Do you remember the lines from Vysotsky's song: “Remember how the late Cook sailed to the shores of Australia”? It was with the light hand of Vladimir Semenovich that many to the question "Who discovered Australia?" They will confidently answer: "Cook!" And they will be wrong, because at the time when James Cook on the ship "Endeavor" reached the east coast of Australia, the lands of this continent had been known to Europeans for more than one hundred and fifty years. And the English navigator was not lucky to be eaten by the aborigines, thousands of kilometers from Australia, in the Hawaiian Islands. So who actually discovered the "Unknown Southern Land"?
Dreams of Australia
Legends that somewhere far in the south, behind a single World Ocean, should exist a huge land, have been known since ancient times. It was the ancient geographers who called this land “Terra Australis”, that is, “South Land”, that Australia owes its modern name. And although their assumptions were largely erroneous, in the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries, many researchers dreamed not only of a way to India, but also of a huge southern continent.
In the 15th century, under the leadership of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese opened the southern route to India and established their first colonies on the shores of the Indian Ocean. The maximum task was accomplished and many explorers headed south in search of the continent Terra Australis. They managed to discover many islands of Oceania, New Guinea and, most likely, set foot on the land of Australia.
There is a version that the Portuguese Cristovan de Mendonça was the first to find Australia in 1522. However, no reliable confirmation of its discovery has survived.
Who is considered to be the discoverer?
Today it is an indisputable fact that the Dutch were the true discoverers of Australia in the 17th century. The dominance of Portugal in the region at that time came to an end and their place was taken by Holland - one of the most developed and strong European powers of this period. In 1605, the Dutch citizen Willem Janszon set sail on the Deifken ship from the port of Bantama on the island of Java. His goal was to explore the southern coast of Guinea, but, as in the case of another traveler, Christopher Columbus, he found something completely different from what he was looking for. The unknown land that Daifken's crew stumbled upon when circling northern Guinea was Australia.
Melbourne is located in the territory that was bought by John Batman in the 18th century. However, the deal was invalidated and the city was named Melbourne, not Batmania, as the landowner had planned.
Willem Jansson, like Columbus, did not realize that he had discovered a huge continent, calling the discovered Australian Cape York Peninsula "New Zealand". The true scale of what was found became known later. Most likely, Willem Jansson was not the first European to set foot on the land of the “Southern Continent”. However, a large amount of direct and indirect evidence of its discovery leaves no historians the slightest doubt that he should be considered the pioneer of "Terra Australis".
