Why Cook’s discoveries remain a gamechanger

Cook not only revealed the most habitable parts of Australia, he changed the way we perceived its geography.

When Cook charted the east coast of Australia his achievement was not in finding a land no-one had seen before, but far more importantly in giving an exact intellectual account of phenomena never previously understood in this way

The famous “erdapfel” in Nuremberg, the oldest surviving terrestrial globe, made by Martin Behaim in 1490-92, gives a good idea of what Christopher Columbus must have anticipated on his voyage across the Atlantic. To a casual glance, the ocean looks about the right size, except it is bounded on the west by the China coast. When the expedition caught sight of land then, it must have seemed to be about where it was expected; except that it wasn’t China but an entirely new and unknown continent.

There is no better illustration of the difficulty of measuring longitude accurately before the new marine chronometers of the 18th century. Eratosthenes (3rd c. BC) had developed the system of the parallels and meridians that grid the surface of the globe and, in a remarkable experiment, estimated the size of the earth with considerable accuracy. So the dimensions of the globe were known, and latitude on the north-south axis, judged by the position of the sun, could be measured reliably; but longitude, that is position on the east-west axis, was very hard to estimate.

Before Columbus, geographers imagined that the whole 360 degrees of the earth’s circumference were effectively filled by the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, together with the hypothesised but as yet unknown antipodean continent. After Columbus, they had to accommodate the huge mass of the two Americas; but they also had to fit in something much bigger – the vast extent of the Pacific Ocean.

Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis terrarum, 1579

This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the discovery of the Pacific: even when geographers and mariners from antiquity, the medieval period and the early renaissance – whether European or Asian – had some knowledge of the seas around the East Indies, or indeed of the China coast, they naturally assumed these waters to be the far side of the same ocean that lay to the west of Europe. Realising it was an entirely new ocean was an extraordinary event in the history of cartography and of our understanding of our planet.

In recent times, of course, talk of discovery has been fraught with angst and tends to be met by angry reminders that the natives of the new lands knew perfectly well where they were before they were supposedly “discovered” by Europeans or Arabs or other explorers from more developed civilisations. And of course there is some truth in this; it is also clear that the Polynesian peoples of the Pacific in particular were extraordinarily talented seafarers, guided only by the clues that nature herself provided.

But as I have observed before, the idea of “discovery” should not be understood in the simplistic sense of merely happening upon places previously unknown to us. The reason that the great voyages of discovery of the early modern period are so important, the reason that they are comparable to other fundamental advances of the Scientific Revolution, is that they achieve for the first time an objective understanding of the shape of the earth that is of an entirely different order from any knowledge that local peoples had of their own land.

All cultures tend to be self-centred in their view of the world around them. Tribal peoples imagine the land they live on as formed by mythical beings with whom they still identify. Even highly sophisticated civilisations like classical China conceive of themselves as occupying the centre of all things. Early medieval maps place Jerusalem, and the East, at the top because the story of salvation is central to their universe.

Captain James Cook (1728-1779) by Nathaniel Dance (not part of this exhibition)

The archaic and classical Greeks still pictured a circumscribed world, but they were not big enough to imagine that they were at the centre of it; they knew very well that their own civilisation existed in complex relations of similarity and difference with the two great neighbouring cultural regions of Egypt and Asia. Herodotus, the founder of historical writing, devotes the first two books of his great work to the traditions and cultures of the Near East and of Egypt, which he knew to be much older than those of the Greeks.

Hellenistic Greek geographers such as Eratosthenes were the first to conceive a universal co-ordinate system for mapping the world – and above all, one in which their own land and culture no longer enjoyed a central or privileged position. Modern geographers from the age of exploration to the enlightenment carried this work much further on the basis of a vastly wider practical experience of lands and seas unknown to the ancient scholars. They did indeed discover the world in a way unknown to any previous peoples.

Again, the idea of discovery by European explorers is lazily characterised as a Eurocentric perspective. But as we have seen, it is precisely not that: the new geographical picture of the world is on the contrary the first not to be culturally or ethnically self-centred; to be universal, impersonal and objective. Even the Mediterranean, the centre of ancient maps, is reduced to a patch in one corner of a modern globe.

Of course Europeans made use of this powerful new knowledge in the quest for profit and dominion, and they were sometimes cruel and rapacious; but they are not unusual in that. It is sentimentalism to think of other civilisations and tribal people as being somehow better; they were simply more limited in their own range of activities. Humans have always extended their dominion where they could; the mariners of the Pacific voyaged for trade, for resources or for sanguinary raids on other tribes.

This exhibition presents a wealth of fascinating maps from the 15th to the 19th centuries, following the astonishing development of knowledge over these centuries, and it also reminds us how the topic of cartography fascinated the modern imagination. There was a practical interest; the Dutch in the 17th century, as we see in Vermeer’s paintings, often hung maps of their own newly independent nation in their houses, and at the same time were avid cartographers of the lands in the East Indies where they traded for spices.

On the other hand, a decorative map produced in Venice in 1776, not long after the publication of Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia, evidently appeals to a more disinterested enlightenment love of knowledge for its own sake. And Cook, as we often tend to forget in our parochial focus on the charting of Australia, was a hero of the later 18th century, celebrated internationally as a brilliant mariner and cartographer, an intrepid explorer of vast and unknown seas, and an enlightened and fair commander.

It is a commonplace to compare the early explorers to the astronauts of the 20th century, but it is true that their voyages were equally daring and dangerous. As anyone who has attempted the most elementary sailing in Sydney Harbour will appreciate, using even our highly accurate modern charts to locate oneself and guide a boat is hard enough; imagine sailing down the Atlantic, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the Indian Ocean guided by any of the maps in the first part of this exhibition.

Edmund Halley, Nova & accuratissimia totius terrarum tabula, c. 1745

Obviously the most important consideration, in these early maps, is to locate the continents as accurately as possible in relation to the equator and the tropics; the emphasis is on the coasts, and the principal island stops are clearly marked. Because of the longitudinal problem already mentioned, land masses are more accurate in the north-south dimension than the east-west, and India, for example, sometimes ends up oddly shrunken. Sri Lanka – named Taprobana, as it had been in Ptolemy’s atlas – is frequently much bigger than it really is.

These early maps are often adorned with fascinating decorative or anecdotal details; thus monsters recalling those that Othello speaks of seeing appear in a column to the left of the Secunda etas mundi map (1493). Sebastian Munster’s Typus cosmographicus unversalis (1532) has vignettes, attributed to Holbein, illustrating the four continents in the corners: a man being killed by an elephant for Africa, spices for Asia; the Italian traveller Ludovico de Varthema (Vartomanus) for Europe, and an elaborate scene of cannibalism, including butchery with an implausible steel cleaver, for America. More scientifically, the map includes special notes on the regions and people of India and Scythia.

The first great mariners were Iberians, but by the end of the 16th century the Dutch and English were beginning to assert themselves. Sir Francis Drake’s great voyage – only the second circumnavigation of the globe – was completed in 1580 and is reflected here in maps from 1599 and 1628. The first Dutch voyage to the East Indies in 1595 is recorded in a map published in 1596; their new route around Cape Horn, south of Tierra del Fuego, is described in a 1619 publication.

In all of this Australia lay in wait, as it were, imagined since antiquity and appearing on Ortelius’s 1579 map of the world as Terra Australis nondum cognita – the as yet unknown southern land. Very soon parts of the continent begin to appear on Dutch maps: in Jan Jansson’s 1657 map, stretches of northern Australia are already charted, and Van Diemen’s Land is mapped on three sides, but open at the top. By the time of Halley’s highly accurate map of almost a century later, most of Australia is mapped, except for the east coast, and Tasmania still lacks a northern boundary.

Only two or three decades later, Cook produced the great charts of New Zealand which are a treasure of the State Library. I am sitting in Rushcutters Bay as I write this, and I reflect on how daunting a task it would be to draw a remotely accurate outline of the bay I have before my eyes, let alone to situate it properly in relation to the bays and promontories on either side. The charts of New Zealand demanded not only the most careful observation of topography but impeccably accurate astronomical sightings combined with precise chronometric calculations.

Cook’s maps are not merely careful renderings of something seen: they are, in reality, works of scientific reasoning as complex and abstract as the mathematical formulae that express the data of physics and cosmology. When Cook similarly charted the east coast of Australia his achievement was not in finding a land no-one had seen before, but far more importantly in giving an exact intellectual account of phenomena never previously understood in this way.

It is interesting that the settlement of Australia began soon afterwards; Cook had of course revealed the most habitable parts of the continent, whose previously known coasts had seemed so unpromising to generations of explorers. But it is tempting, if perhaps an intellectual conceit, to think that it was also because he had turned the shapeless mass, long suspected to extend into the still dreamed-of southern continent, into a clear cartographic idea, whole, bounded and geographically intelligible.

Christopher Allen is a member of the State Library Council. Maps of the Pacific, State Library of NSW, until April 25.

Hartmann Schedel, Secunda etas mundi, 1493

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