Scroll down for: New Zealand unveiled  Part B - Cont'd from Part A -

 New Zealand unveiled - Brian Hooker, cont'd

This is Part B - Continued from Part A -

1. 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 rigors 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.

A modern map showing Cape Horn

and Le Maire Strait at the southern  tip of

South America. Previous to the discovery of

Le Maire Strait in 1616 the only

 entry to the Pacific from the east was

via Magellan Strait, the traverse of

which could take many months.

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 recognisable 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 Māori, 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 Maori 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 Māori.

The orthodox belief among anthropologists is that New Zealand’s settlement was a planned colonisation. 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.

Courtesy National library of Australia

.[nla.pic-an7723]

ohn Webber (1752-1793)

 "Boats of the Friendly Islands"

Published by J. Webber 1791.

Soft-ground etching, hand coloured.

 From a drawing by

 J. Webber, artist accompanying

James Cook on his third voyage to the

 Pacific.

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 civilisations took 5000 years to master the science of long-distance navigation. (fn.1. The history of navigation is reviewed in "The development of navigation" - go via Contents above to Page JZP1 under Section J.)

From the ancient Greeks to 18th century inventors, illustrious scientific and philosophical intellects such as Aristotle, Pythagorus, 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 Maori 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 widest; 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.

Reproduced on this page are three cartographic

 treasures from the 16th century. The exquisitely-drawn maps

on vellum are in Battista Agnese's  Atlas made in  Venice circa 1544.

Above is a map of the Pacific as it was known circa 1544.

Courtesy Library of Congress.

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.

A view of Lisbon in the mid-sixteenth century.

Portugal began to expand her

 trade with England

and Flanders in

the fourteenth century and from that time

 Lisbon became the centre of intense

 maritime activity. Engraving

from Braun's Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1582.

Courtesy:  Museo Naval,  Madrid.

Vasco da Gama  (1460-1524)   Right: "São Gabriel" .Unknown artist.

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 bfleet which sailed from Lisbon to Anjediva, near Goa. Afonso Albuquerque, called "The Great"  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:

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 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

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 occup 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 the Victoria with 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.

Three early geographers who set the course for the later explorers.

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 1580, 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, 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.

Continued in Part C - Click HERE  (under repair)

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