At Vera Cruz, Torres thought that the departure of the capitana was plain desertion, ‘for they did not sail on the proper course, nor with good intention’.[66] He spent two weeks looking and waiting for the lost ship and then determined to carry on with the voyage, against the majority opinion—‘for my temper was different from that of Captain Pedro Fernandez de Quiros’. They sailed round a good deal of Espíritu Santo, enough to establish that it was a large island and not a main, and then southwest as far as 21°S. Seeing no land, Torres bore northwest and made what he correctly assumed to be the southeastern extremity of New Guinea. North of that land, as he knew, was a route which would take him to the Moluccas, but he could not weather the peninsula.[67] Unless he were to give up his purpose, he had no option but to sail west into the Strait which now bears his name; but it was a bold decision, since he must already have seen enough to realise that the surrounding seas were very dangerous. In fact, the 150km between Cape York, the northern tip of Queensland, and the nearest Papuan coast are crowded with reefs and shoals, many shifting, and in places masked by the muddy discharge of the Papuan rivers, especially off the great delta of the Fly.
The passage of the Strait was not repeated until Cook's 1770 voyage, and well might Torres write to the King ‘these are not voyages performed every day …’. He sailed along ‘Magna Margarita’ for some 600 leagues, taking possession at various points, until he met people with iron and ‘China bells’ and crockery, and Mohammedans who had guns and were converting Papuans to Islam; then he knew they were not so far from the Moluccas. After some adventures in those islands, he reached Manila on 22 May 1607. Torres sent an account of the voyage to Quiros before he wrote to the King—an index of his essential though not uncritical loyalty.[68]
In itself, the voyage after the entry to the Strait scarcely belongs to the history of the Pacific proper, and whether or not Torres saw Australia, while naturally interesting to Australians, is a trifle on a world view. His track is very difficult to determine, but the general consensus has been that he could not have sighted Cape York, The most recent examination however, by Brett Hilder, a seaman with nearly half a century of experience in the waters between New Guinea and Australia, seems definitive, and leaves scarcely a doubt that Torres did in fact see Cape York. Hilder's analysis on this point hinges largely on his recognition of the great bank or ‘Placel’ that Torres skirted; his discussion, both documentary and navigational, especially of Prado's maps, is meticulous, and in my view his case may be taken as proven.[69] Yet Torres naturally could not know that what he had seen was a mainland, and the continent had already been sighted by Willem Janszoon in the Duyfken from Bantam. He had coasted along the eastern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria from 14°S to Mulgrave Island half-way between Cape York and Papua, some five or six months before Torres, in September 1606, was in the Strait; the Dutch priority is assured. But what matters is not a possible sighting of an unrecognised bit of land but the extent to which knowledge of the general- 140 -lie of the land filtered through to Europe. The significance of the voyage was the determination of the insularity of New Guinea and the consequent northern delimiting of any possible Terra Australis, and the opening (though its use was long delayed) of an alternative western passage to and from the Pacific.
It is true that this significance was not widely recognised; with Spain's power in decline, it was more than ever to her interest to conceal such dangerous discoveries; but the concealment was not total. It is still sometimes stated, or implied, that the insularity of New Guinea remained unknown until Alexander Dalrymple, from a memorial by Arias found at the British capture of Manila in 1762, realised that there was a strait and named it after Torres.[70] But even though Torres's name may have ‘passed out of history’, some concept of his discovery can be traced in the cartography of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.[71] Quiros was reckless enough to print and circulate some of his memorials; these may not have contained much specific reference to Torres's discovery, but they treated of many things ‘well let alone’, and the Council of the Indies, justly alarmed, got a royal order that Quiros should call them in. Too late: one memorial printed at Pamplona in 1610 had been published in German, Latin, and Dutch, and incorporated in de Bry's widely-read collections of voyages, by 1613.
As for Torres's results, an insular New Guinea appears in the Duchess of Berry Atlas (1615–23), in maps by the remarkable Luso-Macassarese cosmographer Manuel Godinho de Eredia (who had contact with Prado), and in Antonio Sanches's world-map of 1623; but these may be discounted as both manuscript and Iberian. The Van Langren globe of c. 1625 shows not only an insular New Guinea but—south of the Insulae Salomonis!—the Baia de S. Philippo y S. Jago and Porte Vera Cruz on the north coast of a continental Terra Australis; four of Prado's names in the Orangerie Bay area (Papua) are used by Van Langren and Vaugondy. Gerritz’ Dutch chart of the South Seas (1622) is highly confused, but does draw on these or similar Iberian predecessors. Towards the end of the century du Val's ‘La Mer du Sud’ (1679) is a wonderful conflation of Gallego, Mendaña, Quiros, Torres, Janszoon, Schouten, and Tasman; but almost the only things shown on it with some approximation to accuracy are a firmly insular New Guinea and the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. In 1700 the Dutch version of d'Albancourt's Neptune françois shows a south coast of New Guinea with many Torres-Prado place-names, though its relations with Carpentaria are left vague. This map, or the tradition it represents, probably influenced Robert Vaugondy's ‘Carte General’ for Charles de Brosses' very well-known Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes of 1756: the map shows an island New Guinea and a wide strait separating it from the west coast of the Cape York peninsula; though once more Espíritu Santo (and ‘Jerusalem la Neuve’) are impacted into a hypothetical northeast coast of New Holland.[72] And de Brosses probably counted as much as, or more than, Dalrymple in Cook's thinking: certainly it is the former, not the latter, whom he cites when tackling the question of New Guinea's insularity.[73]
- 141 -The knowledge, then, was there, ‘would men observingly distil it out’: why was it so long neglected? One may suspect that the reason was simply that the course of Empire was not yet setting that way. Spain felt herself over-extended, and was in no condition to follow up such an opening; and for her rivals there were the known and assured trans-Pacific tracks—Magellan's great diagonal before the Trades, and the Manila Galleon run—and known places of refuge, notably Guam and the Ladrones, and Juan Fernandez. Using these, there were plenty of pickings to be had without venturing so far into the unknown—booty on the South American coasts, the trade of the Indies, or the treasure of the Galleon itself.