The Rattlesnake, Oswald Brierly, 1849
This year I have been working on another book which is a Maritime History of the Torres Strait.
Below is the Introduction and I hope you and also a publisher will find this of interest.
The reef-strewn passage between the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea remains the most hazardous of all the major straits in the world. It is 270 kilometres long and only 150 kilometres wide, but its calm tropical waters contain over 274 islands, islets, coral reefs and coral cays and its waters are full of potential hazards separated by narrow and often dangerous channels.
The Torres Strait lies at the boundary between two ocean basins, the Coral Sea and the Arafura Sea, with sea levels to the east typically higher than those to the west, leading to strong and unpredictable currents. Depending on the time of the year, massive amounts of water, which are being transferred between the Pacific and Indian Oceans surge through the Torres Strait creating hazards for shipping. Regional currents flow from the Coral Sea into the Arafura Sea from April to December and then from the Arafura Sea into the Coral Sea from January to March. As an area of confluence between two ocean systems, the tidal patterns are complex. Tidal heights can change up to 3 metres, stream rates can exceed 7 knots and gradients can be very short. For example, it can be high tide at one end of the Prince of Wales Channel and 40 minutes later low tide at the other end of the channel only 20 kilometres away.
The Torres Strait Islanders know these waters well because voyaging and trade were part of their livelihood, but the early European explorers like Luis Vas de Torres and James Cook were forced to find their own route through the Strait without any maps.
Trade inevitably follows human settlement and soon after the arrival of the first Europeans to settle on Australian soil in 1788, shipmasters were looking for economical routes to and from the new colony. Torres Strait was a logical shortcut for ships sailing to or from Port Jackson and the Asian ports of India, Singapore or Batavia. The safest route was to sail around the northern coast of New Guinea, however, finding a passage through a gap in the Great Barrier Reef and then across the Torres Strait would save around six weeks on a voyage from the new British penal colony at Sydney Cove (New South Wales) to Asia. To enter the Torres Strait from the east they had to either navigate the tortuous Inner Route inside the Great Barrier Reef or follow the Outer Route through the reef-strewn Coral Sea and then make a dangerous crossing through a gap in the Great Barrier Reef and into the Torres Strait. To enter the Torres Strait from the west was made difficult by the easterly winds and currents that prevailed for most of the year. For those ships that could navigate these hazards and cross the Torres Strait, there was also a culture of headhunting in the islands which led to the deaths of some of the early European sailors.
Hundreds of 18th and 19th-century European shipwrecks offer testament to the dangers of navigating this region in sailing vessels and the Australian Register of Shipwrecks lists as many as 200 shipwrecks occurring in the Torres Strait and its vicinity between the years 1800 to 1900, with the loss of as many as 333 lives, and as you would expect the exact details of many of these shipwrecks are incomplete.
It was not until the completion of detailed hydrographic surveys of the Torres Strait undertaken by the British Admiralty, the advent of steamships and the introduction of Torres Strait Pilots, that a relatively safe passage could be made through the Strait. The Prince of Wales channel is now the main route for commercial vessels passing through the Strait but is limited to ships with no more than 12.2 metres of draught and it is required to have a Torres Strait pilot on board to ensure both a safe passage and the protection of the environment.
This book will follow the history of the Torres Strait Islanders, of the first sailing voyages by Europeans who tried to make this dangerous passage, how they discovered various navigable routes and the numerous shipwrecks that occurred in the process. It was the voyages of these early navigators such as Torres, Cook, Bligh, Flinders, King and the British naval hydrographers such as Wickham, Blackwood, Yule and Stanley who contributed to the charting of the Torres Strait and ultimately its use as a major shipping route.
Readers should be advised that this history will include stories of murder, of mayhem, of mutiny, of disastrous shipwrecks, of desperate voyages of survival in open boats, of headhunting and of hurricanes.