Map proves Portuguese discovered Australia
The Last Lynx Pardinus
A copy of a 16th century maritime map of the east coast of Australia is seen in this handout picture. The copy of the map, taken from a Los Angeles library vault, proves that Portuguese adventurers, not British or Dutch, were the first Europeans to discover Australia,...
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.
@ source : Reuters http://reut.rs/1HxBESk
Austrália descoberta por navegadores portugueses
Segundo a agência de notícias Reuters, foi encontrado um novo mapa que prova que não foram os ingleses nem holandeses que descobriram a Austrália... Mas antes navegadores portugueses!
Este mapa do século XVI, com referências e informação pertinentes escrito em português, foi encontrado numa biblioteca de Los Angeles e prova que foram navegadores portugueses os primeiros europeus a descobrir a Austrália.
O mapa assinala com detalhe e acuidade, várias referências da costa Este Australiana, tudo relatado em português, provando que foi a frota de quatro barcos liderada pelo explorador «Cristóvão de Mendonça» quem efectivamente descobriu a Austrália no longínquo ano de 1522.
Desta forma, os factos são agora invertidos, pois foi o navegador português a fazer tão importante descoberta, cerca de 250 anos antes do Capitão James Cook a ter reclamado junto da coroa inglesa, em 1770.
Na altura a descoberta de Cristóvão de Mendonça, agora suportada por um rol de historiadores, graças aos vários descobrimentos lusos que ocorreram ao longo das costas Neozelandesa e Australiana durante o século XVI, foi mantida em segredo como forma de prevenir e impedir que outras potências europeias alcançassem e se apoderassem deste novo e fantástico pedaço de terra.
@ Fonte : Reuters http://reut.rs/1HxBESk
Comments
seja verdade ou mentira, é interessante 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xO4V5w1DoA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0
Voted!
I discovered Narnia o7
10/10
Best article since that time a Greek guy posted an article raging at the UK for stealing some rocks.
I'm surprised we haven't had another Falklands one over the past few days considering the date
9/11
will read again.
what rocks 😛 we have a few xD
ah, possession being 9/10ths of the law - I'm thinking the Portuguese should have actually claimed the land as well as making maps of it?
Pity that these Portuguese sailors entered Botany Bay 250 years before Lieutenant James Cook named it that. They too could have used it to get rid of their convicts half way around the world.
This work builds on the trail-blazing efforts of the late K G McIntyre (d 2004), who certainly proved the discovery to my satisfaction. In fact, an old friend when I was younger, who happened to have been Australian Ambassador to Portugal in the early 1970s, told me that the Portuguese endorsed McIntyre's work and claimed the discovery. If you go to the Monument to the Discovers in Lisbon (actually Belem, just out of Lisbon), and look down on the big map on the plaza below, you will see that most of Australia is not shown on the map. It is time that they fixed this.
The end point on the map is roughly the area of Warrnambool and Port Fairy in western Victoria, a lovely area. The Portuguese had to turn back, because one of their ships was wrecked. I have the location of the ship pinned down now, thanks to some satellite imagery published recently and verified by me off Google satellite maps, of all things! The people looking for the wreck in the past had the location slightly wrong. I'm sure that it will be found sooner or later.
it's a pity that Portuguese sailors back then were naive..
The Portuguese could not claim the land - it was east of the Treaty Line = Spanish zone. There was no way that they would have given the Spanish the benefit of their hard exploration work for free! Incidentally, that Treaty Line survives in one place in the world 500+ years after 1494 - the border between Western Australia and the rest of Australia.
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Hmm, reading the original report it states "the maps called "Terra Java" had a striking similarity to Australia's east coast"
Could it not also have a striking resemblance to the coast of Java itself, or neighbouring Sumatra?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Java_Topography.png
Without any compass references to show which way is north on any of the maps, although the drawing of a ship may give a better guide to where north is, we cannot say which way up the maps are.
Where is Tasmania? There's a big enough gap between the islands. And why is it a sharp pointed cape to the south and not flatter as it is now?
Once again it's an American sticking their nose into something that does not concern them & making a ridiculous hypothesis.
What American? Trickett is Australian. He is also not the first person to add to the study of this issue.
As for whom it "concerns", as an Australian resident who has checked out most of the supposed sites, it certainly concerns me. Despite being someone who comes from northern England, I have no special grounds to preserve the honour of James Cook, whose credentials are not in question. Actually, Cook used the map pictured above to get the Endeavour into a safe anchorage for repairs after it was holed on the Great Barrier Reef. Check out his diary.
My only problem with this post is that its source comes from 2007 and is old news. Some of the recent stuff is even more exciting.
While I might remain a little cynical myself on purely scientific grounds, the Portuguese government was not, according to Ambassador Kevin Kelly. McIntyre took the research further than a fellow named Collingridge nearly a century ago, that fellow being pretty weak on his scientific scrutiny.
I don't blame a poster for throwing up matters of interest, especially given the absence of anything of any value left in the game.
Oh, and I strongly suspect that Bass Strait has been ignored and that the Portuguese went around Tasmania. No real problem with that, Tasman did the same in 1642. It was Bass and Flinders who found Bass Strait roughly ten to twelve years after settlement in 1788. Like all mapmakers of the time, coasts or suspected coasts past which a ship is blown by the weather tend to get filled in a little imaginatively.
The map could be Java or Sumatra but it is a better fit to the eastern Australian coast.
How did Portugal faster than the dutch and the english? They had Claimed territories in South East Asian regions which is something Portugal doesn't have, their nearest colony was Madagascar, which was an ocean away.
The guy must have spent a long time looking at the east coast of Australia, because that map doesn't ring any bells at all 😛