THE DISCOVERY, REDISCOVERY and EXPLORATION of the ISLANDS of SOLOMON, 1 5 6 8 - L8 3 8 T
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE DISCOVERY, REDISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION OF THE ISLANDS OF SOLOMON, 1 5 6 8 - l8 3 8 t A SYNOPSIS OF A THESIS PRESENTED IN THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY BY C. JACK-HINTON 1962 v This thesis is an attempt to trace the history of the European discovery, rediscovery and exploration of the islands lying immediately to the east of New Guinea which became known after their discovery by the attractive if historically inaccurate name Islands of Solomon. It attempts to narrate the story of the successive voyages to the archipelago in some detail, reconstructing the routes followed and identifying the landfalls made, and further attempts to relate those voyages to the background of pre-discovery knowledge and conjecture, the cartography of the Pacific, and the consideration given over the years to the position, composition and very existence of the archipelago by cartographers, chroniclers, hydrographers, geographers and historians. The study represents the result of research conducted specifically between July i960 and December 19^1 , supported by a previous knowledge of part of the Solomons and a voyage in 1961 on the yacht "Staghound" to reconstruct the routes of the discoverers, rediscoverers and explorers, and to identify their landfalls. To endeavour to summarize the story of the discovery, "disappearance” (as the immediate post-discovery phase of its history has often been romantically but misleadingly termed) and rediscovery of the Islands of Solomon is inevitably to generalize, to oversimplify and to omit much which, though of secondary importance, is vital to an understanding of the whole* This brief synopsis should not, therefore, be regarded as anything more than a very general introduction qualified by the study itself. The story of the discovery and rediscovery of the Solomons is perhaps well, if rather generally and incompletely, known. It has not, however, been previously studied both as a whole and in detail, or in relation to the all-important question of Pacific cartography which is in fact a mirror set up to its successive stages. In 1568 Alvaro de Mendana came westwards across the Pacific to discover, explore and name a substantial part of the eastern half of the islands which were shortly afterwards to become popularly known as the Islands of Solomon. He did so in a spirit of curiosity, colonialism, commercialism and proselytism, against a background of 2 supposition and belief that the South Pacific, from the area to the south of New Guinea and the Moluccas to a point in low latitudes as little as six hundred Iberian leagues west of Lima, contained a vast austral continent, the Cphir of King Solomon, the lands reported by Marco Polo and golden islands reputed to have been known to the Incas. He navigated in the belief that the Pacific was considerably less wide than was in fact the case, and in the further belief that the whole of this area lay within the hemisphere to which Spain laid absolute claim to explore, colonize, exploit and convert. The techniques of navigation in the sixteenth century were such that the influence of the westerly-setting south equatorial current was insufficiently appreciated or allowed for, and in consequence the expedition considerably underestimated the distance sailed from Peru. By virtue of the current underestimate of the width of the Pacific, however, an underestimate which remained undetected for much of the period in v/hich navigators crossed that ocean v/ith the westerly-setting currents, the expedition was able to assume the proximity of its discovery to New Guinea, even though only the western half of the north coast of that land was known to them. Within twenty years of the return of the expedition to Peru charts and maps had appeared in Europe on which the archipelago was laid down, exaggerated in size, in close proximity and to the east of New Guinea, with coastlines and a nomenclature v/hich generally conformed v/ith the discoveries, exploration and conjectures made by the expedition of 1568. It was laid down at distances from Peru which varied according to the distance at which the cartographer plotted New Guinea, but which were generally less than that estimated by the discoverers. Chroniclers described the archipelago with varying degrees of accuracy and as lying either fifteen hundred leagues from Peru (a distance reconcilable with the l600 plus leagues recorded by the discoverers from Peru to the mid meridian of the archipelago where the first landfall was made, and with the exaggerated impression gained of the distance from that landfall to the eastern perimeter of the archipelago) or, quite inaccurately, as 3 lying 800 leagues from Peru, In 1595 Mendana returned to colonize the archipelago, hut discovered instead the island of Santa Cruz v/here he established an abortive and short-lived colony. Abandoning the colony after the death of Mendana and his successor, the remnants of the expedition sailed for the Philippines and must have passed within a remarkably short distance of the main archipelago of the Solomons v/ithout sighting them. The outward trans-Pacific voyage had been made in slightly higher latitudes where the south equatorial current is less pronounced, albeit in the trade wind season when that current tends to be strongest, and an appreciation of the existence of that current and improvements in the techniques of navigation had combined with this factor to produce a more correct, but still inadequate, estimate of the distance sailed. Nevertheless, Quiros, the Chief Pilot, was able to deduce that the Solomons lay to the west of Santa Cruz and that the expedition of 1568 had underestimated the distance of their discovery from Peru. Quiros himself returned in 1606, burning with a desire to discover the austral continent and a Catholic zeal to save its inhabitants from perdition, and discovered the islands of Taumako and Tikopia and heard of Sikaiana. On this occasion an even more correct estimate was made of the distance sailed from Peru, and the fact established that Santa Cruz lay at a short distance to the westwards of the new discoveries. In the New Hebrides, which he took to be part of the supposed continent, the expedition became divided, Quiros returning to California and Peru, Torres, his second-in-command, heading westwards to discover the Torres Straits and demonstrate the insularity of New Guinea. In l6l6 Schouten and Le Maire rounded Cape Horn and so defeated the letter of the Dutch East India Company’s monopoly to the trade of the Spice Islands, and came westwards in search of the austral continent and a cargo of spices. Assuming the Hoorn Islands to be offlyers of Quiros’ reputedly continental discoveries, unaware of Torres' voyage to the south of New Guinea and justifiably timorous of a possible lee shore extending southwards from New Guinea, they headed northwards to lower 4 latitudes and discovered Ontong Java, Tau'u, the Green Islands, St. John's Island and the north-east coast of New Ireland, assuming the latter to be the extremity of New Guinea* In 1643 Tasman, having sailed south of New Holland from the East Indies, and having entered the Pacific by way of Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand, sailed north from t'he Tonga group to join what he thought to be the route of Le Maire when he was in fact to the west of it. Misled by his chart to fear that Fiji might be Quiros' supposed continent he, like his countrymen before him, headed northwards to safety, to join their track and make the same landfalls amongst the outlyers of the Northern Solomons. The seventeenth century saw the continued production of charts and maps of the Pacific which delineated the Solomons in a form similar to those of the late sixteenth century, often with improved dimensions, and the emergence of others of Iberian origin which delineated the discoveries of 1595 and l606 but excluded those of 1568. It saw charts of the first category altered by the merging of the islands of the southern part of the Solomons to form a continental coastline extended southwards to accommodate the reputedly continental discovery of Quiros. It saw the Dutch discoveries added to all three types and their derivatives, the production of greatly improved Dutch charts from which the Spanish discoveries were excluded entirely, and the emergence of an erroneous type of map or chart on which the Spanish discoveries were identified with the chain of islands extending from New Guinea to Tierra del Fuego which cartographers had long postulated as a fringe of eroded fragments of the austral continent. By the end of the century and the first quarter of the l8th century, however, some of the problems of reconciling the delineation of the * Solomons in close proximity to New Guinea and also at the distance at which they were reputed to have been discovered, on charts which laid down a Pacific of considerably improved dimensions, had come to be appreciated. They were consequently and variously plotted eight hundred leagues, fifteen hundred leagues, or at such distances from 5 Peru as the individual cartographers or their authorities understood them to have been discovered at. In the majority of cases all that was left of the Solomons for this repositioning was the one large island of Santa Ysabel and a few diminutive neighbours, the remainder having been lost in the period of their cartographical absorption into the austral continent or Quiros' reputedly continental discovery. Of cartographers who seem to have run the whole gamut of possible locations for the Solomons de I’Isle is perhaps the most marked, beginning as he did by plotting them alongside the Marquesas, then moving them gradually westwards, and ending by plotting them in their earliest position in close proximity to New Guinea.