Customer Reviews

The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years before Captain Cook

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All the history books on Australia concentrate on Captain Cook's "discovery" of Australia. There's usually the odd mention of the Dutch sighting the west coast in 1606 and the odd mention of Abel Tasman ("Tasmania") but that's about it. This book sets out a different story. The author, an Australian lawyer with a lifelong interest in the history of Australia's discovery, shows that Australia was actually discovered and it's coastline mapped in detail by the Portugese 200 years before Cook and a 100 years before the Dutch.

The author uses ancient maps, particularly the Dieppe maps, and has researched the history of the Portugese explorers from the time of Prince Henry the Navigator on. He presents a detailed explanation of early mapping techniques and deep-sea navigation to show how these reflect on the maps of the past, and how, when the errors are corrected, we end up with some remarkably accurate maps of the australian west, northern and eastern coastlines. He also presents some sound arguments for why the portugese kept their discoveries secret (largely revolving around the Treaty of Tordillseras <my spelling on that isn't right> which split the hemisphere's between the Portugese and the Spanish - and incidentally is why Brazil is portugese-speaking and the Phillipines was a spanish colony.

Australia overlapped the line drawn and the Portugese didn't want the spanish to get a freebie is what it boils down to. Given that Timor, the main Portugese outpost in the East Indies, is a mere 250 miles north of the Australian continent, and that to get to Timor the Portugese had sailed down the Atlantic and across the Indian oceans, discovering and mapping numerous isolated islands (Tristan da Cunha and Kerguelen among others) and had also reached Macau in China and had trading posts in Japan, it's not an unreasonable supposition to make.

The book is detailed, some 420 pages in length and while it doesn't include any photo's of the maps, it does include some reasonable drawings. It's a great read that provides considerable historical information and presents a solid and believable case. One of the things I find more than a little interesting is that some of the evidence presented in this book for the Portugese discovery of Australia (the mahogany shipwreck, old stone ruins that pre-date the English) have been used more recently by Gavin Menzies in his book "1421" to support his thesis that the Chinese discovered Australia prior to the Portugese.