The emergence of the modern world

The northern passages

Roger Barlow, in his Briefe Summe of Geographie, written in 1540–41, asserted that “the shortest route, the northern, has been reserved by Divine Providence for England.”

The concept of a Northeast Passage was at first favoured by the English: it was thought that, although its entry was in high latitudes, it “turning itself, trendeth towards the southeast…and stretcheth directly to Cathay.” It was also argued that the cold lands bordering this route would provide a much needed market for English cloth. In 1553 a trading company, later known as the Muscovy Company, was formed with Sebastian Cabot as its governor. Under its auspices numerous expeditions were sent out. In 1553 an expedition set sail under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby; Willoughby’s ship was lost, but the exploration continued under the leadership of its pilot general, Richard Chancellor. Chancellor and his men wintered in the White Sea, and next spring “after much adoe at last came to Mosco.” Between 1557 and 1560, another English voyager, Anthony Jenkinson, following up this opening, traveled from the White Sea to Moscow, then to the Caspian, and so on to Bukhara, thus reaching the old east–west trade routes by a new way. Soon, attempts to find a passage to Cathay were replaced by efforts to divert the trade of the ancient silk routes from their traditional outlets on the Black Sea to new northern outlets on the White Sea.

The Dutch next took up the search for the passage. The Dutch navigator William Barents made three expeditions between 1594 and 1597 (when he died in Novaya Zemlya, modern Russia). The English navigator Henry Hudson, in the employ of the Dutch, discovered between 1605 and 1607 that ice blocked the way both east and west of Svalbard (Spitsbergen). Between 1725 and 1729 and from 1734 to 1743, a series of expeditions inspired by the Danish-Russian explorer Vitus Bering attempted the passage from the eastern end, but it was not until 1878–79 that Baron Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, the Finnish-Swedish scientist and explorer, sailed through it.

The Northwest Passage, on the other hand, also had its strong supporters. In 1576 Humphrey Gilbert, the English soldier and navigator, argued that “Mangia [South China], Quinzay [Hangzhou] and the Moluccas are nearer to us by the North West than by the North East,” while John Dee in 1577 set out the view that the Strait of Anian, separating America from Asia, led southwest “along the backeside of Newfoundland.” In 1534 Jacques Cartier, the French navigator, explored the St. Lawrence estuary. In 1576 the English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher found the bay named after him. Between 1585 and 1587, the English navigator John Davis explored Cumberland Sound and the western shore of Greenland to 73° N; although he met “a mighty block of ice,” he reported that “the passage is most probable and the execution easy.” In 1610 Henry Hudson sailed through Hudson Strait to Hudson Bay, confident, before he was set adrift by a mutinous crew, that success was at hand. Between 1612 and 1615, three English voyagers—Robert Bylot, Sir Thomas Button, and William Baffin—thoroughly explored the bay, returning convinced that there was no strait out of it leading westward. As in the quest for a Northeast Passage, interest turned from the search for a route leading to the riches of the East to the exploitation of local resources. Englishmen of the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670 to trade in furs, explored the wide hinterlands of the St. Lawrence estuary and Hudson Bay. Further search for the passage itself did not take place until the 19th century: expeditions led by Sir William Parry (1819–25) and Sir John Franklin (1819–45), as well as more than 40 expeditions sent out to search for Franklin and his party, failed to find the passage. It was left to the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to be the first to sail through the passage, which he did in 1903–05.

Eastward voyages to the Pacific

By the end of the 16th century, Portugal in the East held only the ports of Goa and Diu, in India, and Macau, in China. The English dominated the trade of India, and the Dutch that of the East Indies. It was the Dutch, trading on the fringes of the known world, who were the explorers. Victualing their ships at the Cape, they soon learned that, by sailing east for some 3,000 miles (5,000 km) before turning north, they would encounter favourable winds in setting a course toward the Spice Islands (now the Moluccas). Before long, reports were received of landfalls made on an unknown coast; as early as 1618, a Dutch skipper suggested that “this land is a fit point to be made by ships…in order to get a fixed course for Java.” Thereafter, the west coast of Australia was gradually charted: it was identified by some as the coast of the great southern continent shown on Mercator’s map and, by others, as the continent of Loach or Beach mentioned by Marco Polo, interpreted as lying to the south of Malacca (Melaka); Polo, however, was probably describing the Malay Peninsula.

In 1642 a farsighted governor general of the Dutch East India Company, Anthony van Diemen, sent out the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman for the immediate purpose of making an exploratory voyage, but with the ultimate aim of developing trade. Sailing first south then east from Mauritius, Tasman landed on the coast of Tasmania, after which he coasted round the island to the south and, sailing east, discovered the South Island of New Zealand; “We trust that this is the mainland coast of the unknown South land,” he wrote. He sailed north without finding Cook Strait, and, making a sweeping arc on his voyage back to the Dutch port of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), he discovered the Tonga and the Fiji Islands. In 1644, on a second voyage, he traced the north coast of Australia from Cape York (which he thought to be a part of New Guinea) to the North West Cape.

Westward voyages to the Pacific

The earlier European explorers in the Pacific were primarily in search of trade or booty; the later ones were primarily in search of information. The traders, for the most part Spaniards, established land portages from harbours on the Caribbean to harbours on the west coast of Central and South America; from the Pacific coast ports of the Americas, they then set a course westward to the Philippines. Many of their ships crossed and recrossed the Pacific without making a landfall; many islands were found, named, and lost, only to be found again without recognition, renamed, and perhaps lost yet again. In the days before longitude could be accurately fixed, such uncertainty was not surprising.

Some voyages—for example, those of Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, the Spanish explorer, in 1567 and 1568; Mendaña and the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós in 1595; Quirós and another Portuguese explorer, Luis de Torres, in 1606—had, among other motives, the purpose of finding the great southern continent. Quirós was sure that in Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides he had found his goal; he “took possession of the site on which is to be founded the New Jerusalem.” Torres sailed from there to New Guinea and thence to Manila, in the Philippines. In doing so, he coasted the south shore of New Guinea, sailing through Torres Strait, unaware that another continent lay on his left hand.

The English were rivals of the Spaniards in the search for wealth in unknown lands in the Pacific. Two English seamen, Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, circumnavigated the world from west to east in 1577 to 1580 and 1586 to 1588, respectively. One of Drake’s avowed objects was the search for Terra Australis. Once he was through Magellan’s straits, however, strong winds made him turn north—perhaps not reluctantly. He then sailed along the coast of Peru, surprising and plundering Spanish ships laden with gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls. His fortune made, Drake continued northward perhaps in search of the Northwest Passage. He explored the west coast of North America to 48° N. He returned south to winter in New Albion (California); the next summer he sailed on the Spanish route to Manila, then returned home by the Cape.

Despite the fact that he participated in several buccaneering voyages, the English seaman William Dampier, who was active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, may be regarded as the first to travel mainly to satisfy scientific curiosity. He wrote: “I was well satisfied enough knowing that, the further we went, the more knowledge and experience I should get, which was the main thing I regarded.” His book A New Voyage Round the World, published in 1697, further popularized the idea of a great southern continent.

In the late 18th century, the final phase of Pacific exploration occurred. The French sent the explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville to the Pacific in 1768. He appears to have been more of a skeptic than many of his contemporaries, for, while he agreed “that it is difficult to conceive such a number of low islands and almost drowned lands without a continent near them,” at the same time he maintained that “if any considerable land existed hereabouts we could not fail meeting with it.” The British, for their part, commissioned John Byron in 1764 and Samuel Wallis and Phillip Carteret in 1766 “to discover unknown lands and to explore the coast of New Albion.” For all the navigational skill and personal endurance shown by captains and crews, the rewards of these voyages in increasing geographical knowledge were not great. The courses sailed were in the familiar waters of the southern tropics; none was through the dangerous waters of higher latitudes.

Capt. James Cook, the English navigator, in three magnificent voyages at long last succeeded in demolishing the fables about Pacific geography. He was given command of an expedition to observe the transit of the planet Venus at Tahiti on June 3, 1769; with the observation completed, he carried out his instructions to search the area between 40° and 35° S “until you discover it [Terra Australis] or fall in with the eastern side of the land discovered by Tasman and now called New Zealand.” He reached New Zealand, circumnavigated both islands, sailed westward, and on April 19, 1770, made landfall on the eastern coast of Australia. He then turned northward, charting carefully, being well aware of the dangers of the Great Barrier Reef. At Cape York, Cook took possession of the whole eastern coast, to which he gave the name New South Wales. He sailed through Torres Strait, recognizing as he did so that New Guinea was an island. When Cook sailed back to England by Batavia and the Cape, the coastline of the fifth continent was almost complete; only in the south did it still remain unknown. In 1798 to 1799, two British navigators, George Bass and Matthew Flinders, circumnavigated Tasmania, and in 1801–03 Flinders charted the coast of the Great Australian Bight and circumnavigated the continent, thereby proving that there was no strait from the bight to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

In a second voyage, from 1772 to 1775, which in many ways was the greatest of the three, Cook searched systematically for the elusive continent that many still believed might exist. The first summer he examined the area to the south of the Indian Ocean; in the second, he searched the ocean between New Zealand and Cape Horn; and, in the third, the ocean between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. He sailed home convinced that the great South Pacific continent of the map makers was a fable.

With the exploration of the Pacific completed, interest in a Northwest Passage revived. In 1778 Cook proceeded to latitude 65° N, but he found no way through the ice barrier either to east or to west. He then sailed south to Hawaii, where he was killed in a dispute with the islanders.

Terra Australis Incognita had disappeared: there was now no unknown landmass in the southern oceans. It was Matthew Flinders who suggested that the fifth continent should be named Australia—a name that had long associations with the South Seas and that accorded well with the names of the other continents.