The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea Part 4

PLACE-NAMES.

It will not be necessary, I think, to give an elaborate description of the place-names that occur on this map; those who wish to know more about them may consult my larger work on "The Discovery of Australia."

We need not dwell either on those that are inscribed along the northern sh.o.r.es of Java, well-known to the Portuguese twenty years at least before these maps were made.

The southern sh.o.r.es of Java are joined to Australia, or, at least, only separated from it by a fict.i.tious river named Rio Grande, the Great River, which follows the sleek curve of the "pig's back" described by D.

do Couto, the Portuguese historian.

In the Portuguese sphere some of the more salient features of the coast lines bear the following names:--

_Terre ennegade._ Ennegade has no possible meaning in French.

It is a corruption of Terra Anegada which means submerged land, or land over which the high tides flow considerably. It refers to a long stretch of sh.o.r.e at the entrance to King Sounds, where the tides cover immense tracts of country, and which has, in consequence, been called Shoal Bay.

_Baye Bresille;_ Brazil Bay, corresponds with King Sound.

The islands on the western coast, known as Houtman's Abrolhos,* and those near Sharks' Bay, are all charted with the reefs that surround them, although they bear no names on this map.

[* _Abrolhos_ is a Portuguese word applied to reefs; literally, it means "open your eyes."]

Lower down, there is a strange name, that has led to some stranger mistakes; it is LAMA, or LAME DE SYLLA, written HAME DE SILLE on another of these maps. It is a curious jumble that I have not been able to decipher; it occurs close to the mouth of the Swan River of modern charts.

Later French and Dutch map-makers took it for the name of an island in that locality.

Now, in those days, navigators and geographers were constantly in search of certain more or less fict.i.tious islands, among which, the "Island of Men" and the "Island of Women," had been sought for in vain.

Could this be one of the lost islands? The old-fas.h.i.+oned letter s, resembling an f, made _Hame de sille_ look like _Hame de fille_, and a French geographer jumped at the conclusion that the word was _fille_, and that he had found the long lost island.

He called it accordingly _I. des Filles_,* Island of Girls. The Dutch translated the name on their charts where a _Meisje Eylandt_ may be seen; but, instead of the girls that they expected to see the island peopled with, they found it overrun by beautiful creatures, it is true, but, alas! of the small wallaby kind, peculiar to the outlying islands of Western Australia.

[* See Vangondy's map of Australia (1756).]

It goes without saying that they did not know of the term _wallaby_, and taking those pretty creatures for overgrown rats, they called the island Rat Island or Rat's Nest, and Rottnest is the Dutch form thereof, preserved to this day.

Let us now turn to the eastern sh.o.r.es of Australia, for we need not trouble about the southern sh.o.r.es as they are connected with the Antarctic continent.

We notice first, _Simbana_, one of the original names of the island of Sumbawa.

You will remember that there are several islands left out in Ribero's map [see pp. 28-29]. Now the princ.i.p.al one between Java and Timor is Sumbawa, and, strangely enough, we find that island grafted on here, and thus forming the northernmost part of York Peninsula, with Timor to the east of it in its actual position with reference to Sumbawa and smaller islands around, although out of place with reference to Australia. We next come to _Coste Dangereuse_, Dangerous Coast. It is situated in the locality of the Great Barrier Reef, not far from the spot where, nearly three hundred years later, Lieutenant Cook, in the _Endeavour_, was almost wrecked. The name speaks for itself; it appears along a coast lined with reefs, clearly shown on this map. _Baye Perdue_, Lost Bay, a broad bay with an island in mid-channel, the modern Broad Sound and Long Island. This name suggests a double voyage, a bay that was once discovered and could not be found again.*

[* Many years ago an old cannon, supposed to be of Spanish origin, was dug out of the sand a little to the south of Broad Sound, and near Port Curtis. It may be connected with this Lost Bay.]

_R. de beaucoup d'isles_; the letter R, in Spanish, meant either river or coast. This appellation refers to the locality of the Burnett river, where the coast is lined with numerous islands. The term may, therefore, mean either "coast of many islands," or "river of many islands." _Coste des Herbaiges_, Coast of Pastures; it has been suggested that this name gave rise to the term Botany Bay, chosen by Sir Joseph Banks,* instead of Stingeray Bay, given by Cook. The locality, however, corresponds to a stretch of coast further north than Botany Bay.

[* It will be remembered that this chart once belonged to Sir Joseph Banks. See above.]

CHAPTER VII.

PIERRE DESCELIERS' MAP.

This is a map of the same type as the one I have just described. It forms part of another large ma.n.u.script planisphere, draughted and illuminated by Pierre Desceliers, a priest of Argues near Havres, and it bears in bold characters an inscription to that effect with the date 1550.

At first sight the most, remarkable feature of this map is the display of descriptive matter contained in cartouches spread here and there between the illuminations. These, however, do not refer to Australia but are descriptive of such countries as Java, Sumatra, Pegu, Malacca, Ceylon, the Andaman Islands, etc.

The only ill.u.s.trations which might be supposed to appertain to Australia are those _not alluded to in the French text_, a fact which suggests that the other, extraneous matter, has been interpolated.

The ill.u.s.trations, not alluded to in the French text, may, therefore, have belonged to the prototypic map, such are the representations of trees, rough guniah-looking dwellings, guanacos, and those strange, huts on the western coast, which may have been inspired by some freak of nature as seen by Dampier on the same coast some hundred and thirty odd years after these charts were painted. Dampier says: "There were several things like hayc.o.c.ks standing in the Savannah, which at a distance we thought were houses, looking just like the Hottentots' houses at the Cape of Good Hope; but we found them to be so many rocks."

Dampier and his companions may have mistaken some anthills for rocks.

Peron the French explorer describes some huge dome-shaped ant-hills seen on this coast, and Captain Pelsart, wrecked in 1629, also describes some ant-hills seen by him and his companions when in search of water on this same coast in lat.i.tude 22 degrees south.

In 1818, Allan Cunningham, when on the west coast of Australia, at the Bay of Rest, took occasion to measure one of these gigantic ant-hills of that coast. He found it to be eight feet in height, and twenty-six in girth.

Pelsart's account runs thus: "On the 16th of June, in the morning, they returned on sh.o.r.e in hopes of getting more water, but were disappointed; and having no time to observe the country it gave them no great hopes of better success, even if they had travelled further within land, which appeared a thirsty, barren plain, covered with ant-hills, so high that they looked afar off like the huts of negroes..."

Dampier in his second voyage to this coast in the year 1699, but more than one-hundred miles further south, describes again some of these evidently very remarkable features of the western coast of Australia. He says: "Here are a great many rocks in the large savannah we were in, which are five or six feet high and round at the top like a hayc.o.c.k, very remarkable; some red and some white." But Flinders, when on this coast, actually came across native huts similar to those depicted on P.

Desceliers' chart of Australia.

CHAPTER VIII.

DESLIENS' MAP.

His is another planisphere, of the same school of map-makers.

I give it here in its entirety, in order to show how the Australian portion stands, in all these maps, with reference to other countries.

It will be observed that, for accuracy, Australia compares favorably with, for instance, North America, named on this map, La Nouvelle France.

Besides its beautiful execution there is nothing to call for special notice unless it be that three Portuguese flags are shown as flying over Australian sh.o.r.es, a sure sign of annexation. The map-maker's name, _Nicolas Desliens_, date 1566, and Dieppe, the place where the map was made, are marked on a scroll right across the fict.i.tious portion of Java-la-Grande.

In this short chapter, before leaving the subject of the old ma.n.u.script maps of Australia, and devoting the remaining pages of my book to actual voyages of discovery, I shall refer once more to the importance of the Lusitano-Spanish planispheres of the Dieppese school of cartography*

because most of those doc.u.ments, becoming the property of French map-makers, were used in various endeavours which were made to induce European sovereigns to colonize the Great South Land.

[*Most of these maps were made at Dieppe; all of them were made in the north of France.]

In the preceding pages I have only described the most important of these ma.n.u.script charts. The following is the list in chronological order of all the specimens known to exist:--

1. The Dauphin Chart 1530-36 2. N. Valiard's (so-called) 1539-49 3. Jean Roze's 1542 4. The Henri II. (of France) 1546 5. P. Desceliers' 1550 6. G. Le Testu's 1555 7. Desliens' 1566

CHAPTER IX.

MENDANA AND SARMIENTO DISCOVER THE SOLOMONS.