islands
but a small failure like that was not enough to keep
down a good keen man. Quirós remained obsessed with
the idea of finding the supposed southern continent.
He was fired with religious zeal and he was also a
good early example of an entrepreneur because in the
early 1600s he convinced the Spanish authorities to
mount yet another expedition. In Rome, he received the
pope’s backing; in Spain, he won the king’s consent.
And in March 1605, he was in Peru to make final
preparations.
He sailed from
Callao on December 21 as commander of two ships and a
zabra. He was aboard the larger ship, San Pedro y
San Pablo, with Don Diego de Prado y Tovar as
second-in-command and Luis Vaez de Torres commanding
the second ship, San Pedrico. The plan was to
steer west-southwest to latitude 30 degrees south
because that was where he expected to fall in with the
southern continent and it has been suggested that he
could have been the man to discover New Zealand, had
he actually reached that intended latitude. On January
26, 1606, at latitude 26 degrees south, he ran into
adverse winds and a heavy swell and changed course to
west-northwest - but the theory falls over when it is
considered that the northernmost part of New Zealand
is in 34 ½ degrees south.
Quirós now aimed
for Santa Cruz, which he had found when he was
Mendaña’s chief pilot, but that didn’t work out
either. He discovered a number of small islands, some
of them in the Tuamotu Archipelago; and Rakahanga
Atoll in the northern Cook Islands; the Duff Islands;
and some of the Banks Islands.
Then, on May 1, he
bore away sharply to the south and found a bay on the
northern side of a large island. This, he decided, was
part of the large continent so he named it “la
Australia del Espiritu Santo” and set about
implementing a plan for a New Jerusalem, in which he
hoped converted natives would live side by side with
Spaniards. His discovery was present-day Espiritu
Santo in Vanuatu.
As an enterprise,
it was doomed from the start and Quirós quit after
only three weeks and set sail for America, leaving
Torres and Prado with San Pedrico and
the zabra in the harbour at Espiritu Santo. Quirós did
make a half-hearted attempt to find the missing Santa
Cruz but then followed the northern route to Acapulco,
where he arrived on November 23, 1606.
Torres and Prado
had watched him depart with some resentment, regarding
him as a deserter. But Torres had no more interest in
the colonising scheme than anyone else and, after
waiting 15 days in case Quirós decided to come back he
also left, setting his course for the Philippines. The
pair proved to be a deal smarter as navigators than
Quirós. Torres sailed northwest and in July 1606, came
to very high land running east to west, which he
identified with New Guinea. He took San
Pedrico and the zabra west along the southern
coast, because the strong winds barred his way east
and eventually reached Ternate in the Moluccas. He
left the zabra there and sailed on to Manila, arriving
on May 22, 1607.
Regrettably, the
navigational feat accomplished by Torres and Prado -
the discovery of a passage south of New Guinea, in
September 1606, was not generally known until 1762,
when the English captured Manila and a report of the
voyage fell into their hands. Posthumously, the
Spanish mariners received full credit for their
achievement and Torres’ name was given to the strait
he had discovered.
They had been
tantalisingly close to Australia - but not close
enough to earn, even long after their deaths, what
would have been a truly valuable laurel wreath.
Meanwhile, Quirós
had returned to Spain where he petitioned for royal
support for another south Pacific voyage. The king’s
advisers, not surprisingly, were disenchanted by his
performances so far and indifferent to his new plea
but they were obliged to retain his services to
prevent him offering them to other nations which might
have been more gullible. They found him work to do but
it did not involve wandering the great Pacific again.
Spain’s policy now
was to consolidate, to seal off the Pacific as a
"Spanish Lake” and to stop other powers from
attempting further discoveries in “their waters”. But
they failed to keep out marauding Englishmen and they
could not prevent the Dutch navigators from taking up
the challenge - and it was the Dutch who finally
established that Mercator’s theory was no airy flight
of fancy. The northern land mass did indeed have a
substantial counterweight in the southwest Pacific.
The period produced
some quaint episodes. In 1616, an Amsterdam merchant,
Isaäc Le Maire, teamed with a noted navigator, Willem
Corneliszoon Schouten, in a company which was given
permission by the States-General of the Netherlands to
trade in Tartary, China, Japan, Terra Australis and
the islands of the South Sea. But they were forbidden
to approach these destinations by the only two known
routes - through the Strait of Magellan or round the
Cape of Good Hope. The fact that the Dutch East India
Company held a monopoly on trade in the East Indies
doubtless had something to do with this awkward
condition being imposed on potential rivals.
Schouten, however,
reasoned that another passage might be discovered
south of the Strait of Magellan and the project
proceeded on this optimistic premise. Isaäc Le Maire’s
son, Jacob, was appointed supercargo and commander of
the expedition, although early printed accounts
wrongly credited Schouten as the leader. Whether they
succeeded or failed in their southern continental
quest, they were to proceed north of New Guinea
towards the Moluccas and, if possible, sail south of
Java to latitude 25 degrees south or 30 degrees south
to see if they could find Mercator’s “Beach”.
The expedition
followed the pattern of many before them. Two ships
left Texel Island in June 14, 1615 but only one, the
Eendracht, made it across the wild southwest
Atlantic. She was obediently taken past the entrance
to the Strait of Magellan and on January 24, 1617,
found and entered a passage from which land extended
away to the east-southeast. The expedition’s officers
called this land Staten Landt and their newly-found
strait was named Le Maire Strait in honour of Isaäc.
The southern extremity of South America became the
Cape of Hoorn, after the officers’ home town.
The Eendracht
was in Pukapuka in early April but then took a more
southerly course than earlier navigators. On May 9, Le
Maire and Schouten observed a Polynesian sailing
vessel (See Figure 6), and, soon after, came
across the detached northern islands of the Tonga
group, Tafahi, Niuatoputapu and Niuafo’ou.
Pushing west, the
explorers found the Îles de Horne -- Fortuna and Alofi
-- ten days later, and Le Maire wrongly reasoned
Niuaf’ou and the Îles de Horne to be the Solomon
Islands discovered by Mendaña in 1568. They were
incredibly far out in that reckoning.
The Eendracht
reached Ternate in the Moluccas on September 17,
stayed a week and then continued to Batavia - and to
the end of their expedition. Le Maire and Schouten
were arrested and charged with infringing the Dutch
East India Company's monopoly and the Eendracht
and all their possessions were confiscated. To add
insult to the injury, no one believed their insistence
that they had found a new way into the Pacific.
To compound the
disaster, Jacob Le Maire died as he, Schouten and ten
of their crew were being shipped back to the
Netherlands as the unwilling guests of van Spilbergen,
best known for being the fifth man to circle the
world.
Nevertheless, the
Eendracht’s voyage ranks as one of the greatest
navigational feats in the history of maritime
exploration. Finding Le Maire Strait was a
masterstroke and the depiction of the passage in maps
became a feature of extreme cartographic importance.
They had also proved that New Guinea was not part of a
great southern continent extending indefinitely to the
east in tropical latitudes.
13. 1606: Dutch
courage
Le Maire and Schouten were part of
a mini-flood of Dutch mariners for four decades from
1606 onwards. Many of these explorers found and
charted various parts of Australia’s coast, beginning
with a pinnace, the Duyfken, which was sent
from Bantam (present-day Banten, West Java), to
explore New Guinea, other unknown lands east and west,
and to seek gold. The Duyfken was under the
command of Willem Jansz, and Jan Lodewycksz van
Roosengin sailed with him as supercargo.
The Duyfken
crossed the Arafura Sea, unaware of the strait north
of Australia - they thought the western entrance to
the strait was merely a broad bay indenting the New
Guinea coast - and made landfall on the west coast of
Cape York Peninsula in or about March 1606. The
pinnace continued south, following the peninsula as
far as Cape Keerweer (Turnback) in latitude 13 2/3
degrees south.
Between 1616 and
1636, a number of Dutch ships chanced on parts of the
west, northwest and southern coasts of Australia. Most
of them were outward bound from the Netherlands to the
East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope and none of them
ventured to the eastern side, where they might have
stumbled onto New Zealand, rapidly becoming the
wallflower of the south Pacific.
One of the Dutchmen
was Jan Carstensz, who took two pinnaces, Arnhem
and Pera, from Amboina in the Dutch East Indies
and made numerous discoveries on the west side of Cape
York Peninsula, in 1623. He reached as far south as
the Gilbert River; and later, when the vessels became
separated, his fellow commander, in the Arnhem,
Willem Joosten van Colster, located what is now Arnhem
Land. But, if they were looking for the western
entrance to Torres Strait, neither found it.
The first Dutch
expedition to follow Le Maire’s route round Cape Horn
was the so-called Nassau fleet of ten ships, which
sailed from Holland in 1623. Their goal was to attack
Spanish possessions on South America’s west coast but
they first found that Cape Horn formed part of an
island group, which Le Maire and Schouten apparently
had not realised. The Nassau fleet carried out it
viciousness with the Spanish, crossed to Batavia and
was split up there.
Another of these roving
Dutchmen was Abel Janszoon Tasman, who made two
momentous voyages of discovery in the southwest
Pacific during Anthony van Diemen’s term as
governor-general of Batavia.
The first voyage
stemmed from a treatise written in early 1642 by an
experienced Dutch pilot of Batavia (today’s Jakarta),
Francoys Jacobszoon Visscher, and outlining plans for
discovering the “Southland”. One idea was to strike
south from Mauritius to latitude 52 degrees or 54
degrees south and then, if no land appeared on the
horizon, to sail east to the longitude of a group of
islands, which were portrayed on the chart the
expedition carried, as "Islas de Salomon". Visscher
equated these islands with Le Maire’s 1616 discoveries
from Tafahi to Îles de Horne. As mentioned earlier, Le
Maire mistakenly thought these islands, found
northwest of modern-day Tonga, were Mendaña’s Solomon
Islands.
A second
proposition was to head south from the Cape of Good
Hope to approximately latitude 54 degrees south and
then sail east, following the first plan. A third
proposed sailing east from Staten Landt (today’s
Staten Island or Islas de Estados, southeast of the
southern tip of South America), across the South
Atlantic and South Pacific to the longitude of "Islas
de Salomon". A fourth suggested heading south from the
"Islas de Salomon" to latitude 50 degrees south and
then sailing east. South America might be reached if
no other lands got in the way.
All these notions
were extremely bold but practicalities, and possibly
fate, led to the decision that probably the most
sensible was to pursue the first of them, southwest
and then east from Mauritius. The Dutch East India
Company decided to send two vessels, the jacht
Heemskerck and the fluyt Zeehaen, under the
command of Tasman with the visionary Visscher as
navigator and chief adviser.
Sailing from Batavia on
August 14, 1642, the expedition called at Mauritius
and then, on October 8, turned south. Tasman and
Visscher calculated longitude by dead-reckoning and
their eastings and westings were expressed in degrees
of longitude east of the prime meridian passing over
the Peak of Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
They sailed to
latitude 49 degrees south and straight into very cold
and stormy weather. Visscher advised returning to 44
degrees south and then turning east, which ran them
directly into previously unknown Tasmania. They
skirted the island to the south, regained latitude 44
degrees and determined to continue steering east. New
Zealand was not going to escape this time.
Around noon on
December 13, sailing east-by-north, Tasman sighted a
long and mountainous coast running north-south. He had
found the west coast of the South Island in the
Hokitika-Abut Head area.
He shaped his
course northwards to follow the coast -- which way to
go must have been an interesting decision given that
the coast stretched interminably in either direction.
Two days later he found a conspicuous point which he
named Clippije Hoeck (Rocky Point), today’s Cape
Foulwind, the name later applied by the innovative
Cook.
On December 18, the
ships hove to in a large and beautiful bay. It is now
known as Golden Bay but Tasman named it Mordenaers
Baij (Murderers Bay) because four Dutchmen were killed
when unwelcoming Maori attacked a cockboat from the
Zeehaen. Tasman did not linger too long there but
sailed on along the coast looking for a place to land
and obtain provisions and water with less risk of
sudden death.
Tasman reached the
western entrance to Cook Strait and suspected that a
passage existed between the coast he was following and
another looming to his portside. Any idea of examining
both coasts to test his theory was scuttled by the
roughness of the weather. He called the coast north
and south of the Manawatu-Rangitikei area Seehaens
bocht (Zeehaen’s Bight).
The continuing bad
weather prevented Tasman from setting foot on land at
any point but there is little doubt that, given calm
weather, he could have found and traversed Cook
Strait, investigated the east coast of the North
Island and, almost certainly, have achieved landings.
This would have placed him among much friendlier Maori
than the war party he did encounter.
But, bowing to the
conditions, the expedition turned back to the north
and followed the west coast until January 4, 1643,
when it reached what was obviously the northernmost
point of this long coastline. Tasman courteously
called it "Caabo maria van Diemen" (Cape Maria van
Diemen) in honour of the wife of the governor-general
in Batavia. On the same day, they sighted a group of
islands, and named them "drie koonijgh eylant" (Three
Kings Islands) because they anchored there on Three
Kings Eve (Epiphany).
Tasman called the
long western littoral Staten Landt, in honour
of the States-General of the United Provinces of the
Netherlands, for the simple and, today, startling
reason that he believed, but was not certain, that
this land was merely part of Staten Landt, east of Le
Maire Strait at the southern tip of South America. [See
Tasman’s journal - go the page via Contents.]
The expedition worked
northeast, making significant discoveries in the Tonga
group and the Fiji islands, then heading west and
sailing north of New Guinea, to anchor back in Batavia
on June 15, 1643.
Little is known of
Tasman’s subsequent life since his contemporaries
failed to anticipate his later fame. He was not
regarded as an important person in the Netherlands or
Batavia. It is probable that various paintings, which
are claimed to represent Tasman and his family, are
not authentic. He died at Batavia in 1659.
|
14. 1740:
Davis Land, where are you?
The
years rolled on by - and 127 of them had
passed after Tasman’s discovery before New
Zealand again came into the thoughts of
Europeans. The Pacific scene, however, was
never idle. Numerous European explorers roamed
the ocean and from 1740, the English became
the most active of them. A new era of
circumnavigations began but, before that,
English buccaneers had a merry time, preying
on Spanish settlements and ships along the
west coast of America and arrogantly asserting
England’s rightful mastery of the oceans.
One of them,
Edward Davis, sailing a Danish prize renamed
Bachelor’s Delight, in a 1687 voyage
recorded by Lionel Wafer a surgeon with the
ship, was the man who gave rise to the
suspected existence of a mysterious land that
later became known as “Davis’ Land”. Davis
headed from the Galapagos Islands for Islas
Juan Fernandez and from a position in latitude
12 degrees south and about 500 leagues west of
Chile, steered “S by E 1/2 Easterly” until the
ship reached latitude 27 1/3 degrees south. On
a clear dawn, Davis viewed a small, low, sandy
island and, to the west at a distance of about
12 leagues, a range of high land, which some
of his companions thought might be part of the
coast of Terra Australis Incognita.
Davis’ Land became a puzzle which many later
navigators were unable to solve. It appeared
on a number of 18th century printed maps and
it remained a curiosity until recently, when
it was realised that what Davis had seen was
Sala-y-Gomez, a small island east of Easter
Island.
In September
1740, during the 11-year Anglo-Spanish war,
which began in 1739, the British Admiralty
dispatched George Anson as commander of a
squadron of six ships, led by the 60-gun
Centurion. His mission was mainly to
incite the Spanish colonists of Chile and Peru
to revolt against Spain and gain their
independence, undoubtedly with advantage to
the British in mind. Anson spent considerable
time and ammunition raiding the Spanish
shipping lanes off the South American coast
before crossing the Pacific to China. He then
sailed east again and had the great good
fortune to capture a treasure-laden galleon
bound from Manila to Mexico. He then continued
his westerly voyage round the world, arriving
home after three years. He obviously gained a
great deal of bounty and stirred up
considerable interest but his addition to
Pacific discovery was nil.
In March 1764,
the Admiralty began preparations for another
expedition. In June, John Byron, who had been
with Anson on his expedition, sailed from the
Downs in command of the frigate Dolphin
and the sloop Tamar. After traversing
the Strait of Magellan, Byron called at Isla
Alejandro Selkirk and then began a search for
“Davis’ Land”.
He, too, failed and
shaped his course to the west, hoping to fall
in with the Solomon Islands or even find
something new. He had little luck, making only
a few minor discoveries as he crossed to
Tinian, one of the Ladrones Islands, now known
as the Mariana Islands. He was back at anchor
in the Downs on May 9, 1766, after a
circumnavigation, which had lasted less than
two years. Neither of these expeditions held
any significance for New Zealand’s future but
two, which followed Byron's return to England,
did.
Samuel Wallis, in the refitted
Dolphin and accompanied by Philip Carteret
in command of the sloop Swallow and a
storeship, the Prince Frederick, carried
secret Admiralty orders to try to find land
believed to exist between Cape Horn and New
Zealand. He was instructed to stretch to the
westward about 100 or 120 degrees of longitude
from Cape Horn. This course would bring him to
the longitude of New Zealand.
The
Admiralty, however were confident that he
would have found the coast of the supposed
southern continent long before he sailed so
far, and gave him detailed instructions for
surveying the coast discovered, dealing with
its inhabitants, and taking possession.
In spite of the experiences of all the
earlier navigators, particularly Anson and
Byron, who had entered the Pacific from the
same quarter, and in spite of the voyage of
Tasman whose entry into the Pacific from the
west, had been relatively straightforward, the
lesson had not yet been learned that it was
almost a physical impossibility for a
sailing-ship to make headway against the west
winds. It was James Cook who later recognized
this essential fact.
Even before the
expedition left Plymouth late in August 1766,
it became apparent that the Swallow had
been inaptly named. It was quite unsuitable as
an consort for the faster Dolphin but
it kept company as far as the Strait of
Magellan, a route Wallis had chosen because of
a better chance of obtaining fresh provisions
than the Cape Horn alternative.
After
struggling through the strait, Carteret, who
had been a lieutenant under Byron, suggested
to Wallis that he should take the Swallow
back to England and that Wallis should
continue alone. Wallis rejected this idea but,
soon after leaving the strait on April 11,
1767, realised he would make better time
alone and the two vessels separated.
Wallis did not sail, as directed, to the west
in a southern latitude because of the powerful
westerlies but, for a week or more in May,
mounted a look-out for the elusive “Davis’
Land”. Nothing was sighted and, by early June,
Wallis was exploring the eastern part of the
Tuamotu Archipelago, plotting five small
islands previously uncharted. On June 17, he
found Mehetia in the Society Islands and, the
following day, sailed into Matavai Bay,
Tahiti. The visitors spent five weeks in this
Polynesian paradise, setting a fair standard
for modern tourists.
Setting sail again
on July 28, Wallis added several minor islands
to the Society Islands’ map but he did not
turn south to investigate high land previously
seen, which might have guided him to the
supposed southern continent. Instead, he
sailed west to navigate the gap between the
Samoa and Tonga groups, charting some lesser
islands as he went. Via the Ladrones and
Batavia, he doubled the Cape of Good Hope and
anchored in the Downs on May 20, 1768.
Although he gave a sterling demonstration of
failure in his main instructions and lack of
initiative, Wallis filed reports, which
persuaded the Royal Society and the Admiralty
that Tahiti would be an ideal place for James
Cook to observe the Transit of Venus in the
following year.
When Wallis left the
dawdling Swallow in his wake, Carteret
decided he would head for Islas Juan
Fernández, obtain refreshments and then sail
west. Instead, to his surprise, he found
Cumberland Bay, in Isla Alejandro Selkirk,
which was so loomingly and ominously dominated
by a Spanish fort, he turned tail and withdrew
tactfully to Isla Robinson Crusoe where he
partially refilled his water barrels.
And then, as Wallis and his predecessors had
done, he changed his mind about sailing
westward and was attracted to the more
favourable trade winds. On May 21, 1767, he
believed he was in the vicinity of Isla San
Ambrosio and Isla San Félix and made a
fruitless search to find them. It was his
wrong deduction that these islands were the
elusive “Davis’ Land” sighted by Edward Davis
nearly 80 years earlier, even though he was on
a course more than 20 degrees north of that
set out in a copy of the Admiralty’s secret
instructions, which, fortunately, he had been
given by Wallis. He was still on a much more
southerly track than any previous European
navigator but his only reward was to find
lonely Pitcairn Island, later to be settled by
the Bounty mutineers.
Another year
passed before Carteret arrived at Batavia,
having sailed through the Solomon Islands
without realising that he was near Mendaña’s
1568 discovery. By the time he dropped anchor
at Spithead on May 20, 1769, a year later than
Wallis, James Cook was months into his voyage
to mark the Transit of Venus and later to
achieve a much greater understanding of the
size and shape of New Zealand than Tasman had
managed.
While Carteret was working his
way homeward and Cook’s expedition was being
readied, Louis Antoine de Bougainville was
establishing himself as the first of several
distinguished French navigators who explored
the Pacific during the second half of the 18th
century and early in the 19th. Bougainville
did not visit New Zealand, thereby negating
the possibility that we could have become a
nation of French speakers, but he solved many
of the mysteries of the Pacific.
In
command of two ships, the frigate Boudeuse
and the storeship Étoile, he cleared
the Strait of Magellan on January 26, 1768,
and made the usual vain search for “Davis’
Land” before setting the customary northwest
course. Passing through the Tuamoto
Archipelago - and adding a few more details to
knowledge of this group of islands - he
reached Tahiti on April 4. As Wallis had
discovered the year before, the inhabitants
entertained and feasted their visitors in
lavish style so the Frenchman laid up there
for ten days, rather less time than the
English had elected to spare from their
duties.
From Tahiti, Bougainville
passed through the Samoa Islands and the
northern islands of Vanuatu and on May 29,
left Espiritu Santo and sailed west along the
15th parallel in search of the east coast of
Australia. Instead, he encountered some of the
reefs east of the Great Barrier Reef and was
forced to turn north.
He was now in a
position to test the theory of a passage
separating New Guinea and Australia but a
starving crew and difficult weather blocked
him. He crept on northwards, sighting New
Guinea on his port side, and eventually
reached New Ireland on July 6. But, on the
way, he left his mark - he found an island
which today bears Bougainville's name.
Storms and earthquakes were added to his list
of difficulties as he made his way to Batavia
and then struck out for home round the Cape of
Good Hope, entering the harbour at St Malo on
March 16, 1769.
His contribution was
mainly that of the astronomer who accompanied
him, Pierre Antoine Véron. He carried out
remarkably accurate longitude calculations
during the circumnavigation, leading to a
major advance in understanding the true width
of the Pacific Ocean, which, until this point,
had been a matter of some fairly wild
guesswork and conjecture by a host of
pioneering explorers.
15. 1644-45:
On the map at last
The part of New
Zealand found by Tasman appeared on printed
maps and globes with commendable speed. Some
Amsterdam map publishers, eager to include all
the latest geographical information in their
maps, incorporated data surreptitiously
obtained from the Dutch East Indies. Plainly,
the leakage of secret information is not a
modern-day phenomenon.
As early as
1644-45, Tasman’s "Staten Landt" was inscribed
alongside part of New Zealand’s west coast
slightly misplaced - the name Zeelandia Nova
was devised later, almost certainly by the
Amsterdam publisher and cartographer to the
Dutch East India Company, Joan Blaeu, in
association with an official or officials of
the company. The name no doubt was given to
compliment the province of Zeeland, which was
the seat of the second most important chamber
of the company.
Access to the
company’s confidential information enabled
Blaeu to update his maps and globes using
Tasman's more authentic records.
Between 1647-48 and 1670 Blaeu published at
least five cartographic works portraying part
of New Zealand beside the name "Nova
Zeelandia". His maps and globes were widely
circulated and before long other publishers in
the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and
England began modelling the southwest Pacific
area in their maps on Blaeu's data.
So
although New Zealand slumbered unvisited as
the decades rolled by it was not forgotten in
Europe and slightly changed circumstances in
1722 could well have altered the course of
history. It all came down to a last-minute
debate and a decision to place discretion
ahead of valour.
On August 1,
1721, Jacob Roggeveen left Texel Island in
command of a three-ship expedition with
instructions from the Dutch West India
Company, founded a century earlier, to break
the East India Company’s monopoly on trade. He
was also to search in the South Seas for
“Davis’ Land”, and to investigate land which
Willem Schouten, in 1616, had surmised lay to
the south of an area of smooth water in about
latitude 15 degrees south. It was also
envisaged that the ships might proceed to New
Zealand, now known to exist in latitude 35
degrees south, and quest farther west in
search of Terra de Quir (Land of Quiros),
which Quirós had assumed to extend south from
Espiritu Santo.
Roggeveen entered the
Pacific through Drake Passage, anchored
briefly at Isla Robinson Crusoe and then
sailed on and became the first to discover a
new island. It was Easter Day, 1722, so he
named it Easter Island. He then searched in
vain for “Davis’ Land” but made several
discoveries in the Tuamotu Archipelago. He
landed at Makatea and enjoyed the friendliness
of the natives - until they began pelting
stones at their Dutch guests.
One of
the expedition’s three ships, De
Africaansche Galey, was wrecked on
Takapoto Island and the flavour of the voyage
was beginning to sour.
On June 3, 1722,
Roggeveen held a full council of captains and
officers on his flagship, Den Arend, to
seriously consider setting a course for New
Zealand. The council discussed the relative
advantages and disadvantages of an approach
from the east or the west but the main concern
that developed was pure and simple fear. Fear
that the natives would prevent them from
landing and obtaining fresh water and fear of
what might happen when they took sick members
of their crews ashore for rest.
The
whole idea of using New Zealand as a
refreshment stop before returning round Cape
Horn was eventually dismissed and the council
decided they were obliged to carry on to the
East Indies. Had a more resolute commander
made for New Zealand, met friendly Maori on
the east coast and reported back to the
Netherlands, Dutch settlers may well have
preceded British colonists to this country.
During his westerly course for
Batavia, Roggeveen charted several discoveries
in the Samoa Islands but no effort was made to
investigate Quirós’ supposed southern
continent. Again, caution prevailed.
They sailed Den Arend and the
Thienhoven into Batavia on October 4,
1722, and any plans for challenging control in
the area were scuppered when, like Le Maire
and Schouten before them, the ships were
seized and the officers and crews ordered back
to the Netherlands.
The voyage was
among the most unfortunate in the history of
Pacific explorations despite a number of
additions, notably Easter Island, it made to
the growing knowledge of the vast area.
16. 1768: Cook’s tours begin
The scheduled transit of Venus across the
face of the sun in 1769 had been occupying the
Royal Society for most of that decade. That
observations should be made from the South
Seas was largely due to the steadfast
campaigning of a noted geographer and
hydrographer, Alexander Dalrymple, who wanted
the planning authorities to extend the range
of the observation expedition to include a
search for the supposed southern continent. He
was equally interested in drawing attention to
himself because he wanted to take an active
part in any voyage that eventuated.
His
campaign worked well enough for the Society to
recommend to the Admiralty that the civilian
Dalrymple should be given command of a Royal
Navy ship. The Admiralty vetoed that idea
smartly and gave the command to James Cook,
with the rank of first lieutenant. Cook was a
practical seaman with a particular interest in
navigational theory and, to some extent, in
astronomy. He impressed the Royal Society in
1766 when he presented a paper on determining
longitude through an eclipse of the sun at
Newfoundland.
Cook was appointed an
observer for the Venus transit and Charles
Green was elected second observer. A group of
civilians, all devoted to scientific
observations and headed by Joseph Banks, was
chosen to accompany Cook. Dalrymple was not on
the list. He had withdrawn in a total huff; if
he was not going to be the commander, he
wanted no part in the expedition at all.
However, before Cook’s party set sail, he did
give Banks an advance copy of his book, An
Account of the Discoveries Made in the South
Pacifick Ocean, Previous to 1764. The book
contained not only a map of the South Pacific
but also an explanation of the author’s theory
about the hypothetical southern continent and
the possibility of a strait existing where, in
due course, Cook Strait was found to be.
The barque Endeavour, the vessel
chosen for the voyage, was “cat-built”,
bluff-bowed and strong and was still being
prepared for sailing when Wallis brought news
of his discovery of Tahiti and the sighting of
supposed land to the south. Just what Wallis
reported about Tahiti, given the generosity
and friendliness of the Tahitians, is a matter
of conjecture, but the decision was
immediately made that Tahiti was the place
from which the transit most assuredly had to
be observed. Cook was then given secret
instructions which he was to open, read and
follow as soon as the astronomical segment of
the expedition was completed.
The
Endeavour sailed from Plymouth on August
26, 1768, and entered the Pacific through Le
Maire Strait in January 1769. Cook added the
atoll of Ravahere to the map of the Tuamotu
Archipelago as he sailed through and into
Wallis’ Matavia Bay anchorage in Tahiti on
April 13, in ample time for the establishment
of the on-shore observatory.
The
observation of the transit was a notable
success and Cook then opened his sealed
Admiralty packet to find out what he had to do
next. Quite simply, he was to search between
latitudes 35 degrees south and 40 degrees
south for the southern continent and, if that
exercise failed, to fall in with the eastern
coast of the land named in Dalrymple's map
"Staats Land or New Zeland". Cook was
instructed to ascertain its latitude and
longitude and to explore as much of the coast
as the condition of the bark, the health of
the crew and the reserves of provisions
permitted.
The Admiralty was not
buying into Tasman’s already discredited
"Staten Landt" theory. Another Dutch explorer,
Hendrik Brouwer, had circumnavigated the
original Staten Island and found it not only
small but also extremely miserable.
So,
naturally, Cook did not find the mystic
continent, for the simple reason that it
wasn’t there, but early in the afternoon of
October 7, he sighted Poverty Bay, his first
glimpse of New Zealand and the beginning of
months of sailing, studying and observing that
finally planted this country firmly and
recognisably on the face of the earth, some
1800 years after it was first found and
inhabited.
Banks clung to the notion
that they had found the coast of the great
southern continent and let the idea go rather
reluctantly - and when the Endeavour finally
circumnavigated New Zealand Banks thought the
elusive continent must exist east from New
Zealand.
As soon as they encountered
land Cook was quite confident that it was the
east coast of Tasman’s "Staten Land", and it
wasn’t a continent’s distance from the western
side. Cook ignored the preferred name in
Dalrymple's map and applied the name "New
Zeland" in his charts and journal entries. If
he had followed Dalrymple's lead we might have
been known today as "Staten Landers".
17. 1769: Coasts, contours, confrontations
The Endeavour was anchored in Poverty
Bay and Cook, Banks and a party of marines
went ashore. They saw groups of natives but
these, unlike the ones who sent Tasman fleeing
after four of his men were slain, took fright
and vanished into the bush. Cook, Banks and
two others were able to inspect some of the
thatched homes of the natives then hurried
back to the beach when they heard shots fired.
There they learnt that the marines who had
stayed with the landing boat had been
approached by some Maori and had shot dead one
who had raised his taiaha threateningly.
Cook stayed four days in Poverty Bay and
then sailed south, rounding Portland Island
and closing on the Hawke Bay coast on October
13. He continued until he reached a point,
which he named Cape Turnagain, from where he
could view the coast south to about
Castlepoint. Cook was secretly searching for
the eastern entrance of the strait whose
existence Tasman had suspected. He knew he was
farther south but well to the east of Tasman’s
1642 anchorage in Golden Bay but, he abandoned
the search at that point without recording
details of his puzzlement, and turned back to
the north.
Needing water, Cook landed
at Anaura Bay. He found a fresh-water stream
but friendly Māori appeared and directed him
to a more suitable watering place at Tologa
Bay. Around the southern headland of this bay,
he found a snug haven, now known as Cook’s
Cove, where the Endeavour stayed until October
29. Sailing north again, Cook rounded East
Cape and, after being followed for a time by a
large double canoe, entered Mercury Bay, where
he stayed from November 4 to 15 to observe the
transit of Mercury. He also took possession of
the neighbourhood in the name of the king of
Great Britain.
From Mercury Bay, Cook
continued sailing northward and entered the
head of the Firth of Thames but not finding
the Waitemata Harbour or, later, the entrance
to Whangarei Harbour. Battered by a
northwesterly gale off the Cavalli Islands, he
decided it was time to seek shelter and gain
some further knowledge of the country. He
steered into the Bay of Islands and anchored
for several days near Tapeka Point, making
landings on the mainland and the islands of
Motuarohia and Moturoa, before resuming his
voyage past the Cavallis, sighting Doubtless
Bay and passing Cape Karikari.
He was
within a whisker of coming across the
Frenchman, Jean de Surville, in the Saint
Jean Baptiste; but while Cook in the
Endeavour was trying to round the northern
tip of New Zealand from east to west, de
Surville doubled it from west to east and they
passed each other without a sighting from
either vessel.
While Cook was
identifying Three Kings Islands from versions
of Tasman’s sketches in Dalrymple's book, and
then bore south down the west coast, de
Surville, who had come up that coast, was
heading for an anchorage in Doubtless Bay.
Maintaining his record, Cook missed the
entrances to the Hokianga, Kaipara and Manukau
Harbours. He did think a harbour entrance
existed at Kaipara but later changed his mind.
On January 9 and 10, 1770, Cook saw Mt Karioi,
Albatross Point and the Kawhia Harbour
entrance and then sighted something that
Tasman - and countless other hopeful tourists
since - failed to see. The inspiringly perfect
peak of Mount Taranaki loomed up.
Cook
pursued the coast south and on January 16
anchored in Ship Cove in Queen Charlotte
Sound. Much-needed repairs and the careening
of the sturdy but battered Endeavour, held
them there until February 2 and Cook took the
opportunity to climb a high point above the
cove. With his earlier failure to find Cook
Strait lingering on his mind Cook thought he
saw a passage leading to open sea in the east.
The local Maori in the region were much
friendlier than those Tasman encountered and
from one of the older of them Cook learnt two
place names which confirmed this theory. The
names as recorded were “Aeheino mouwe” and
“Tovy-poenammu”, which the explorer
interpreted as names for the two islands north
and south of the strait.
On January 30,
Cook took possession of Queen Charlotte Sound
and the adjacent country in the name of the
king. Like so many claimants before him, he
didn’t really have a full appreciation of the
extent of the region he was acquiring for his
country.
Setting sail on February 7,
Cook confirmed that the strait existed by
traversing it and he accepted the name
suggested by his officers and then sailed
north as far as Cape Turnagain to prove that
the northern land was an island. No doubt he
gazed toward the southwest and remembered his
puzzlement when the Endeavour stood off
the cape three months earlier and the entrance
to the strait eluded him. Right up until that
point, there were many among Cook’s complement
who had remained convinced that New Zealand
was part of the long-sought southern
continent. Now, indubitably, it wasn’t.
Cook next turned his attention to the
south, cruising the east coast until
mid-March. He recognised Kaikoura Peninsula as
part of the mainland but, rounding Banks
Peninsula, he saw the entrance to Akaroa
Harbour and concluded that the land he saw
within was an island. Later, off Otago
Peninsula, he thought the harbour entrance was
a bay on the peninsula’s north side.
Ruapuke Island was glimpsed and named Bench
Island, the Traps were seen three days later
and, on March 10, Cook coasted Stewart Island
on the southern side without establishing its
insularity. He sighted and named Solander
Island the following day and came back within
sight of the mainland before heavy weather
forced him to stand off to sea. So he missed
some of the entrances to substantial southern
indentations such as Preservation and Chalky
Inlets. He saw the white cliffs of Chalky
Inlet to his south a day later when he tried
unsuccessfully to put the Endeavour into Dusky
Sound, then sailed past the entrance to
Doubtful Sound and on up the coast. He sighted
Cascade Point after three days sailing,
finally rounded Farewell Spit, slipped past
Stephens Island and entered Admiralty Bay to
take on water. New Zealand now had, by Cook’s
estimations, two major islands and a mixed
bunch of smaller ones.
Cook left the
vicinity of New Zealand on April 1, 1770,
heading west to his discovery of Australia’s
east coast and to a long and arduous battle
northwards up that coast, with its dangerous
reefs, before he traversed Torres Strait and
reached Batavia on October 11. He was back in
England on July 13, 1771, with a picture of
New Zealand remarkably close to reality, given
the difficulties under which he, his crew and
his tiny ship had laboured for so long.
Meanwhile, what
had become of the Frenchman, Jean de Surville,
who had been so close to Cook? He had brought
the three-masted Saint Jean Baptiste
from Pondicherry, India, for a privately
organised trading enterprise and visited New
Zealand primarily to rest sick crewmen and
obtain fresh food supplies. He sighted land,
just south of Hokianga Harbour, on December
12, 1769, while Cook was battling the weather
off Cape Karikari. The breakers on the
Hokianga bar blocked any entry there, so the
Frenchmen sailed on to the northern tip of the
island and doubled it from west to east as
Cook was struggling to round it from the other
direction.
The French explorers sailed
on south and anchored in Doubtless Bay, which
proved not the safest of havens because, four
days after Christmas Day, a sudden storm
whipped in and two of the ship’s anchors were
lost. Kelly Tarlton and a team found and
raised the anchors in 1974 and they are now
exhibits in two New Zealand museums.
In
his brief stay - he left after a fortnight -
de Surville didn’t just let the water flow
under his keel. He charted parts of
Northland’s coasts, surveyed Doubtless Bay,
which he called "Lauriston Bay", and also
recorded valuable information about the Māori
he encountered, the bird life and various
trees. New Zealand’s northernmost point, which
he discovered, is now named Surville Cliffs,
in recognition of the fact that he was the
first to sight them.
The next arrivals
off New Zealand were also French but a great
deal less fortunate.
Marc Macé Marion
Dufresne, a wealthy mariner, commanded a
two-ship expedition, the flyboats Mascarin
and Marquis de Castries, in search of
new lands in the Pacific. He had Julien Crozet
as his second-in-command and Chevalier Du
Clesmeur commanded the consort. Marion knew
nothing of the voyages to New Zealand by
either Cook or de Surville but had Tasman’s
reports.
They made landfall near Cape
Egmont on March 25, 1772, sailed north,
doubled Cape Maria van Diemen and anchored off
Spirits Bay on April 15. Du Clesmeur partially
surveyed the bay, then the ships moved on
round North Cape, and hove to in the Bay of
Islands on May 4. Marion and his men spent
five weeks there, surveying the bay and
exploring in the area.
On June 12,
Marion and a party of his men landed at
Manawaora Bay to catch some fish. Maori
ambushed them and all but one were massacred -
he escaped to tell the story. The French
response, led by Crozet, who took charge of
the expedition, was to exact violent
retribution before they left. A bottle was
buried on Moturua Island, enclosing a document
declaring the annexation of the country under
the name of "Franco-Australe". Had it ever
been found, it could have raised interesting
reactions on the other side of the world but,
presumably, the possessive claim in a bottle
is still buried somewhere on the island.
18. 1772: Back again - and again in
1777
While Marion du Fresne was
approaching and meeting his fate, James Cook,
promoted to captain on his return to Plymouth,
was off on his second Pacific voyage, in
command of an expedition consisting of HMS
Resolution and HMS Adventure
(Tobias Furneaux). Astronomer William Wales
was with Cook and his colleague, William
Bayly, posted to the Adventure, were
given the important task by the Board of
Longitude of checking the accuracy of a copy
of John Harrison’s chronometer, made by an
expert watchmaker, Larcum Kendall.
This
time, Cook approached New Zealand from the
west. He and the Adventure had become
separated by bad weather during the voyage out
but were to meet up again in Queen Charlotte
Sound, which the Adventure reached first. Cook
this time sailed into Dusky Sound, on March
26, 1772 -- the day after du Fresne had made a
landfall off Cape Egmont - and made friendly
contact with local Māori while at a
comfortable anchorage in Pickersgill Harbour.
More than a month later, he regained the open
sea through Breaksea Sound, after discovering
and traversing the channel later named Acheron
Passage. He joined Furneaux on the Adventure
at Queen Charlotte Sound on May 19.
Cook and Furneaux then sailed for Tahiti,
moved on to discover some islands in the Cook
group, visited Tonga and, on October 23, 1773,
were once again in sight of New Zealand, this
time near Mahia Peninsula. Seven days later,
the two ships became separated again and
Furneaux eventually returned to England
without rejoining Cook.
Cook, sailing
south, tried to get into the entrance to Port
Nicholson but gave up when the tide turned and
went back to Queen Charlotte Sound. He stayed
there for more than three weeks and then made
an extensive sweep of the ocean east of New
Zealand, proving conclusively that no southern
continent existed in that part of the South
Pacific. He visited widely-separated Pacific
islands on a circuit which saw him pass
Norfolk Island and make another New Zealand
landfall near Cape Egmont. He headed once
again to Queen Charlotte Sound and finally
left New Zealand and set sail for home on
November 10.
In 1776, Cook
headed out on his third - and fatal last -
voyage with HMS Resolution and HMS
Discovery (Charles Clerke), among whose
crew was midshipman George Vancouver who, in
1791, was to lead his own expedition to New
Zealand. Again, William Bayly was with Cook to
work on longitude calculations.
On
February 12, 1777, Cook was back in his
favourite New Zealand spot, Queen Charlotte
Sound, where he stayed until the 25th before
leaving New Zealand for the last time. His
brilliant career ended when he was slain at
Kealakekua Bay, in Hawaii, later in the
voyage.
19. 1785: Gone but not
forgotten
One of the most important
Pacific expeditions was led by Jean-François
Galaup de la Pérouse, who sailed from Brest on
August 1, 1785, with two well-outfitted
frigates, L’Astrolabe and La
Boussole, entering through Le Maire
Strait, reaching Easter Island in April, 1786,
and spending the next 21 months exploring the
vast ocean. About the only place he did not
visit was New Zealand. The expedition anchored
in Botany Bay, New South Wales, late in
January 1788, and left again in March.
They were not seen or heard of again. Traces
of wrecks found in 1827 suggested the
probability that the two ships sailed
northeast from Australia and ran into a
disastrous storm in the Santa Cruz Islands,
with total loss of life. Fortunately, la
Pérouse had sent the National Assembly of
France copies of his journals and other
documents from two points along his route.
In 1793, a French expedition of two
frigates, Recherche and Espérance
(Huon de Kermadec) was sent in search of la
Perouse. It worked along the southwest coast
of Australia and visited Tasmania and then
passed close to the northern tip of New
Zealand’s North Island. Maori in canoes traded
with the explorers before the ships headed
northeast. This expedition, led by A R J Bruni
d’Entrecasteaux, found and named Esperance
Rock and Raoul Island in the Kermadecs. But
they did not find any trace of La Pérouse.
Next to the
starting blocks were William Sever, who, in
1788, discovered the uninhabited Curtis and
Macauley Islands in the Kermadec group; and
the doughty and much-publicised William Bligh,
who took his Bounty south of New
Zealand on his way to Tahiti for a cargo of
breadfruit plants. He found and named the
small, uninhabited Bounty Islands east of New
Zealand on September 19 1788 and, on his way
back west from Tahiti, became an everlasting
object of critical scrutiny and subject of
films when 16 of his crew mutinied. He was
cast adrift with 18 loyal followers to steer
the Bounty's launch 3000 miles to
Kupang in Timor on a voyage of incredible
fortitude and courage.
Then followed
George Vancouver, who brought two Royal Navy
vessels, HMS Discovery and HMS
Chatham, into Dusky Sound on November 2,
1791. This was an unplanned stopover; he had
no intention of visiting New Zealand but,
south of Tasmania, he became concerned about
the health of his crew and diverted to Dusky
Sound in search of fresh provisions. In the
three weeks he spent in the sound, he surveyed
Anchor Island Harbour and William Robert
Broughton, commanding the Chatham,
surveyed Facile Harbour. Then, together, they
explored the upper arm of Breaksea Sound,
which Cook had been unable to investigate
fully, and found that it divided into two
branches, both ending in small coves and
neither connecting, as they had hoped, with
Doubtful Sound, a short distance away across
the rugged bush-wrapped country.
Driven
apart by a storm after leaving New Zealand,
Vancouver and Broughton independently found
the Snares and Broughton came within sight of
the main island of the Chathams.
Only a couple of
months later, HMS Gorgon, commanded by
John Parker, sailed between Northland and
Three Kings Islands but Parker made no attempt
to land. Some coastal information he gathered
possibly found its way into early published
charts but it was hardly a significant
contribution.
20. 1792: The
entrepreneurs move in
The next
arrivals included New Zealand’s first
commercial entrepreneurs -- sealers attracted
by Cook’s reports of large colonies of seals
in Dusky Sound. The first party, in 1792-93,
spent ten months in the sound securing seals
for the China market and establishing New
Zealand’s first major export market. Sealing
later spread to islands in Foveaux Strait, to
Stewart Island and to the deep harbours of the
west coast and, by the second decade of the
19th century, to the cold and rugged Bounty,
Auckland, Chatham and Campbell Islands.
A quarter of a
century after Cook’s first visit, the whalers
moved in and from then on, New Zealand’s
coastal water were crowded with ships of
different nationalities pursuing seals and
whales or calling in for provisions. There was
some give among all the take - a number of
sealing and whaling captains investigated
sections of the coastline and carried out
rough but important harbour surveys.
An
American seal hunter, Owen Folgar Smith,
finally discovered Foveaux Strait in 1804.
Despite the increasing activities of shipping
around the area, Stewart Island had continued
to be seen as part of the mainland and
captains sailed round to its south.
Considering the width of the strait, this is
either a reflection on the observational
powers of the mariners or a comment on the
bleak conditions and poor visibility that
prevailed in that southern sea.
Another
American, Eber Bunker, sailed his whaler,
William and Mary, into Doubtless Bay in
1791 and returned in 1808-09 in the sealer
Pegasus to locate and record seal colonies.
Bunker surveyed extensively in southern
waters, including Foveaux Strait.
One
Samuel Chase brought the Pegasus back
in 1809 and anchored in Port Pegasus on
Stewart Island, while his first officer,
William Stewart, surveyed the harbour. They
were supposedly after seals but spent their
time to a large degree on important surveying
work. Chase also surveyed the southern coast
of the main island of the Chathams to improve
on Broughton’s 1791 chart.
Chase had
sailed to the Chathams to look for seals, then
in October 1809 headed up to Cook’s “Banks
Island”, which he discovered was not an island
at all but a peninsula. The name Pegasus Bay,
north of the peninsula, commemorates this
important correction.
Cloudy Bay and
Port Underwood attracted the whalers and
sealers of many nations, especially between
1831 and 1839. Several American captains
produced plans of Cloudy Bay, which are now
preserved in museums on the eastern seaboard
of the United States.
The Royal
Geographical Society in London holds a Cloudy
Bay survey carried out in 1837 by the
Englishman Rossiter, who was sailing-master of
the French whaler with the American name
Mississippi.
Among all this
toing and froing was one Spanish expedition,
led by an Italian, Don Alessandra Malaspina,
and consisting of two corvettes, the
Descubierta and the Altrevida,
which arrived off southwest New Zealand in
February 1793. Their intention was to repeat
at Dusky Sound gravity measurements already
conducted elsewhere. The ships were unable to
get into Dusky Sound but briefly visited
Doubtful Sound, where the chief navigator, Don
Felipe Bauzá, reconnoitred the sound in an
armed longboat, producing a plan later
published by the British Admiralty as an
official Hydrographic Office chart.
In March 1800,
Henry Waterhouse, in command of HMS
Reliance, passed south of New Zealand on a
voyage to London via Cape Horn and was the
first to come upon a group of uninhabited and
desolate islands. Waterhouse called them Isles
Pentantipode, from their global relationship
to the antipodes of London and they are now
identified in maps as the Antipodes Islands.
21. 1788: Timber!
James Cook
was also the trigger-point for another
fledgling industry. Published accounts of his
voyages included reports of fine timber-trees.
Enterprising traders were soon on the scene
and a new industry supplying ships’ spars was
launched. Even the Royal Navy joined, sending
timber-gathering expeditions from New South
Wales, where the penal colony had been
established.
In the final decade of
18th century, several ship-loads of spars were
extracted and taken out through the Hauraki
Gulf. Records of these early exploiters are
sketchy but the journal of William Wilson has
survived and his entries disclose that he
surveyed extensively around the gulf for
suitable timber when he came here in the East
India Company’s ship, Royal Admiral, in
1801.
In 1822, James Herd, commanding
the Providence, hove to in Hokianga
Harbour in search of spars and carried out a
survey, which two years later reached the
French captain Isidore Duperrey at the Bay of
Islands. The resultant chart was subsequently
published at Paris.
Ever since the
Seven Years War in 1756-63, Royal Navy ships
were under instructions to survey all harbours
they visited and this directive was still
being followed in the 1820s and 1830s, when a
number of naval timber-gathering ships came to
New Zealand. Richard Skinner, in command of
HMS Dromedary, while taking kauri,
charted parts of Northland’s east coast and
surveyed Whangaroa Harbour; James Downie, in
the store-ship HMS Coromandel, sought
kauri on the shores of the Hauraki Gulf,
surveyed extensively and made such an extended
stay off the Coromandel Peninsula coast that a
search for him was launched by John Rodolphus
Kent, in command of the New South Wales
government schooner Prince Regent. The
search, while not necessary, had a surprise
bonus.
Coming south from the Bay of
Islands, Kent sailed through Rangitoto Channel
and made the European pioneering entry into
Waitemata Harbour, which he partially surveyed
on August 21 1820. Kent's fine survey-plan
reached Norie the English chart publisher via
Sydney and probably Herd. Until recently it
was mistakenly believed that Herd carried out
the survey as indicated in the published plan.
The Royal Navy added significant details
of other harbours. Thomas Woore on HMS
Alligator (George Lambert) surveyed
Whangaroa Harbour; HM Storeship Buffalo
(F A Cudlip), which made several voyages to
New Zealand before coming to total grief on
Buffalo Beach in Mercury Bay, in 1840,
surveyed Whangaroa and Mahurangi Harbours; in
1837, N C Phillips, second master of the
ill-fated ship, surveyed Tutukaka Harbour; and
on the last voyage, second master Thomas Bowen
surveyed Tairua Harbour.
The
Alligator starred in a dramatic rescue
mission in 1834. Elizabeth, the wife of a
whaler, John Guard, was being held captive by
Maori at Moturoa, Taranaki, and George Lambert
dashed from New South Wales to save her. He
succeeded and then called at Port Hardy, Port
Gore and Queen Charlotte Sound, on the
northern coast of the South Island, for
surveying by the ship’s master Thomas Woore.
Opportunities to add to the sum total of New
Zealand knowledge were rarely overlooked
Kapiti Island was partly charted and Port
Underwood surveyed in 1837 by HMS Conway
(C R Drinkwater-Bethune) and the following
year HMS Pelorus (Philip Chetwode),
with master David Craigle, carried out the
first survey of Pelorus Sound. John Guard was
on board as pilot when Chetwode took the
Pelorus an adventurous 40 miles up the
sound. The newly-found Waitemata Harbour was
twice surveyed by Royal Navy officers in 1840,
the year HMS Herald brought
Governor-designate William Hobson from Sydney
to the Bay of Islands. After the Treaty of
Waitangi signing, Hobson sailed in the
Herald (Joseph Nias) to the Waitemata
with the intention of examining areas suitable
for the capital of the new colony. While
Hobson and his party inspected the upper parts
of the harbour, Peter Fisher, Philip Bean and
Thomas Bowen surveyed the lower part. Later in
the year, Owen Stanley, in command of HMS
Britomart, called briefly into the
Waitemata and made a fresh survey with the
assistance of J S Hill. The names associated
with modern-day New Zealand were all slotting
more or less into place.
Earlier in the
same period, Stanley had surveyed Akaroa
Harbour and Pigeon Bay, on Banks Peninsula.
Farther afield,
the unoccupied and inhospitable Auckland
Islands had been placed on the map in 1806 by
Abraham Bristow in command of the British
whaler Ocean. He named them “Lord
Auckland’s Group” after his father’s patron.
He returned in 1807 in the Sarah and
took formal possession of the islands.
Although the Snares and Chatham Island had
already been discovered by Vancouver's
expedition, Pitt Island and Rangatira, east of
Chatham, were not discovered until 1807, when
Charles Johnston, in command of HMS
Cornwallis, sighted them.
Another remote
and uninhabited island, Campbell, was placed
on the map by a sealer, Frederick Hasselburgh,
in the Perseverance in 1810. He named
the island after the head of the Sydney firm
he was working for, but there is no record
that he was rewarded for this gesture.
Hasselburgh was drowned at the island on a
return visit there.
One of the most
interesting early visitors to New Zealand was
the Russian explorer Thaddeus von
Bellingshausen, leading an expedition of two
ships, Vostok and Mirnyi. Bound
from Port Jackson, New South Wales, for Rapa
in the Tubuai Islands, von Bellingshausen came
in view of the North Island near Cape Egmont
on May 24, 1820, visited Queen Charlotte Sound
and made numerous valuable observations of
Maori life in that area. He was later blown
about in Cook Strait for several days and saw
the grim, rock-faced and wave-beaten shores of
Wellington at uncomfortably close range before
scraping past Cape Palliser.
22.
1820: Flax finds favour
Cook was
also at the beginning of the next commercial
ventures. On his first voyage, he and Banks
had recorded the presence of flax in New
Zealand and, on his second voyage, botanists J
R and G Forster had studied the varieties of
the plant and the skilful use of flax leaves
by Māori.
But, although Sydney
merchants sent ships across to collect flax
from 1810 onwards, the trade with Sydney was
not firmly established until a decade later
when William Lawrence Edwardson, in the sloop
Snapper, was sent by the New South
Wales government to pick up a cargo of dressed
flax from southern New Zealand in 1822.
Edwardson also carried out several surveys in
the Foveaux Strait region. His charts were
acquired by a midshipman, Jules de Blosseville
on the French vessel Coquille at Port Jackson
and were eventually published in Duperrey’s
atlas, in Paris in 1833. The British Admiralty
copied and published some of the charts
without giving any credit at all to Edwardson.
In 1823, aboard the brig Perseverance
(Captain Murray), a rope-making expert, Robert
Williams, closely inspected the area around
Bluff Harbour. Williams, a convict in the
penal settlement of Port Jackson, was released
by the governor of New South Wales, Lachlan
Macquarie, who supported the investigation
into the commercial properties of New Zealand
flax and recognised Williams as an expert in
the field. Bluff Harbour was probably well
known to sealers but Williams and Murray were
the first to survey the harbour.
In the same
decade, the most detailed studies associated
with flax gathering were carried out by John
Rodolphus Kent. Kent was initially in the
service of the government of New South Wales
but eventually became commercially employed.
He commanded a number of ships in the 1820s
and 1830s including the colonial schooner
Prince Regent, the New South Wales
government cutter Mermaid, and the brig
Elizabeth Henrietta, and engaged at
different times in sealing, trading in general
merchandise and flax-gathering. He became
familiar with several of New Zealand’s
harbours, including the Waitemata and Port
Nicholson, and also charted long stretches of
coastline and some of the offshore islands.
In 1827 Kent inspected Kawhia Harbour
in the Emma Kemp, and in 1829 he took
the Governor Macquarie into Hokianga
Harbour. Then in 1830 he investigated the
Manukau Harbour in the Tranmere.
The French
interest in New Zealand remained high and in
1824, one of their expeditions established an
observatory on the beach at the centre of
Orokawa Bay in the Bay of Islands to survey
the bay’s many offshore features. Leader of
this expedition was Louis Isidore Duperrey,
commander of the corvette la Coquille,
and his second in command was J S C Dumont
d’Urville. The French tapped into local
missionaries considerable geographical
knowledge and Duperrey acquired James Herd’s
chart of Hokianga Harbour on the opposite
coast - this also was published in Duperrey's
atlas, in Paris, in 1833.
Herd had been
in New Zealand the year before and, on his
return to England, was involved in the
formation of the first New Zealand Company. In
August 1825, he was given command of two
emigrant ships, the barque Rosanna and
the cutter Lambton (Thomas Barnett),
which made first landfall at Pegasus Bay on
Stewart Island in March 1826. In a month-long
stay, Herd met a number of sealing captains,
including William Stewart, who possessed an
intimate knowledge of lengthy stretches of New
Zealand’s coastlines. From Pegasus Bay, Herd
visited “Molyneux Harbour” (the vicinity of
the mouth of the Clutha River), Otago Harbour,
Ship Cove, Cloudy Bay, Manganui Harbour (Port
Underwood), Port Nicholson, Mercury Bay,
Hauraki Gulf, Bay of Islands and Hokianga
Harbour in an intensive search for a site for
his proposed settlement. Herd purchased land
at Rawene but suddenly abandoned the
colonising venture and took his ships and
potential settlers off to Sydney where they
arrived on February 11, 1827.
Herd’s
most important work in New Zealand waters
involved surveys of Otago Harbour and Port
Nicholson and, when he got back to England, he
supplied the London chart publisher, J W
Norie, with such excellent information that
Norie became the first to correctly lay down
the east coast of the northern half of the
South Island and both coasts of the southern
part of the North Island.
D’Urville was
back in New Zealand in 1827, commanding the
Coquille, which had now been renamed Astrolabe
in memory of la Pérouse's lost flagship. One
objective of this expedition was a further
attempt to solve the mystery of la Pérouse's
disappearance; another was to explore those
parts of the coast left in doubt by Cook.
They came upon the South Island’s west
coast near the mouth of the Grey River on
January 10, 1827, sailed north round Farewell
Spit and prepared to closely examine Tasman
Bay. On January 18, d’Urville went ashore,
climbed a hill and saw across Tasman Bay on
the eastern side, a deep opening that led him
to suspect a passage existed through to
Admiralty Bay.
At enormous risk, he
made two unsuccessful attempts to sail the
Astrolabe through the narrow gap but
finally passed through. The passage was named
“Passe de Francais" (French Pass) and, at the
insistence of his officers, who no doubt were
relieved to have survived the experience,
named what was now proved to be an island on
the north side of the pass, D’Urville Island.
Contrary winds prevented him from delving into
an indentation between Cape Terawhiti and
Turakirae Head, at the southern end of the
North Island, so he missed the opportunity of
exploring Port Nicholson. Instead, he
continued through Cook Strait and surveyed
northwards. The plan was to anchor in
Whitianga Harbour but difficult winds, coupled
with the earlier delays, forced a change of
plans and the Astrolabe headed for the Hauraki
Gulf. Then, as winds around the New Zealand
coast do, another shift in their direction
drove him farther north and he finally dropped
anchor in Bream Bay.
D’Urville made it
back to the Waitemata on February 24, sailing
between Tiritiri Matangi Island and the
Whangaparaoa Peninsula. A survey station was
established on the summit of a hill
overlooking the harbour, probably Mount
Victoria in present-day North Shore City.
More of the picture puzzle that was New
Zealand was uncovered when d’Urville learnt
from the Maori chief, Rangui, that a large
harbour lay on the western side of the
isthmus. Keen to verify this important piece
of information, he sent an exploring party,
escorted by a Maori and led by V C Lottin, in
a whaleboat, which followed the Tamaki River
upstream for five or six kilometres. The party
crossed the narrow stretch of land and were
the first Europeans to discover the vastness
of the Manukau Harbour.
The Astrolabe
left the Hauraki Gulf in early March and
d’Urville and Lottin charted the east coast of
Northland before setting sail for Tonga on
March 18 1827.
23. 1827: Naval
detail
On a round the world voyage,
a British battleship, HMS Warspite, and
the corvette HMS Volage traversed Cook
Strait in 1827 and stayed in the area for a
fortnight. By that time the gaps in the chart
of New Zealand were becoming fewer but the two
Royal Navy vessels added nothing.
In 1834, Thomas
Wing came to New Zealand as chief officer of
the ship Independence. Returning to
England, he was interviewed and commissioned
by the Admiralty to survey a number of New
Zealand harbours. In the schooner Fanny,
he started the following year in Tauranga
Harbour and went on to the Kaipara, Manukau,
Raglan and Kawhia Harbours. In 1837, he
surveyed Port Ahuriri, Napier, and then, in
the schooner Trent investigated part of the
central east coast of the North Island. In yet
another ship, the brigantine Deborah,
he collated information on Foveaux Strait in
1844. His was an exceptionally thorough
exploration of much of what New Zealand had to
offer but for unknown reasons none of his
surveys reached publication.
Meanwhile, late
in 1831, Pierre Théodore Laplace, commanding
the French corvette La Favorite, had
come from the west and worked his way north
and round into the Bay of Islands. He was
mainly in need of a few days’ restful
anchorage for sick members of his crew but he
took the opportunity to work on a number of
scientific projects, including a detailed
survey of the Kawakawa River. The hydrographer
accompanying the expedition, E F Pâris,
erected a temporary observatory on Kaiaraara
Island and carried out observations before
Laplace continued his voyage east.
Another French
corvette, the Héroïne, commanded by J B
Cécille, was sent out in 1838 to show the
French flag and, because the international
competition for whales was fierce, to offer
protection to French vessels engaged in the
trade. Two hydrographers accompanying the
expedition, J. M. Fournier, and L. A. J.
Durand-Dubraye, carried out a survey of the
Kawakawa River area and later when Cécille
sailed south, they took the opportunity to
survey Akaroa and Lyttelton Harbours and in
the Chatham Islands.
The same year,
the French frigate Vénus, commanded by
A A Dupetit-Thouars, arrived for the same
purpose. The anticipation was that French help
might be needed to maintain discipline among
the whaling fleet and to solve any diplomatic
problems that might arise. The Vénus
was not much use initially; it anchored in the
Bay of Islands in October and was there for a
month while extensive repairs were carried out
to make it seaworthy again. An experienced
hydrographer, Dortel de Tessan, was among the
complement and he spent his time profitably by
making yet another survey of the bay. Enough,
in those days, never seemed to be enough.
September 1839 saw the arrival of the
advance party of the second New Zealand
Company, on board the barque Tory,
under the command of Edward Main Chaffers. The
Tory called first at Ship Cove and
engaged the famed whaler Dicky Barrett as
pilot and interpreter, before sailing to Port
Nicholson. Among the passengers was Charles
Heaphy, the company’s official artist and
draughtsman, who became New Zealand’s most
notable land surveyor of the colonial period
and a leading citizen.
Chaffers was the
first to thoroughly survey Port Nicholson,
Tory Channel and Kaipara Harbour, where the
Tory unfortunately spent quite some time
on a sandbank. It was duly charted as a
shipping hazard.
Back in France,
d’Urville had submitted a modest proposal in
1836 for a second circumnavigation. King
Louis-Philippe more ambitiously enlarged on
the plan and suggested that the voyage should
include the Antarctic. The Astrolabe
was chosen again and was joined by another
corvette, the Zéleé (Charles
Jacquinot). A noted hydrographer Clement A
Vincendon-Dumoulin sailed with d’Urville.
But it was 1837 before the ships left
Toulon and March 1840 before they approached
the Auckland Islands and anchored in the
exotically named Bay of Sarah’s Bosom.
Vincendon-Dumoulin carried out observations
and surveys around Sarah’s Bosom before the
expedition sailed past the Snares and Stewart
Island, anchoring at the end of March in Otago
Harbour.
By April 8, the Frenchmen were
approaching the southern shore of Banks
Peninsula and here experienced what might be
considered some justification for the
repetitive surveys and re-surveys by different
experts and different nationalities of the New
Zealand coast. They were using English charts
and were totally confused because those charts
showed Akaroa Harbour on the eastern side of
the peninsula. They got there eventually but
the French opinion of English expertise would
have been interesting to record.
The
corvettes were off Cape Campbell by April 21,
which was the limit set for their survey work,
which created yet another dilemma. When he
arrived off Kororareka on April 26, d’Urville
was uncertain, in the absence of any
instructions from France, whether he should
recognise William Hobson as governor of a
British colony. He decided he could not and
would call on Hobson as a British naval
officer. Hobson, taking care to avoid
embarrassment or possibly worse consequences,
was diplomatically out of town. D’Urville left
a few days later, bound for Torres Strait,
leaving the British in solid control and New
Zealand about to enter the colonial period.
D'Urville's visit brought to an end the era of
the great Pacific explorers in New Zealand
waters. Foreign and private surveyors ceased
their activities except one, the French naval
officer Auguste Bérard who remained until 1846
to complete a fine survey of the Banks
Peninsula area.
It was now solely the
task of he Royal Navy to continue coastal
investigations and in the late 1840s Britain
sent out John Lort Stokes in the
paddle-steamer HMS Acheron to start a
comprehensive survey. Byron Drury later joined
Stokes in the brig HMS Pandora. By 1855
what became known as the "Great Survey" was
completed. □
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