In only a few months, scores, if not hundreds, of science
fiction fans will be boarding planes, ships, rafts and other
means of transportation to go to the land down under for the 57th
Annual Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia,
better known as AussieCon 3. They will be discovering a land
whose discovery is detailed in Miriam Estensen’s book
Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land.
Estensen’s style is straight forward as she begins be
discussing the Portuguese fervor for exploration which began
with Henry the Navigator. Over the first several chapters of the
book, she discusses beliefs, often based on nothing more than
logical conjecture, that there had to be a great land mass in
the south to balance out the land mass of the north. As Estensen
advances through the sixteenth century, she describes voyages of
discovery in the East Indies, along with cartographic
techniques. Although she admits that there is no clear-cut
evidence that the Portuguese ever sighted Australia, she does
champion the idea that a Portuguese explorer from Goa, Cristovão
de Mendonça, sailed along the northern Australian coast in the
early 1520s. Estensen doesn’t provide any hard evidence that
Mendonça did discover Australia and points out that her evidence
is circumstantial at best, but mostly based on lack of contrary
evidence.
Eventually, Estensen leaves the Portuguese conjecture behind
and looks at the Spanish and English voyages which have left
definite proof that they had visited the Australian region.
Unfortunately, her narrative still does not reach out and grab
the reader because she is not able to focus on the
larger-than-life aspect of the individuals who were on these
voyages, whether Cristovão de Mendonça, Juan Fernández or James
Cook. As long as these characters take a back seat to political
and economic forces in her narrative, she fails to give the
reader something to grab hold of. While this would not be a
problem in an academic historical work, Discovery is
clearly meant as a popular work, and such a toehold is needed.
Another failure by omission is the lack of an accurate map
showing Australia and its environment in the book. There are
several plates showing period maps which might accurately
reflect what was believed at the time, but in order to help the
reader visualize where the various voyages were, an accurate
modern map would have been useful. Furthermore, the period maps
which are included are reproduced at a size which makes seeing
detail in them difficult without the help of a magnifying glass.
Estensen has an perplexing habit of referring to other
scholars without using their names in the text. For instance,
when discussing the fate of the Spanish ship the San Lesmes,
she notes that "one writer has argued. . . ." and "Another
researcher conjectures. . . ." (p.96). The reader must turn to
the endnotes to discover that she is referring to Robert Langdon
and Roger Hervé. There is no good reason for this and it comes
across as if Estensen is spreading gossip, rather than
discussing historical theories.
However, Estensen gives a good outline of the voyages of
discovery which led to Australia’s emergence into the European
sphere. Unfortunately, she ends with Cook’s discovery of the
continent, not caring, at least in this book, to look at the
discovery of the interior of Australia or its settlement and
use. Instead, Australia is shown as a prize which, once won, is
no longer of interest.
