The secret discovery of Australia: Portuguese ventures 200 years before Captain Cook
Adventurers and explorers, History, European history
Human-narrated audio
Summary
Everyone knows that Captain Cook 'discovered' the great continent of Australia in 1770. It says so in the history books, and his many monuments in Australia acknowledge it. True, the Dutch had sighted the West Coast in 1606. But it… was Cook who found the harbours of the East, and made settlement possible. But K. G. Mclntyre, an Australian lawyer with a lifelong interest in the history of discovery, has uncovered a different story. By studying ancient maps particularly those known as the Dauphin and 'Dieppe' maps and researching the history of Portuguese navigation from the time of Henry the Navigator, he shows that not only was Captain James Cook not the first European to visit Australia, he was preceded by more than 200 years. For is it not reasonable that the Portuguese who discovered Timor in the mid-16th century should have found the vast continent a mere 250 miles away, as well? How else to explain the mysterious records of the finding of a wrecked 'Mahogany Ship' on the Western Australian Coast? Mclntyre's story of these early voyages, his detailed understanding of the development of deep-sea navigation and of the policies that drove the Maritime Powers of Spain and Portugal to compete to rule the world on either side of the Pope's meridian, make his book compelling reading in itself. But The Secret Discovery of Australia is also a fascinating suspense story, the tale of the author's own unravelling of a great historical mystery, the unearthing of secrets that have been kept for hundreds of years.