Theory of Portuguese Discovery of Australia - Criticisms and Alternative Views of The Dieppe Maps

Criticisms and Alternative Views of The Dieppe Maps

Matthew Flinders cast a sceptical eye over the "Great Java" of the Dieppe maps in A Voyage to Terra Australis, published in 1814, and concluded: "it should appear to have been partly formed from vague information, collected, probably, by the early Portuguese navigators, from the eastern nations; and that conjecture has done the rest. It may, at the same time, be admitted, that a part of the west and north-west coasts, where the coincidence of form is most striking, might have been seen by the Portuguese themselves, before the year 1540, in their voyages to, and from, India".

In the last chapter of The Secret Discovery of Australia, Kenneth McIntyre threw down a challenge, saying: “Every critic who seeks to deny the Portuguese discovery of Australia is faced with the problem of providing an alternative theory to explain away the existence of the Dieppe maps. If the Dauphin is not the record of real exploration, then what is it?”

Possibly because of the degree of conjecture involved in the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia, there have been a number of critics. By far the most prolific writer on this theory, and also its most consistent critic, has been Flinders University Associate Professor W.A.R (Bill) Richardson, who has written 20 articles relating to the topic since 1983. As Richardson, an academic fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, first approached the Dieppe maps in an effort to prove they did relate to Portuguese discovery of Australia, his criticisms are all the more interesting. He suggests he quickly realised there was no connection between the Dieppe maps and modern Australia's coastline:

The case for an early Portuguese discovery of Australia rests entirely on imagined resemblances between the "continent" of Jave La Grande on the Dieppe maps and Australia. There are no surviving Portuguese 16th-century charts showing any trace of land in that area, and there are no records whatsoever of any voyage along any part of the Australian coastline before 1606. Advocates of the Portuguese discovery theory endeavour to explain away this... embarrassing lack of direct supporting evidence as being due to two factors: the Portuguese official secrets policy, which must have been applied with a degree of efficiency that is hard to credit, and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake which, they claim, must have destroyed all the relevant archival material.

He dismisses the claim that Cristóvão de Mendonça sailed down the east coast of Australia as sheer speculation, based on voyages about which no details have survived. In the same way, the re-assembling of sections of the "Jave La Grande" coastline so that it fits the straightjacket of the real outline of Australia relies upon a second set of assumptions. He argues taking that approach, "Jave La Grande" could be re-assembled to look like anything.

Another dimension of the argument Richardson advances against the theory relates to methodology. Richardson argues McIntyre's practice of re-drawing sections of maps in his book was misleading because in an effort to clarify he actually omitted crucial features and names that did not support the Portuguese discovery theory.

Richardson's own view is that a study of placenames (toponymy) on "Jave La Grande" identifies it as unmistakably connected to the coasts of southern Java and Indochina. Emeritus Professor Victor Prescott has claimed Richardson "brilliantly demolished the argument that Java la Grande show(s) the east coast of Australia." However, Australian historian Alan Frost has recently written that Richardson’s argument that the east coast of Java la Grande was in fact the coast of Vietnam is “so speculative and convoluted as not to be credible”.

In 1984, criticism of The Secret Discovery of Australia also came from master mariner Captain A. Ariel, who argued McIntyre had made serious errors in his explanation and measurement of "erration" in longitude. Ariel concluded that McIntyre erred on “all navigational...counts” and that The Secret Discovery of Australia was a “monumental piece of misinterpretation.”

In 2005, Historian Michael Pearson made the following comment on the Dieppe maps as evidence of a Portuguese discovery of Australia:

If the Portuguese did in fact map the northern, western and eastern coasts, this information was hidden from general knowledge... The Dieppe maps had no claimed sources, no "discoverer" of the land shown... and the iconography on the various maps is based on Sumatran animals and ethnography, not the reality of Australia. In this sense the maps did not really expand European knowledge of Australia, the portrayal of "Jave La Grande" having no greater status that any other conjectural portrayal of Terra Australis.

In a recent interpretation of the Dieppe maps, Professor Gayle K. Brunelle of California State University argued that the Dieppe school of cartographers should be seen as acting as propagandists for French geographic knowledge and territorial claims. The decades from about 1535 to 1562 when the Dieppe school of cartographers flourished were also the period in which French trade with the New World was at its 16th-century height, in terms of the North Atlantic fish trade, the fur trade, and, most important for the cartographers, the rivalry with the Portuguese for control of the coasts of Brazil and the supplies of lucrative brazilwood. The bright red dye produced from brazilwood replaced woad as the primary dyestuff in the cloth industry in France and the Low Countries. The Dieppe cartographers used the skills and geographic knowledge of Portuguese mariners, pilots and geographers working in France to produce maps meant to emphasize French interests in and dominion over territory in the New World that the Portuguese also claimed, both in Newfoundland and in Brazil. Brunelle noted that, in design and decorative style the Dieppe maps represented a blending of the latest knowledge circulating in Europe with older visions of world geography deriving from Ptolemy and mediaeval cartographers and explorers such as Marco Polo. Renaissance mapmakers such as those based in Dieppe relied heavily on each other’s work, as well as on maps from previous generations, and thus their maps represented a mixture of old and new information often coexisting uneasily in the same map.

Robert J. King has also argued that Jave la Grande on the Dieppe maps is a theoretical construction, reflecting 16th-century views of cosmography. In an article written in 2009, he pointed out that the geographers and map makers of the Renaissance struggled to bridge the gap from the world-view inherited from Graeco-Roman antiquity, as set out in Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography, and a map of the world that would take account of the new geographical information obtained during the Age of Discoveries. The Dieppe world maps reflected the state of geographical knowledge of their time, both actual and theoretical. Accordingly, Java Major, or Jave la Grande, was shown as a promontory of the undiscovered antarctic continent of Terra Australis. This reflected a misunderstanding of where Marco Polo had located Java Minor and confusion regarding the relative positions of parts of East and Southeast Asia and America. In an argument similar to Professor Gayle K. Brunelle's, King suggests that Jave la Grande on the Dieppe maps represents one of Marco Polo’s pair of Javas (Major or Minor), misplaced far to the south of its actual location and attached to a greatly enlarged Terra Australis. He believes it does not represent Australia discovered by unknown Portuguese voyagers.