Of course there were people already living there so like Columbus, they
really 'discovered' nothing. (I always thought the Dutch were the first
Europeans to find Australia.)
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Map proves Portuguese discovered Australia: new book
By Michael PerryWed Mar 21, 6:26 AM ET
A 16th century maritime map in a Los Angeles library vault proves that
Portuguese adventurers, not British or Dutch, were the first Europeans
to discover Australia, says a new book which details the secret
discovery of Australia.
The book "Beyond Capricorn" says the map, which accurately marks
geographical sites along Australia's east coast in Portuguese, proves
that Portuguese seafarer Christopher de Mendonca lead a fleet of four
ships into Botany Bay in 1522 -- almost 250 years before Britain's
Captain James Cook.
Australian author Peter Trickett said that when he enlarged the small
map he could recognize all the headlands and bays in Botany Bay in
Sydney -- the site where Cook claimed Australia for Britain in 1770.
"It was even so accurate that I found I could draw in the modern airport
runways, to scale in the right place, without any problem at all,"
Trickett told Reuters on Wednesday.
Trickett said he stumbled across a copy of the map while browsing
through a Canberra book shop eight years ago.
He said the shop had a reproduction of the Vallard Atlas, a collection
of 15 hand drawn maps completed no later than 1545 in France. The maps
represented the known world at the time.
Two of the maps called "Terra Java" had a striking similarity to
Australia's east coast except at one point the coastline jutted out at
right angles for 1,500 km (932 miles).
"There was something familiar about them but they were not quite right
-- that was the puzzle. How did they come to have all these Portuguese
place names?," Trickett said.
Trickett believed the cartographers who drew the Vallard maps had
wrongly aligned two Portuguese charts they were copying from.
It is commonly accepted that the French cartographers used maps and
"portolan" charts acquired illegally from Portugal and Portuguese
vessels that had been captured, Trickett said.
"The original portolan maps would have been drawn on animal hide
parchments, usually sheep or goat skin, of limited size," he explained.
"For a coastline the length of eastern Australia, some 3,500 kms, they
would have been 3 to 4 charts."
"The Vallard cartographer has put these individual charts together like
a jigsaw puzzle. Without clear compass markings its possible to join the
southern chart in two different ways. My theory is it had been wrongly
joined."
Using a computer Trickett rotated the southern part of the Vallard map
90 degrees to produce a map which accurately depicts Australia's east
coast.
"They provided stunning proof that Portuguese ships made these daring
voyages of discovery in the early 1520s, just a few years after they had
sailed north of Australia to reach the Spice Islands -- the Moluccas.
This was a century before the Dutch and 250 years before Captain Cook,"
he said.
Trickett believes the original charts were made by Mendonca who set sail
from the Portuguese base at Malacca with four ships on a secret mission
to discover Marco Polo's "Island of Gold" south of Java.
If Trickett is right, Mendonca's map shows he sailed past Fraser Island
off Australia's northeast coast, into Botany Bay in Sydney, and south to
Kangaroo Island off southern Australia, before returning to Malacca via
New Zealand's north island.
Mendonca's discovery was kept secret to prevent other European powers
reaching the new land, said Trickett, who believes his theory is
supported by discoveries of 16th century Portuguese artifacts on the
Australian and New Zealand coasts.
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http://tinyurl.com/2gxh6r
--
John #1782
"We should always be disposed to believe that which appears to us to be
white is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides."
- Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) Founder of the Jesuit Order.
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