Map Matters, Si the Newsletter of the Australia on the Map Division of the De Australasian Hydrographic Society
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www.australiaonthemap.org.au I s s u e Map 1 Matters Issue 13 December 2010 In Welcome to the "Summer" 2010 edition of Map Matters, si the newsletter of the Australia on the Map Division of the de Australasian Hydrographic Society. th is is su e N e w s If you have any contributions or W suggestions for ell Map Matters, you can - email them to me at: tra ve [email protected] lle , or post them to me at: d art ef GPO Box 1781, ac Canberra, 2601 ts co Frank Geurts m Editor e ho m e M att he w Fli nd er s ret ur n sy m po si u m Cl ai m s th e P ort ug ue se si gh te d Te rr a A us tra lis in 15 00 News Well-travelled artefacts come home Between 1629 and 1712 four Dutch ships had the misfortune to be wrecked on the coast of Western Australia, the Batavia (1629), the Vergulde Draeck (1656), the Zuytdorp (1712) and the Zeewijk (1727). Over time these wrecks have been "discovered" and excavated, with a considerable amount of material being retrieved. The remnants of the Zeewijk were first noted by Captain Stokes of the Beagle (the ship Darwin had sailed on previously) in 1840 in the Southern or Pelsaert Group of the Abrolhos Islands. Some objects and other material left by the survivors were collected from Gun and Pelsaert Island in the 1890s by the principals of a guano mining company operating there, and in 1952 crew from HMAS Mildura and HMAS Fremantle raised three cannons. Further material was recovered as result of newspaper-funded expeditions in the 1960s, and finally the WA Maritime Museum carried out extensive surveys of the scattered debris from the wreck between 1976 and 1979. Wreckage and other material from the Zuytdorp had been first reported in 1927, found by Tom Pepper and Ada Drage along the Zuytdorp Cliffs, 550 km north of Perth. There were a couple of expedition to the area in the 1950s but it was not until 1959 that Phillip Playford was able to formally identify the wreck as the Zuytdorp. Because of the dangerous situation of the wreck no-one was actually able to dive on it until Max and Graham Cramer and Tom Brady managed it in 1963. These divers reported coming across a “carpet of silver” on the sea bed. They recovered some items, such as several small cannons, and the WA Maritime Museum managed to retrieve a further 3,500 coins, a cannon and a bell in 1971. Investigations continued here until the late 1990s. On 14 April 1963 another of these historic wrecks, the Vergulde Draeck, was discovered by 16-year-old Graeme Henderson while scuba diving off Ledge Point, 110 kilometres north of Perth. This sensational find became the subject of some controversy as looters took to dynamiting the wreck. Nevertheless the WA Maritime Museum was able to recover a substantial amount of material in the course their excavations. Some of the returned Dutch shipwreck material (courtesy Centre for International Heritage Activities) Remarkably, just over six weeks after the Vergulde Draeck was found, the long sought- after wreck of the Batavia was finally located in the Wallabi or Northern Group of the Abrolhos Islands, on 4 June 1963. The find was an international sensation and excavations and recovery of artefacts, mainly the cannons, began almost immediately. Ultimately many valuable and unique items were brought up, including part of the Batavia itself and the portico intended up for Batavia Castle, now residing in the WA Museum’s Shipwrecks Gallery in Fremantle. The legal status of these wrecks was in question at the time they were found, and this necessitated state and federal shipwrecks legislation to secure them from private interests and interference. As the wrecks were the property of the Dutch government, which had inherited all the assets of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in 1800, a bilateral agreement was reached between the Australian and Dutch governments in 1972 to share the wreck material equally. This agreement resulted in the formation of ANCODS, the Agreement between Australian and Netherlands Concerning Old Dutch Shipwrecks. In 2009 the then Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs Maxime Verhagen, whilst on a visit to Australia, announced that the Dutch government had decided to transfer all of the material it held to Australia, thus uniting the whole collection. And true to their word, the artefacts have come home. On the evening of Tuesday, 9 November, in the Terrace Room at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, overlooking picturesque Darling Harbour, the Netherlands Ambassador Willem Andreae formally unveiled and handed over the Dutch portion. Those fortunate to be guests at this function were treated a glimpse of some of the rare objects being returned. Accepting these historic items on behalf of the Australian government was the Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water, Senator Don Farrell. Ultimately all the material will be housed in the Shipwrecks Gallery in Fremantle, where it will again be united with the other half of the collection, having twice travelled back and forth from one side of the world to the other over a period three to four centuries. Rupert Gerritsen Matthew Flinders return symposium On Sunday 31 October 2010, AOTM members Rupert Gerritsen and Robert King attended a symposium to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Matthew Flinders’ return to England, held at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Darling Harbour. Matthew Flinders The symposium was introduced by Her Excellency the Governor of New South Wales, Professor Marie Bashir, AC, CVO. The Mitchell Library's Paul Brunton spoke on “Matthew Flinders through his private letters”, and Australian map collector Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy, AM, spoke on “Matthew Flinders, the mapmaker”. Flinders biographer (and AOTM member), Miriam Estensen, spoke on “Some lesser voices in the life of Matthew Flinders”, drawing on numerous minor but important sources of information about his life, including biographical sketches, journal entries, letters and books, many by people who knew him. These provided unusual personal glimpses of Flinders, reflecting the emotions of the writers and showing how attitudes have changed over the course of two centuries. As a physician, Professor Clancy was able to reveal to the audience that Flinders’ demise was due to a urinary tract infection, consistent with a late stage of gonorrhoea, probably contracted in Tahiti in 1791 during the visit of HMS Providence, in which Flinders served as a midshipman under the command of Captain William Bligh. The portrait which Paul Brunton drew from Flinders’ private letters was of an engaging man, passionately devoted to his wife and his profession, witty, well-read, and in many ways high-minded, but nonetheless a man with more than a hint of arrogance and self-will, both of which were ultimately to have devastating consequences in his clash with Governor Decaen on Mauritius, leading to his incarceration there. Robert King Claims the Portuguese sighted Terra Australis in 1500 At various times controversial claims have arisen that the Portuguese sighted Australia and set foot on Australian soil. One of the earliest of these reported sightings dates from 1500. It is only by going back to the original sources and endeavouring to make sense of them that the validity of such claims can be properly assessed. Pedro Alvares Cabral’s Voyage A letter dated 27 June 1501, from Giovanni Matteo Cretico, the Venetian Ambassador to Portugal, describing Pedro Alvares Cabral’s discovery of Brazil during his voyage to India of 1500-1501, was printed in Paesi novamente retrovati, published in Vicenza in 1507 (and in Latin and German versions in 1508). It stated: Above the Cape of Good Hope they discovered a new land towards the west, which they called the Land of Parrots (terra d li Papaga), because some are found there which are a cubit and a half in length, of various colours. We saw two of these. They judged that this was mainland because they ran along the coast more than two thousand miles but did not find the end of it. It is inhabited by naked and handsome people.i Cretico’s letter was reprinted in 1532 in Novus Orbis (cap.xxv, Exemplum literarum cuiusdam Cretici), but with a significant error. Where the original said: “Di sopra dal capo d Bôasperâza verso garbi hano scopto una terra nova la chiamâo d li Papaga (Above the Cape of Good Hope they discovered a new land towards the south-west, which they called the Land of Parrots)”, the Novus Orbis version said: “Supra Caput bonae spei lebegio vecti vento nacti sunt novam tellurem quam apellarunt Psittacorum (Near the Cape of Good Hope they were driven by a south-west wind and discovered a new land, which they called the Land of Parrots)”. The phrase Cretico used, “verso garbi (towards the south-west)”, was mistranslated in Novus Orbis as “lebegio vecti vento (driven by a south-west wind)”. This put the Psittacorum Regio [Land of Parrots], incorrectly, to the south-east of the Cape of Good Hope, in the Southern Continent.ii Gerard Mercator, misled by the mistake in Novus Orbis, misplaced the Land of Parrots on his globe of 1541 to the Southern Continent and inscribed over the portion of it to the south-east of the Cape of Good Hope: Psitacorum regio a Lusitanis anno 1500 ad milia passuum bis mille praeter vectis sic appellata quod psitocos alat inauditae magnitudinis, ut qui ternos cubitos aequẽt longitudine (The land of Parrots, so called by the Portuguese who in the year 1500 were carried further than two thousand miles, because of the parrots with wings of unheard of size equaling three cubits in length).iii On his planisphere of 1566, the Dieppois navigator and cartographer Guillaume Le Testu inscribed over the Terre Australle to the south of Madagascar a legend attributing its discovery to Portuguese navigators: Certain Portuguese going to the Indies were, by adverse weather conditions, carried far south of the Cape of Good Hope.