Supplementary Facts in the History of the Discovery of Australia

On the 14th of March last I had the honour of laying before this Society some new facts which had fallen under my notice in connection with the early discoveries of the great continental Island of Australia. One of these new facts was the very promising circumstance that there had been found in the Royal Burgundian Library in Brussels, by M. Ruelens, one of the Conservators of the Library, who had obligingly communicated to me the fact, the original autograph report to King Philip III. of a discovery of Australia in 1601 by a Portuguese named Manoel Godinho de Eredia, which discovery I had been the first to make known to the world in a paper read before this Society on the 7th of March, 1861. The report was accompanied by maps and views and portraits, and as at the time of my announcing its discovery to you I had received through M. Ruelens an obliging promise from the Chevalier d'Antas, the Portuguese Minister in Brussels, that an extract should be sent me of that portion with which I was immediately concerned, I begged that the printing of my paper should be postponed until I should possess the opportunity of incorporating into it the translation of the said extract. My reason for appearing before you without waiting till I had examined the Report with my own eyes was, that, while I had no reason to entertain the shadow of a doubt as to the corroborative nature of its contents, I had a still more important announcement to make to you respecting a yet earlier discovery of Australia in the first half of the sixteenth century. Since then I have received the promised extract, and I am sorry to have to report to you that a more unsatisfactory document has never fallen under my notice. But, in order that you may rightly estimate both it and the case to which it refers, it will be necessary that I repeat to you the leading facts and circumstances of the whole story. Up to 1861, the earliest visit to the coasts of Australia known in history in connection with the name of any ship or captain, was that made by the Dutch yacht the “Duyphen,” or “Dove,” about the month of March, 1606. This vessel had been despatched from Bantam on the 18th of November, 1605, to explore the islands of New Guinea. Her course from New Guinea was southward along the islands on the west side of Torres Strait to that part of Terra Australis a little to the west and south of Cape York, but all these lands were thought to be connected and to form the west coast of New Guinea. The Commander of the “Duyphen,” of whose name we are ignorant, was of course unconscious of the importance of his discovery. Indeed, of the discoveries made subsequently by the Dutch on the coasts of Australia, our ancestors of a hundred years ago, and even the Dutch themselves, knew but little. That which was known was preserved in the “Relations de divers Voyages curieux,” of Melchisedeck Thevenot (Paris, 1663-72, fol.); in the “Noord en Oost Tartarye,” of Nicolas Witsen (Amst. 1692-1705, fol.); in Valentyn's “Oud en Nieuw Oost Indien” (Amst. 1724-26, fol.); and in the “Inleidning tot de algemeen Geographie” of Nicolas Struyk (Amst. 1740, 4to.). We have, however, since gained a variety of information, through a document which fell into the possession of Sir Joseph Banks, and was published by Alexander Dalrymple (at that time hydrographer to the Admiralty and the East India Company) in his collection concerning Papua. This curious and interesting document is a copy of the instructions to Commodore Abel Jansz Tasman for his second voyage of discovery. That distinguished commander had already, in 1642, discovered not only the island now named after him, Tasmania, but New Zealand also; and, passing round the east side of Australia, but without seeing it, sailed on his return voyage along the northern shores of New Guinea. In January, 1644, he was despatched on his second voyage, and his instructions, signed by the Governor-General Antonio Van Diemen and the members of the Council, are prefaced by a recital, in chronological order, of the previous discoveries of the Dutch. Prom this recital, combined with a passage from Saris, given in Purchas, vol. i. p. 385, we derive the above information respecting the voyage of the Duyphen, the date of which constituted it the first authenticated discovery of Australia with which a vessel's name could be connected. In 1861, however, I ventured to dispute this priority, and I think I cannot do justice to you and to myself better than by reciting the grounds on which I did so in the very words with which I then addressed you. They are as follows: “Within the last few days I have discovered a MS. Mappemonde in the British Museum, in which on the north-west corner of a country, which I shall presently show beyond all question to be Australia, occurs the following legend: Nuca antara foi descuberta o anno 1601 por mano (sic) el godinho de Evedia (sic) por mandado de (sic) Vico Rey Aives (sic) de Saldaha,” (sic) which I scarcely need translate, Nuca Antara was discovered in the year 1601, by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, by command of the Viceroy Ayres de Saldanha.

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III.—The Pre-Cambrian Rocks of Wales

Geological Magazine ◽

10.1017/s0016756800173984 ◽

1893 ◽

Vol 10 (9) ◽

pp. 396-401

Author(s):

Henry Hicks

Keyword(s):

XIII.—Further Facts in the History of the Early Discovery of Australia

Archaeologia ◽

10.1017/s0261340900006718 ◽

1874 ◽

Vol 44 (2) ◽

pp. 233-241

Author(s):

Richard Henry Major

Keyword(s):

British Museum ◽

The West ◽

Gold Mines ◽

Good Fortune ◽

Special Commission ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

Cape York ◽

First Time

In the year 1861 I had the satisfaction of laying before the Society of Antiquaries, and thereby making known to the world for the first time, the important fact that the great continental island of Australia had been discovered in the year 1601 by a Portuguese navigator, named Manoel Godinho de Eredia. Up to that time the earliest authenticated discovery of any part of the great southern land was that made a little to the west and south of Cape York by the commander of the Dutch yacht the Duyfhen, or Dove, about the month of March 1606. Thus the fact which I announced in 1861 gave a date to the first authenticated discovery of Australia earlier by five years than that which had been previously accepted in history, and transferred the honour of that discovery from Holland to Portugal. The document on which this fact, so entirely new to the world, was based, was a MS. Mappe-monde in the British Museum, in which, on the northwest corner of a country which could be shown beyond all question to be Australia, stood a legend in Portuguese to the following effect:— “Nuça antara was discovered in the year 1601 by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, by command of the Viceroy Ayres de Saldanha.” This mappe-monde had the great disadvantage of being only a copy, possibly made even in the present century, from one the geography of which proved it to be some two centuries older. Still, the mere fact of its being a copy laid it open to a variety of possible objections, which fortunately I was able to forestall by arguments that I believe to be unanswerable, and which I think I need not repeat now, as they are already printed in the “Archaeologia,” vol. xxxviii. I will merely say that I had the good fortune at the time to find a happy confirmation of what was stated in the map in a little printed work which described the discoverer as a learned cosmographer and skilful captain, who had received a special commission from the Viceroy at Goa to make explorations for gold mines, and at the same time to verify the descriptions of the southern islands.

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“Eskimo” Immigrants and Colonial Soldiers: Icelandic Immigrants and the North-West Resistance, 1885

Canadian Historical Review ◽

10.3138/chr-102-s1-022 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 102 (s1) ◽

pp. s309-s338

Author(s):

Laurie K. Bertram

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Indigenous People ◽

Western Canada ◽

The West ◽

New Developments ◽

North West ◽

The North ◽

History Of ◽

The City ◽

Urban Working

How did marginalized and racialized ethnic immigrants transform themselves into active, armed colonial agents in nineteenth-century Western Canada? Approximately twenty Icelanders enlisted to fight Louis Riel’s forces during the North-West Resistance in 1885, just ten years following the arrival of Icelandic immigrants in present-day Manitoba. Forty more reportedly enlisted in an Icelandic-Canadian battalion to enforce the government’s victory in the fall. This public, armed stance of a group of Icelanders against Indigenous forces in 1885 is somewhat unexpected, since most Icelanders were relatively recent arrivals in the West and, in Winnipeg, members of the largely unskilled urban working class. Moreover, they were widely rumoured among Winnipeggers to be from a “blubber-eating race” and of “Eskimo” extraction; community accounts testify to the discrimination numerous early Icelanders faced in the city. These factors initially make Icelanders unexpected colonialists, particularly since nineteenth-century ethnic immigration and colonial suppression so often appear as separate processes in Canadian historiography. Indeed, this scholarship is characterized by an enduring belief that Western Canadian colonialism was a distinctly Anglo sin. Ethnic immigrants often appear in scholarly and popular histories as sharing a history of marginalization with Indigenous people that prevented migrants from taking part in colonial displacement. Proceeding from the neglected history of Icelandic enlistment in 1885 and new developments in Icelandic historiography, this article argues that rather than negating ethnic participation in Indigenous suppression, ethnic marginality and the class tensions it created could actually fuel participation in colonial campaigns, which promised immigrants upward mobility, access to state support, and land.

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DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

Modern Intellectual History ◽

10.1017/s1479244317000439 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 16 (02) ◽

pp. 599-605

Author(s):

CAROLINE WINTERER

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

North Atlantic ◽

Wars Of Religion ◽

The West ◽

History Of Thought ◽

The North ◽

History Of ◽

Self Rule ◽

American Thought ◽

Number Of Authors

After a generation of grand stories about the rise of modern republican thought (the so-called “republican-synthesis” school epitomized by the works of Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock), James Kloppenberg's new book, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, offers a history of democratic thought: what Kloppenberg calls “the idea of self-government.” In the course of nearly a thousand pages of text and notes, Kloppenberg traces democracy's emergence “as a widely shared, albeit still controversial, model of government” over the last four centuries in the North Atlantic world (1). The book is deeply learned and intellectually capacious, covering thinkers from the ancient Greeks, through the sixteenth-century wars of religion, through the American and French Revolutions, ending abruptly at the Civil War. Few intellectual historians writing today could have managed a book of such sweep. The number of authors, texts, and themes discussed is vast—so much so that at times it seems that the book could double as a history of thought in the West.

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Long-term persistence and vicariance within the Australian Monsoonal Tropics: the case of the giant cave and tree geckos (Pseudothecadactylus)

Australian Journal of Zoology ◽

10.1071/zo13080 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 61 (6) ◽

pp. 462 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Paul M. Oliver ◽

Rebecca J. Laver ◽

Katie L. Smith ◽

Aaron M. Bauer

Keyword(s):

New Caledonia ◽

Morphological Diversity ◽

North West ◽

The North ◽

Arid Conditions ◽

The Face ◽

History Of ◽

Cape York ◽

Rag 1

The Australian Monsoonal Tropics (AMT) are one of the largest unbroken areas of savannah woodland in the world. The history of the biota of this region is poorly understood; however, data from fossil deposits indicate that the climate was more mesic in the past, and that biodiversity has been shaped by attenuation and turnover as arid conditions expanded and intensified through the Miocene and Plio-Pleistocene. The giant cave and tree geckos (Pseudothecadactylus) are distributed across three disjunct regions of relatively high rainfall in the AMT (the north-west Kimberley, the ‘Top End’, and Cape York). We present an analysis of the diversity and biogeography of this genus based on mitochondrial (ND2) and nuclear (RAG-1) loci. These data indicate that the three widely allopatric lineages of Pseudothecadactylus diverged around the mid-Miocene, a novel pattern of relatively long-term persistence that has not previously been documented within the AMT. Two Pseudothecadactylus species endemic to sandstone scarps in the west Kimberley Region and ‘Top End’ also include divergent mitochondrial lineages, indicative of deep intraspecific coalescence times within these regions. Pseudothecadactylus is a highly relictual lineage with an extant distribution that has been shaped by a history of attenuation, isolation and persistence in the face of increasingly arid conditions. The low ecological and morphological diversity of Pseudothecadactylus also contrasts with its diverse sister lineage of geckos in New Caledonia, further underlining the relictual nature of standing diversity in the former.

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Scientific exploration of Central Australia

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London ◽

10.1098/rspl.1867.0074 ◽

1868 ◽

Vol 16 ◽

pp. 347-364

Keyword(s):

Sandy Desert ◽

The West ◽

North West ◽

Inland Lakes ◽

The North ◽

Scientific Exploration ◽

Australian Continent ◽

Central Australia ◽

Better Than ◽

Vast Territory

If we look on a map of the Australian continent published ten years ago, we are struck by the immense expause of land then unexplored; we perceive at a glance that the south-eastern sea-board only of this great continent had then been examined with any degree ot accuracy, and that very little was known to us respecting the character of its shores on the west and north-west. In two quarters only had the zeal and daring of tire explorer succeeded in forcing a path towards the central portions of this vast territory, Sturt having penetrated as far as 24° South and 138° East, and Gregory as far as 21° South and 128° East. The nature of the country traversed by these two eminent explorers was such as to countenance the supposition, that the interior of Australia was little better than one vast desert, offering almost insurmountable obstacles to exploration. The idea, originally advanced by Oxley, that the greater part of the interim was occupied by vast inland lakes, was then abandoned; and the theory just mentioned took its place. In such a state of utter uncertainty as to the nature of the interior of a vast continent, it is but natural that various theories should be started; and no doubt they will, in the end, help to keep up the spirit for rigorous examination and exploration, yet care must be taken that they do not, by the unfavourable nature of their suppositions, tend to discourage enterprise. From such a danger we had a narrow escape during the years following A. C. Gregory’s exploration of the interior, and his expedition in search of Dr. Leichhardt, as at that time it was generally believed that the arid plains and stony deserts met with in the east and south, and the sandy desert in the north-west, were but the outskirts of a desert country unparalleled on our globe.

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Evolution of cartographic aggression by India: A study of Limpiadhura to Lipulek

Geographical Journal of Nepal ◽

10.3126/gjn.v13i0.28151 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 ◽

pp. 47-68

Author(s):

Jagat K Bhusal

Keyword(s):

East India Company ◽

Historical Maps ◽

British India ◽

The West ◽

Google Maps ◽

Southern Plains ◽

North West ◽

The North ◽

Kali River

Nepal is a sovereign country since its history and has never been colonized. In course of time, once a greater Nepal shrunk to present territory after its defeat in the Anglo-Nepal War (1814–15) and since the signing of the border treaty (Between the East India Company and the Raja of Nepal) which is known as the Sugauli Treaty of 1816. The defeat fixed the river Kali as the border in the west and the Mechi in the east on the hilly regions whereas there are border pillars (Jange Pillars) on the southern plains. The territorial issue between Nepal and India on the north-west border, especially up to the source of the Kali river is reviewed in this paper. Interpretations of the relevant documents and correspondences, reviewed papers, articles in periodicals and newspapers, and historical maps are critically made with reference to the recent freely available google maps and political maps published by Nepal and India. British-India after the Sugauli treaty and also India after the independence realized the importance of the Gunji-Kuti area, Lipulek pass and Kalapani and made the unilateral cartographic manipulation on the North-west border of Nepal. It is found that the borderline swinging over the century clearly indicated that the encroachment of about 400 sq. km land of Nepal contravened the spirit of the Sugauli Treaty.

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Realpolitik in the Decline of the West

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670500022002 ◽

1959 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 131-150

Author(s):

John S. Dunne

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Balance Of Power ◽

New Order ◽

The West ◽

History Of ◽

History Of Western Civilization ◽

Technological Community ◽

Established Order ◽

Better Than

Decline can be defined as the disruption of an established order, and if so defined, does not exclude the possibility of the simultaneous rise of new order. The “Decline of the West,” Spengler's term, is substantiated in the history of Western civilization, though not according to Spengler's theory, in the successive disruption of the community of belief, Christendom, through the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century, of the community of reason, or the Concert of Europe, as it was afterwards named, through the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and of the community of fear, the balance of power, through the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. A revolution, in every instance, is the overthrow of an established order. Whether the new order, if any, was better than the established order does not matter in deciding whether or not there has been a decline. Whether, for example, during the decline of the West there has been the rise of a scientific and technological community that has spread from the West to the world, giving substance to the slogan ”One World,” does not alter the fact that there has been a gradual disintegration of the established order in the West itself.

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The Scottish Herring Trade, 1470–1600

The Scottish Historical Review ◽

10.3366/shr.2005.84.2.149 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 84 (2) ◽

pp. 149-165 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Martin Rorke

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

West Coast ◽

North West ◽

Capital Costs ◽

The North ◽

East And West

This paper uses customs figures to show that herring exports from the east and west coast lowlands expanded significantly in the last six decades of the sixteenth century. The paper argues that the rise was primarily due to the north-west Highland fisheries being opened up and exploited by east and west coast burghs. These ventures required greater capital supplies and more complex organisation than their local inshore fisheries and they were often interrupted by political hostilities. However, the costs were a fraction of those required to establish a deepwater buss fleet, enabling Scotland to expand production and take advantage of European demand for fish while minimising additional capital costs.

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Conflict, Population Movement, and Microscale Social Networks in Northern Iroquoian Archaeology

American Antiquity ◽

10.1017/aaq.2021.5 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 86 (2) ◽

pp. 350-367

Author(s):

Jennifer Birch ◽

John P. Hart

Keyword(s):

Social Networks ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

Lake Ontario ◽

Population Movement ◽

Network Ties ◽

The West ◽

Local Networks ◽

North Shore ◽

The North ◽

Specific Sequences

We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.

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