Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Winston Churchill

It’s out there . . . somewhere

JIM HAYNES

MY FRIEND DENNIS O’KEEFFE knows where the ‘mahogany ship’ is. In fact, he even showed me!

Dennis and his wife Anne are lucky enough to live on the outskirts of Warrnambool on the southwest coast of Victoria—one of my favourite places and home to one of the greatest jumping races left in Australia, the Grand Annual. Their enormous kitchen window overlooks the coastal dunes and bay, down towards the town of Port Fairy, where Australia’s premier folk festival is held every year.

Dennis is a folk singer, erstwhile historian, and the world’s leading authority on the history of the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’; he wrote a book about it.

We often perform together at the Port Fairy Folk Festival and I’d called in for a visit, as I was passing through Warrnambool a few weeks before the festival.

I happened to mention my interest in the sixteenth-century Portuguese exploration of Australia’s coast as we sat discussing our coming performances . . . and horseracing.

‘Oh,’ said Dennis casually, ‘I can show you where the mahogany ship is.’

I was stunned into silence for a full thirty seconds and sat, trying to consider the significance of the statement. Why hadn’t he claimed the reward offered by the Victorian government? Was he part of some secret local group intent on keeping the knowledge hidden?

‘I’ll show you where it is,’ he added nonchalantly, standing up and heading into the kitchen.

I followed.

We stopped at the large picture window and gazed out across the miles of windswept dunes, along the coast to where Port Fairy sits at the end of the bay. Dennis waved his hand grandly across the horizon framed by the window . . . sweeping it slowly left to right over the coastal vista spread before us.

‘It’s out there . . . somewhere,’ he said.

I should have known.

It’s sad that, at my age and having known Dennis for so long, I could be fleetingly gullible enough to believe he could offer any new revelations about the oldest and possibly most annoying puzzle in Australia’s history!

The riddle of the mahogany ship, the Dieppe maps and the Portuguese discovery of eastern Australia will remain unsolved until the long-wrecked vessel—which is very likely not made of mahogany— is rediscovered.

The big questions are:

• Is the wreck still out there in the sand dunes, or has it rotted away, or been burned—as reported by some nineteenth century sources?

• If it still exists somewhere in the sand dunes between Warrnambool and Port Fairy, is it a sixteenth-century Portuguese caravel?

• Are the Rotz and Dauphin Maps, and the other so-called ‘Dieppe maps’, derived from an accurate chart of Australia’s east coast from Cape York to near Warrnambool, made by Cristovao de Mendonca between 1521 and 1523?

• Did James Cook have copies of the Dieppe maps on the Endeavour? Or had he consulted them before he set out?

• If Mendonca made a series of maps from which the Dieppe maps were derived, what happened to them?

• If Mendonca explored our coast and charted it, why don’t we have a record of it happening?

• Does any of this really matter?

Let’s consider the ‘Portuguese discovery’ theory, with all the probables and possibles included. It goes like this . . .

In 1520 the Portuguese were established as the only European power in what is today Malaysia and Indonesia, having annexed Malacca in 1511 and set up strongholds in Ambon and other places in the region.

In May 1493, Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI had established an imaginary line from pole to pole through the mid-Atlantic. Spain could take unclaimed territories to the west of the line. King John of Portugal renegotiated the line the following year in what became known as the Treaty of Tordesillas, and established Portugal’s right to explore new lands on the other side of this line.

The Portuguese realised by 1520 that they had some valuable possessions in Asia, but a second line would soon need to be drawn to delineate where their authority ended, and Spain’s began.

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in the service of Spain, had reached the Philippines and the Portuguese knew their hold on the area was shaky at best. Spain laid claim to the Moluccas, based on the Treaty of Tordesillas, but no-one could work out where the line drawn by that treaty went if it continued around the globe.

Before they established the line or began negotiations with Spain over who owned what and what they could keep, the Portuguese wanted to know what else in the area was worth having. If they were there first it would give them a better negotiating position.

So, according to historian Joao de Barros, Mendonca set out on an expedition with three large caravels from Malacca. He then proceeded to explore and chart the coast of what was then known as Java la Grande, and sailed as far as modern-day Warrnambool, charting the coast as he went, but missing certain sections when the small fleet travelled out at sea. He made the standard ‘strip maps’ of the day, charting each section of the coast separately in a linear fashion.

Near Warrnambool, one of the caravels was either wrecked or careened for repairs, ran aground accidentally, or was abandoned at sea and washed ashore. It is still there.

Mendonca decided not to continue the exploration without the third vessel and returned to the Moluccas, where he later became the commander of the Portuguese fleet and, later still, a governor of one of the provinces of the Spice Islands. As it turned out, the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza drew another meridian east of the Moluccas, to delineate two halves of the Earth, and divide them between Spain and Portugal. Spain relinquished its claim to the Moluccas, but maintained its claim to the Philippines—although once the meridian was successfully measured, it was obvious the Philippines were in the Portuguese half of the globe. Eastern Australia was in Spain’s half, so Mendonca’s expedition had been in an area over which Portugal could have no legitimate claim—a good reason to tell no-one about it.

Mendonca’s strip maps were kept hidden from other foreign powers for several reasons. Firstly, it was in Portugal’s best interest not to encourage other nations into the area. Secondly, it was not common practice at that time to share maps. Thirdly, the Treaties of Tordesillas and Zaragoza both gave the area to Spain to explore, so Mendonca should not have been there.

The original strip maps were probably lost when the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed the Portuguese Archive of the Indies, but copies had been made soon after the originals arrived in Lisbon. Some of these copies found their way to Dieppe in France, the centre of map-making in Europe at the time.

France was manifestly interested in empire building and exploration, and would remain so for the next 300 years. French cartographers used the strip maps to construct a continent called Java la Grande, which they placed on maps and atlases.

One of the earliest depictions of Java la Grande was on a map given to Henry VIII of England, by French cartographer Jean Rotz. In Dieppe, Rotz had prepared a book, called Boke of Idrography (‘Book of Hydrography’). Denied patronage by the French Court, he found his way to England, where he became cartographer to Henry VIII in 1542.

Another depiction of Java la Grande is on a large, profusely illustrated map, made as a gift for the young French Dauphin around 1547, probably by Pierre Desceliers. This map is now in the British Museum.

How the ‘Dauphin Map’ came to Britain in the first place is clouded in mystery, but as the coat of arms on the map has been changed from that of the young prince to those he took when he became King Henry II of France, it appears to have remained in France during his reign at least. (Henry II married Catherine de Medici, had ten children and died in 1559.)

Desceliers made similar depictions on a world map in 1546, and again in 1550 and 1553. The map of Java la Grande is generally a rough representation of the coast of Queensland and New South Wales—but then it slopes the wrong way: southeast, instead of southwest.

However, if the map is broken up into sections, as it would have been when the charts were first made, it is remarkable that it closely resembles the Australian coast between Cape York and Warrnambool in general shape. There are also at least sixty instances where the map bears a close relationship to particular landmarks.

If corrections are made to allow for ‘certain factors’, the whole coastline fits in shape, and many landmarks line up perfectly.

What are the ‘certain factors’?

Well, some of the strip charts need to be ‘juggled’. If Java la Grande is Australia, pieces of the coastline are out of order: it appears the Dieppe map-makers either made errors, or didn’t know the correct sequence of the linear charts.

Secondly, some charts need to be rotated to fit. For example there is an uncannily accurate map of the Furneaux Islands group, which appears to indicate that Mendonca visited the Bass Strait islands either coming or going—but the orientation is wrong. The strip charts made in the sixteenth century did not always have standard map-making devices, such as an indication of north.

Thirdly—and you need to take my word for this, otherwise it requires a lesson in geometry and what happens when you attempt to make a globe fit onto a flat page or two—errors can easily occur in orientation when you are working with pieces of a coastline. One wrong fold and everything is out, and the discrepancy is repeated as maps are copied.

If one particular fold is reversed, the map of Java la Grande suddenly appears to be a very close representation of Australia’s east and south coast, down as far as Warrnambool.

As for the location of Java la Grande, in relation to Australia, it appears that the original Portuguese maps, now lost, placed the continent slightly to the west of where Australia actually is . . . which strangely (said with tongue in cheek) placed it in the Portuguese half of the globe.

The names on the Dieppe maps show evidence of French, Portuguese and Galician words and phrases. Mendonca was from Galicia, in northwest Portugal.

So much for the actual maps—now how about the theory that James Cook had one, or had seen one?

Well, as Henry VIII had one, included in Jean Rotz’s Boke of Idrography, and Desceliers’ atlases contained the map, it is hard to imagine that Cook had not seen or been made aware of representations of Java la Grande. However, it’s more interesting than that.

The Dauphin Map later became known as the Harleian Map and now resides in the British Library. It came into the possession of either Robert or Edward Harley sometime before 1741.

Father Robert Harley and son Edward were the first and second ‘Earls of Oxford and Earl Mortimer’, a title created especially for politician Robert in 1711. Both men were book and map collectors and, twelve years after Edward’s death, his enormous library was bequeathed to the nation by his widow and became part of the newly created British Museum in 1853.

Apparently, however, the Dauphin Map was kept by one of the family servants; it was only given to the British Museum in 1790, by none other than Sir Joseph Banks.

(You have to bear with me briefly, there’s a conspiracy theory on the boil here.)

It is mentioned in many sources that the map was ‘shown’ to noted geographer and hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple by Dr Daniel Solander sometime before 1786.

As Solander worked at the British Museum, as Keeper of Natural History, it is often implied that the map was there in 1786. Yet Solander would have had little access to, or interest in, the museum’s books and maps: he was a botanist in charge of the plant collection.

However, Solander was also Sir Joseph Banks’ private secretary and lived with him in London. It was Banks who owned the Dauphin Map and loaned it to Dalrymple. It may have been Solander who delivered it, but Banks owned it. In fact he finally gave the map to the museum in 1790, after Dalrymple had used it to make copies and engravings.

This begs the question: how did the map make its way from the ‘butler’ who appropriated it into the collection of Sir Joseph Banks? Even more importantly, when did the map come into Banks’ possession?

I don’t need to remind even the most ill-informed reader that both Banks and Solander were on the Endeavour with James Cook when he ‘discovered’ and charted the east coast of Australia.

Sir Joseph Banks never admitted that the map or a copy was on the Endeavour, but he didn’t contradict Dalrymple when he suggested, obliquely, that Cook had used the map to reference his exploration.

Dalrymple pointed out that the map corresponded to Cook’s charts in several ways, or vice versa.

Let’s look briefly at the circumstantial evidence used to link Cook’s charts to the Dieppe maps.

• Some place names are similar. Cook changed ‘Stingray Bay’ to ‘Botany Bay’; the Dieppe maps call it ‘Cote des Herbages’, and there is the rather obvious ‘Dangerous Coast’, where Cook hit the reef.

• Port Jackson is marked as a small, unexplored indent on the Dieppe map and Cook’s charts. It appears Mendonca didn’t enter it, nor did Cook. Botany Bay is marked and charted on both maps, and Cook made landfall there.

• When Cook needed to repair the Endeavour, after grounding her on the Great Barrier Reef, he did two odd things. Firstly, he headed on a diagonal course to shore, rather than using a direct one; secondly, he made a strange entry in his journal, noting that the bay where the ship was careened was ‘much smaller than I had been told, but very convenient for our purpose’.

• Much has been made of Cook never mentioning a map. However, mariners rarely mentioned their charts in their logs, and Cook’s mission was also ‘secret’. He would have had some inkling of the purpose of the voyage, and Banks certainly might have. Having secret orders may have precluded any mention of certain charts and may have made it more likely that certain maps were included in those taken on board.

• The specific latitude at which Cook was instructed to sail westward in his secret orders is a latitude at which Dieppe maps show the bottom portions of Java la Grande.

Captain James Wharton, introducing Cook’s published journal in 1898, tells us:

The exact text of Cook’s orders cannot be given. They were secret orders; but, curiously enough, while the covering letter, which enjoined him to show them to nobody, which is dated July 30th, 1768, is duly entered in Admiralty Records, the orders themselves, which should follow in the letter book, are omitted. They have never been published.

Of course, this is all circumstantial evidence and mere conjecture.

However, at least three men of importance in maritime affairs believed the maps of Java la Grande were maps of Australia. Matthew Flinders talks of them as being earlier maps of the continent and assumes a Portuguese discovery. Alexander Dalrymple certainly believed the maps were genuine charts of the same coastline Cook explored, and openly hints that Cook had knowledge of them. Of course, Dalrymple had an axe to grind with Cook. Dalrymple was the one who suggested the voyage of exploration to the South Pacific and hoped to lead it. But, as Dalrymple was not a naval officer, he was passed over for Cook.

Having examined the Dauphin Map, copied it for engraving and publication, and made some observations about similarities in names on Cook’s charts, Dalrymple concluded: ‘we may say with Solomon “There is nothing new under the Sun”’.

Did the Admiralty exclude Dalrymple from the expedition because it could only trust one of its own? Was the real purpose of the voyage to check the Dieppe maps and claim Java la Grande for Britain, if it did exist?

The supposed plot thickens, though rather thinly.

Sir Joseph Banks is the third major player who appears to have had no argument with Dalrymple’s conclusions, and never refuted them; we know the Dauphin Map came into his possession sometime between 1760 and 1785.

So, there is no concrete evidence that Cook used French maps derived from Portuguese charts, nor is there any definite evidence that he didn’t.

All very interesting . . . não é assim? . . . n’est-ce pas? . . . isn’t it?

When we proceed to the other part of the hypothesis—the ‘mahogany ship’—evidence seems to be a little more substantial.

But, wait! Although the existence of the mahogany ship is well documented, the ship itself completely disappears from view—literally!— around 1880.

It was definitely there, a mere century and a quarter ago! Well, if it wasn’t, there was an amazingly complex conspiracy of lies constructed over much of the nineteenth century, for no rational reason.

In January 1836, three men left Port Fairy on a seal-hunting expedition in a small sailing boat, which overturned near the mouth of the Hopkins River. One man, Captain Smith, drowned, and the other two, Joseph Wilson and William Gibbs, walked back to Port Fairy along the beach and discovered a wrecked ship in the sand dunes.

On their arrival back at Port Fairy they reported their find to the district’s highest authority, Captain John Mills.

Port Fairy had been a base for sealers and whalers since 1810, when John Wishart arrived there from Tasmania in his cutter the Fairy, after which the port was named.

On his return to Tasmania, Wishart gave his charts to John Mills, who established a whaling base at Port Fairy in 1826. He and his brother were quite possibly the first ‘settlers’ on mainland Victoria. John Mills ran the port and whaling station and later, when the town was well established, became the official Port Master.

According to tales related later, Wilson told Mills that the wreck had good ‘squared timber for the taking’, so Mills and Wilson took two whaleboats to investigate the wreck. Mills inadvertently gave the wreck its common name when he snapped off the point of his knife, attempting to cut a piece of timber from the wreck, and reported that it was made of very ‘hard dark timber—like mahogany’.

According to accounts given by ‘Curly’ Donnelly, many years later, they estimated the wreck as being about 100 feet long and forty feet wide, and half a mile from the low-water mark.

Having a need for timber at the settlement, they broke off some pieces of the wreck with axes and reported that it split with a sound like a gunshot.

At that point a large group of Aborigines appeared and threatened them. Shots were fired and a stand-off occurred. There is a suggestion the Aborigines were displeased that the wreck was being interfered with. After some parlay and reconciliation, the men from Port Fairy placated the locals and made good their withdrawal. The much-needed timber was procured soon after from Tasmania.

Donnelly gave over forty anecdotal accounts concerning the mahogany ship, and claimed to have been in the original party led by John Mills to investigate the wreck.

There is indisputable evidence, however, that Donnelly arrived in Victoria with his wife and son as assisted migrants in 1841, and all his stories about the first sightings of the wreck were passed on to him by a lifelong friend, Tasmanian-born Jimmy Clarke, who was in Port Fairy in 1836.

In spite of this, there are almost a hundred references to the wreck in letters and writings throughout the nineteenth century, indicating that it was a common landmark and well known to locals.

One of the most detailed accounts was given in 1876 by Captain John Mason:

Riding along the beach from Port Fairy to Warrnambool in the summer of 1846, my attention was attracted to the hull of a vessel embedded high and dry in the Hummocks, far above the reach of any tide. It appeared to have been that of a vessel about 100 tons burden, and from its bleached and weather-beaten appearance, must have remained there many years. The spars and deck were gone, and the hull was full of drift sand. The timber of which she was built had the appearance of cedar or mahogany. The fact of the vessel being in that position was well known to the whalers in 1836 when the first whaling station was formed in that neighbourhood, and the oldest natives, when questioned, stated their knowledge of it extended from their earliest recollections.

. . . The wreck lies about midway between Belfast and Warrnambool, and is probably by this time entirely covered with drift sand, as during a search made for it within the last few months it was not to be seen.

(Port Fairy was known as Belfast from 1843 to 1887; it then reverted to the original European name given by Wishart.)

The Warrnambool Standard carried several articles on the wreck in June and July 1890. Alexander Rollo remembered it as being ‘far above high water mark, her stern pointed towards Port Fairy and only her timbers were standing about three or four feet above the sand’.

Joseph Archibald, father of the famous J.F. Archibald, was police sergeant at Warrnambool and, on retirement, founded the museum there. He examined the site and sketched the position of the wreck according to Mr Rollo’s evidence in 1890, and reported his findings and theories in 1892.

In recent times, three symposia have been held to investigate the evidence: in 1980, 1987 and 2005. Many books have been written on the subject and, in 1992, the Victorian government offered a reward of $250,000 to anyone who could locate the wreck. Official searches using drilling equipment, in 1999 and 2004, found only small, unidentifiable fragments of timber.

Local historian Jim Henry was one of many to write an account of all the evidence, in his book The Mahogany Ship: Relic or Legend? He spoke to elderly residents of Koroit, a town six kilometres from the site, who remembered the ship being seen on picnics at the beach. It was generally reported to be located ‘near the end of Gorman’s Lane’.

Mrs Daisy Smith had memories of her mother saying she saw the ship in 1876:

Mother told us the timbers were very solid and smooth, and polished (she supposed) with the drift sand. The ship was well in the sand hills. It was seen a year or two later but only the top timbers, then it disappeared and has never been seen since.

In 2010, Rob Simpson, author of Warrnambool Shipwrecks, using the evidence gathered by Jim Henry and aerial photography provided by Google Earth, claimed to have located the wreck site, very close to where all the anecdotal evidence from the late nineteenth century placed it.

We eagerly await the next development.

Meanwhile, as I ponder the evidence and the theories that abound about the voyage of Mendonca, the Dieppe maps and the ‘mahogany ship’, certain things seem obvious to me:

• The Portuguese were well established in the islands to our north eighty years before the Dutch arrived, and eventually ousted them in a series of naval battles in the seventeenth century.

• The Dutch were exploring and charting our coast within a decade of arriving in Asia, and had two-thirds of Australia’s coast charted within thirty years.

• Why, therefore, is it considered fanciful to imagine that the Portuguese also explored the territory around and beyond their trading routes? They had eighty years to do it before the Dutch arrived—and after all, they had already managed to navigate and explore their way successfully around half the globe.

• The Dieppe maps were in the public domain in the eighteenth century, to be used by those interested in exploration, hydrography and previous discoveries.

• Anyone planning to sail into unknown seas would naturally be very interested in exploration, hydrography and previous discoveries . . . including James Cook and Joseph Banks.

Does any of this imply a conspiracy to defraud another nation of some rightful claim, or besmirch the reputation of Cook?

Of course not.

Although the caravels of Portugal may have explored our coastline, there was never any claim made on the territory by the Portuguese. Indeed, it was probably their desire to hide the fact that they were here that led to the uncertainty about the validity of the Dieppe maps.

If any European nation had a supposed prior claim over ‘New Holland’, it would have been the Dutch. But the Dutch never claimed any part of the continent, although they visited frequently and named many parts of the coast.

When Cook sailed off in 1768, the great-great-grandson of a Dutch Prince was on the throne of England, and the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company were in unofficial collusion to respect each other’s territories and destroy the ability of the French to trade in Asia. The Dutch and English would not go to war against each other until 1780—a decade after Cook had claimed the east coast for Britain.

So, it really doesn’t matter if the Portuguese were here before Cook, or the Dutch, or even before the many French explorers who sailed the southern seas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries . . . or the Chinese or the Spanish or any of the others about whom theories have been propounded.

All those mentioned above have been suggested as the original owners of the ship in the dunes near Warrnambool.

It would be nice to know the truth, though, and one day soon we may know the truth, because it’s out there . . . somewhere.

The truth about the ‘truth’, however, is that nobody knows exactly where it is—not even my friend Dennis.