Synopsis
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 contains over 274 islands, islets, coral reefs and coral cays and its waters are full of potential hazards separated by narrow and often dangerous channels.
Trade inevitably follows human settlement and soon after the arrival of the British to settle the convict colony at Sydney Cove in 1788, shipmasters were looking for economical routes from New South Wales to Asian ports. 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 treacherous Torres Strait would save around six weeks on a voyage from the new British penal colony to Asia.
This passage was one of the greatest challenges for early European mariners relying on sail. Hundreds of 18th and 19th-century 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 333 lives and as you would expect, the exact details of many of these shipwrecks are incomplete.
This book will follow both the history of the Torres Strait Islanders and of the first European voyagers who tried to find their way through the Torres Strait and the numerous shipwrecks that occurred in the process. It was the early navigators such as Torres, Cook, Bligh, Flinders and King who contributed to the charting of this dangerous passage. However, it was not until the completion of detailed hydrographic surveys undertaken by the British Admiralty in the 1840s, the advent of steamships and the introduction of Torres Strait Pilots that it could ultimately be used as a major shipping route.
Readers should be advised that this history will include accounts of murder, mayhem and mutiny, of disastrous shipwrecks and desperate voyages of survival in open boats, and of hurricanes and headhunting.
