By Simon Pratt.
In primary school, I was taught that ‘Captain Cook discovered Australia’. Even if you ignore the aborigines (who walked here), that is unfortunately quite wrong. By the time Cook’s Endeavour sighted Point Hicks in 1770, the Dutch and Spanish had already discovered and mapped the great majority of the Australian coastline.
What Cook is now credited with discovering was the east coast. But even this is arguable, because Spaniard Luis Torres who was the first to navigate the Strait that now bears his name, and passed through Torres and Endeavour Straits 164 years before Cook, must have sighted Cape York, which of course, is one end of the east coast. Not to detract from Cook, who was a great navigator, but he was in possession of maps made by others, including Torres, that made his journey that much easier. Torres, by comparison, has been almost forgotten by history. Torres Left Callao in Peru in December 1605 skippering the San Pedrico with two other ships under the overall command of Quiros. His ship was about 40 tons (which would make her smaller than the Duyfken, the replica of which is now sailing on Sydney Harbour, and a tenth of the size of the rather small Endeavour), crewed by 40 men and carried four square sails on two masts, a jib on her bowsprit and a lateen on her mizzen.
They were headed for the Solomon Islands which had been discovered in 1565, but were unable to find it in the vast Pacific, ending up at nearby Vanuatu instead. It had taken half a year to make the 7000 nm crossing, at an average speed of just under two knots. Here, they were separated from the flagship, and Torres took command and opened his orders. Discover the Southland, they read!!
Until 1615, the Spanish owned the Pacific, interrupted only by the English pirate Francis Drake in 1579. In order to survey potential bases for other such pirates, the Spanish in the latter part of that century conducted many voyages of exploration across the Pacific, putting the Solomon, Gilbert, Caroline, Marshall, Cook and Admiralty Islands, among others on their maps. But only their maps, naturally; they weren’t about sharing such trade secrets. Of course, they had already colonised the Philippines, and it was the silver-loaded Manilla Galleon that sailed from Acapulco to Manilla that was the target of the pirates.
Torres headed south-west as instructed and came to 190 nm off Rockhampton, where, following his orders, he turned north. One more day’s sail and he would have hit the Great Barrier Reef, possibly fatally. As an indication of how close to the wind such a square-rigger could sail, he was then unable to clear the eastern edge of New Guinea in the east/ south-east trade winds, and therefore had to indeed hope that a Strait did exist.
At the time, Spanish navigators knew the northern coast of New Guinea very well. And they suspected a landmass–Terra Australis–to the south. The problem was, as they were also familiar with the trade winds, which for eight or nine months of the year blow in this area from east/ southeast, if there was no Strait between New Guinea and Terra Australis, a square-rigger would never make headway out of the great gulf that they suspected was there. So now, Torres had to find a Strait or his bones would still be there today.
He tracked along the southern coast of New Guinea, gingerly picking his way through reefs and shallows. As it was new, undiscovered water, navigating was unimportant, which was just as well, because his navigational tools were pretty limited. There were no telescopes, no log, no chronometer, no sextant. He shot the sun at noon each day with an astrolabe and compared the readings to tables from the other side of the world. Sighting from a rolling ship, each day he was up to 20 miles out. In the voyage from Peru, the variance of the brace of navigators charting daily
dead-reckonings was over 1500 sea miles!
When they came to the area of Cape York, they had to steer south of the New Guinea coast (just 80nm apart here) due to the shallows and reefs. Sailing only in daylight, they had to put out several anchors every night and sometimes during the day also as they waited for the tides. Only by sailing with wind and tide together could they make forward progress. This only occurred for a few daylight hours each day. It must have been nerve wrecking stuff. Any mistake was certain death for all aboard. One consolation was that with such strong tides, they had to suspect there was a way through.
Finally, after more than a month threading their way through reef strewn water never deeper than nine fathoms, they traversed Endeavour Strait (still the main shipping channel), found the western end, and deep water. Eventually, they made Manilla. Though they clearly would have sighted Cape York, they never recognised it as the north tip of a great continent, as Dutchman Janszoon in the Duyfken a few months earlier, standing well out from the reefs, had not realised he’d passed a Strait.
We know nothing about Torres apart from the record of this journey. Probably Galician, we don’t know his birthdate, anything else about his career or where or when he died. After Manilla, he is never heard from by history again. His charts were kept under lock and key in Manilla until the British occupied it in 1765, when a copy of them was given to Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook. It must have been a godsend for Cook, because after grounding off Cooktown, if there was no Strait, he would never have made it out of the great gulf against the trade winds either.
Like Cook, Torres never lost a man from his crew to sickness during that whole incredible voyage from Peru to Manilla. Unlike Cook (or Gavin), he never touched the bottom. He traversed some of the most dangerous waters in the world, without anyone else’s charts. He navigated across the world’s biggest ocean with primitive equipment in a tiny square-rigger. It’s fitting that his immortality is assured by that stunningly beautiful and terrifying Strait that bears his name.
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