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Author: Kenneth Morgan, Professor of History, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, England
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Title page
From Cook to Flinders: The Navigation of Torres Strait
Keywords: Torres Strait; Navigation; Australia; Ships
Abstract:
This article offers the first published appraisal of the attempts by navigators to find a safe passage through Torres Strait, a notoriously difficult sea channel for sailing vessels. Securing a passage through the strait was important for the timing and viability of commercial and naval ships following this route from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Luis Vaez de Torres’ traversal of the strait that bears his name was kept secret for over a century and a half after his voyage in 1606. It was not until the late 1760s that a chart showing his track through Torres Strait was published. This article considers the routes followed by the small number of navigators who undertook the earliest known voyages through the strait: James Cook, William Bligh, William Wright Bampton and Matthew Flinders. The reasons why these navigators took different routes through Torres Strait are explained in relation to the cartographical knowledge they possessed. The navigational difficulties they encountered are explained. The article shows that knowledge of passages through the strait increased incrementally from one voyage to another. Cook sailed via Endeavour Strait, the most southerly passage through Torres Strait. Bligh followed a much more northerly passage to the north of Prince of Wales Island. Flinders took a course between that of Cook and Bligh to sail to the south of Prince of Wales Island. The article concludes that Flinders had the most thorough information with which to navigate Torres Strait, and that his passage became the preferred course for ships sailing between the north and Australia and the south of New Guinea by the mid-nineteenth century.
From Cook to Flinders: The Navigation of Torres Strait
The attempt to establish a safe sea route for shipping through Torres Strait was a major problem confronting navigators in Australian waters during the late eighteenth century when European, especially British, interest in establishing connections with Australia first assumed importance. The Spanish mariner Luis Vaéz de Torres sailed between New Guinea and the northern Australian coast in 1606, but it was many years before this became common knowledge. Abel Tasman’s second voyage of exploration to Australia in 1644, under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, included instructions to locate and sail through the strait, but this voyage failed in that task as Tasman left the Gulf of Carpentaria to return to Batavia. We do not know why he did not seek out a channel between New Guinea and Australia’s northern shores because his journals of the voyage are lost. It was not until 1762 that the existence of the strait was confirmed from documents captured by the British from a raid on Spanish Manila. The hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple gained access to the documents, translated them into English, and named the strait. He kept this evidence to himself but mentioned it in a short book entitled Account of the Discoveries Made in the South Pacific Ocean Previous to 1764, printed in 1767. This included a fold-out chart that showed Torres’ track to the south of New Guinea.[1] It was through Dalrymple’s efforts that the existence of Torres Strait was communicated to the wider world by the eve of the American Revolution.[2]
After Dalrymple had indicated that a route for sailing ships through Torres Strait could be achieved, the quest to find a safe passage through the strait became an important consideration for oceanic shipping sailing to and from Australia. Before the era of steam navigation, an east-west route through the strait was the only feasible direction in which ships could make the passage. Without securing a safe route through the strait, shipping leaving Australia’s east coast for Europe would be delayed and inconvenienced by having to steer an indirect course into the Indian Ocean around the north of New Guinea. Thus, the first voyages from Sydney to Java in the later eighteenth century avoided sailing through Torres Strait or along the northern coast of New Guinea and, instead, followed a longer but safer course through straits between the Solomon Islands, past the northern end of the Bismarck Archipelago, and westward along the Macassar Strait between Borneo and the Celebes. Such a course, however, added about 1,500 miles to a voyage from Sydney to Java than a more direct route through Torres Strait.[3] It was of course possible for ships to return from the east coast of Australia to Europe via Cape Horn. But that route was seldom used in the late eighteenth century because in winter it was, as William Bligh once put it, ‘a horrid tempestuous place to struggle with.’[4]
Locating a safe passage through Torres Strait was beset by navigational and geographical problems. Torres Strait is 150 kilometres wide at its narrowest extent, linking the Coral Sea in the east with the Arafura Sea in the west. It has shallow water, many reefs, shoals, sand cays and small islands scattered throughout its course. Altogether, there are some 274 small islands in Torres Strait. Many of its islands and reefs have never been named or charted accurately. East-west movement through the strait, with a choice for the navigator of around nine channels, is restricted to draughts of 12.2 metres; north-south movement can only cope with much shallower draughts. Northern projections of the Great Barrier Reef extend across the eastern end of the strait. The extent of the labyrinthine coral formation effectively closes southeastern approaches except for shallow, small draft vessels. Even to reach the northerly end of the reef requires very skilful navigation through other narrow gaps in the wall of coral. Tides, winds and currents in Torres Strait cause difficulties. The strait is situated at the intersection of two oceanic tidal systems that can cause dangerous, rapid tidal streams. Its shallow water means that tides and winds can affect ships dramatically. During the wet season from December to April, strong southeasterly winds can cause storms. ‘In passing through Torres Strait,’ Geoffrey Blainey has written, ‘a ship had to snake through a maze of submerged coral for about 150 miles, always with a look-out on the masthead, and always with a man sounding the depth of the water.’[5] It has been suggested that, in addition to these navigational difficulties, traversing Torres Strait was psychologically difficult for mariners in the days of sail because it usually occurred at the beginning or end of a tortuous passage through the inner route of the Great Barrier Reef.[6]
This article shows that the search for a secure passage through Torres Strait was advanced by the efforts of British navigators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Several naval commanders and hydrographers needed to sail around the northern end of the Cape York peninsula to proceed towards the Indian Ocean through the strait. They had to find a safe passage that could be charted for subsequent navigators to follow. The main advances towards this goal were made in voyages led by James Cook, William Bligh, William Wright Bampton and Matthew Flinders between 1770 and 1803. In 1770 Cook in the Endeavour, on his first voyage of Pacific exploration, was the first navigator to establish the existence of Torres Strait and to sail through it successfully. Bligh was the second naval commander to traverse the strait. This occurred on two separate voyages. In the first, Bligh sailed in 1789 with his remaining crew in an open launch to Timor after the famous mutiny on the Bounty. In the second, Bligh led a voyage in the Providence in 1791/2 to take breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean, and in doing so sailed through Torres Strait. In 1793 Bampton, commander of the Shaw Hormuzear,[7] undertook a speculative trading voyage from Sydney to Bombay, which also passed through the strait. Flinders sailed through Torres Strait with Bligh in the Providence in 1792 but also in two later voyages, in the Investigator in 1802 and the Cumberland in 1803, during his circumnavigation of Australia. Each of these four naval commanders left written and cartographic materials relating to their passages through Torres Strait, and it is from their logbooks, journals and charts that one can analyse how a safe passage through the strait was established.
James Cook
Cook lacked extensive knowledge about Torres’ route through the strait named after him. Moreover, he was not convinced that Torres had sailed through the passage.[8] Torres’ report of his voyage to the King of Spain was kept secret until about 1780, and was not published in an English translation until 1806. The route taken through the strait by Torres has never been conclusively determined, owing to lack of essential navigational information.[9] Several maps known to Cook gave conflicting clues about the existence of a strait between New Guinea and northern Australia. Maps by Mercator (1569) and Ortelius (1570) showed a strait that divided New Guinea from a fictitious southern continent. Yet Melchisédec Thévonot’s map, based on seventeenth-century Dutch sources, left a conjectural blank for Torres Strait with shoals stretching almost as far as the Gulf of Carpentaria.[10] Sources more contemporaneous with Cook, however, presented a more positive view about the existence of a strait. Dalrymple had furnished Joseph Banks, who sailed in the Endeavour alongside Cook, with a rough chart showing the supposed track of Torres.[11] Maps provided by Robert de Vaugondy for volumes prepared by Charles de Brosses’s Histoire des navigations aux terres australes (1756) showed a strait between New Guinea and northern Australia, but they did not have any expedition tracks.[12] Cook thought the northern extremity of Australia’s Cape York peninsula did not join up with New Guinea. He did not explain why he thought this was the case, though it may have been influenced by the information Dalrymple supplied to Banks about Torres.[13] Cook intended to prove or disprove whether such a strait existed.[14] Given that the sources he had available did not provide a definitive answer, the only way of locating the strait and a safe passage through it was through persistent practical navigation.
Cook’s vessel, the Endeavour, was a converted collier of moderate size, being 106 feet long and 268 tons burthen.[15] He sailed towards Torres Strait after a long voyage in which he had observed the transit of Venus in Tahiti and circumnavigated New Zealand. He then decided to return home via a northward route along the east coast of Australia into waters where few navigators had previously sailed.[16] Cook had a difficult passage in the Endeavour near the Great Barrier Reef along the northern Queensland coast, during which the ship was damaged and needed repair. While sailing off Cape Melville, on 15 August, he still did not know whether a passage existed between New Guinea and Australia’s northern extremity. Joseph Banks, the wealthy botanist on the voyage, noted in his journal: ‘The Captn fearfull of going too far from the Land, least he should miss an opportunity of examining whether or not the passage which is layd down in some charts between New Holland and New Guinea realy existed or not, steerd the ship west right in for the land.’[17] Two days later Cook sailed inside the Great Barrier Reef through Providential Channel and followed a course northwards fairly near the mainland Australian coast. He was determined to find out whether New Guinea joined the top of the Cape York peninsula. A boat was sent out ahead of the Endeavour to signal the depth of the water. Cook reached Cape York on 21 August and on the next day he sailed around it and anchored at Possession Island, where he famously claimed New South Wales as a British possession. While on the island, he satisfied himself with the prospect of there being ‘the great probability of a Passage, thro’ which I intend going with the Ship.’[18]
Cook realised he had passed the northern extremity of Australia’s east coast. He sailed through Endeavour Strait, the southernmost and most extensive of the western entrances to Torres Strait, between Possession Island and the Prince of Wales Island, the largest of the Torres Strait islands.[19] On 23 August, leaving Possession Island, he proved that New Holland and New Guinea were two separate lands or islands ‘which until this day hath been a doubtfull point with Geographers.’[20] Sailing conditions were difficult: numerous small banks of coral with a couple of fathoms between them were invisible until they were almost reached and, even then, they appeared as though they were reflections of dark clouds on the water.[21] He headed northwestward to sail past Booby Island, which was little more than a rock. This is where Endeavour Strait ended.[22] By 26 August the Endeavour had passed between New Holland and New Guinea and there was open sea to the westward.[23] This was the only occasion that Cook sailed through Torres Strait. Cook later reported to the Admiralty that on 22 August 1770, in the latitude of 10°30’, he had found a passage into the Indian Ocean between the northern extremity of New Holland and New Guinea.[24] Dalrymple claimed in a publication that Torres’ tacks, which he laid down in his chart supplied to Banks, had enabled Cook to pass between New Holland and New Guinea.[25]
Cook wondered whether his route through Torres Strait was the best one available for navigators, or whether safer access from the east could be found. ‘The Northern extent or the Main or outer Reef which limets or bounds the Shoals to the Eastward,’ in his view, ‘seems to be the only thing wanting to clear up this point, and this was a thing I had neither time nor inclination to go about, having been already sufficiently harrass’d with dangers without going to look for more.’[26] Thus Cook held out the possibility that a better route through the strait would one day be discovered among islands he could see to the north. As G. Arnold Wood put it, Cook had been the first known navigator to sail through Torres Strait but ‘apart from this one passage, the huge chaos of the strait remained unexplored.’[27] Knowledge of Cook’s traversal of Torres Strait entered the public domain primarily through charts showing his track through Endeavour Strait. Hawkesworth’s account of the Endeavour’s voyage, published in 1773, included a ‘Chart of Part of the Coast of New South Wales from Cape Tribulation to Endeavour Straits by Lieut. J. Cook’ (1770), and many later maps also illustrated the routes taken on the voyage.[28]