‘Whodunit’ of N.Z. past

Press, 2 June 1984, Page 20

‘Whodunit’ of N.Z. past

Chance Discovery of Australia and New Zealand by Portuguese and Spanish Navigators between 1521 and 1528. By Roger Herve. Translated by John Dunmore. Dunmore Press, 1983. 70 pp. $13.95.

(Reviewed by

Vincent Orange)

Roger Herve, map keeper at the National Library in Paris, published a detailed analysis in 1982 of early European voyages in the south-west Pacific. This analysis, re-worked in several papers that have attracted scholarly attention during the last 30 years, is based on a famous collection of maps made in Dieppe and Le Havre in the sixteenth century. John Dunmore, professor of French at Massey University and himself an acknowledged expert on French 2es in the Pacific, has now ated Herve’s latest paper into English, though without the footnotes, appendices and bibliography which supported the original. Their absence may irritate or hinder the serious student more than Dunmore supposes, while the reader with a more general interest in early voyages may regret the absence of an introduction to set the subject in context. It is certainly possible that Iberian seamen visited this part of the world in the 15205, as Herve argues, but why did they not return?

Eastern Australia and New Zealand, though very difficult to reach by sailing ship from an easterly quarter, could well have been reached from Iberian bases in Indonesia or the Philippines, had such "chance discovery” as Herve suggests reported an abundance of spices, gold or rich cities ripe for plunder. The Solomons were reported in such terms and although the Spanish failed for many years to repeat their “chance discovery,” certain news about those islands was recorded — more certain than the vague fragments that can be pieced together about a European discovery of eastern Australia and New Zealand in the sixteenth century. In themselves, such questions of priority in discovery, although “fascinating as an intricate piece of detection,” in the words of Oskar Spate, an outstanding historian of European activity in the Pacific, remain “a rather specialised and academic sort of whodunnit.” If you like that sort of thing, you will like this booklet, in which an expert comparison of numerous maps is linked to such old favourites as the Spanish Helmet, the Mahogany Ship and the Geelong Keys, together with a new contender for the pantheon, the Dargaville Caravel — a wreck reported off the Northland coast in 1982.