The Torres Strait, a reef strewn passage between the Australian mainland and the island of New Guinea, is one of the most hazardous of all the world’s major straits. It’s said that this passage is even more dangerous than the rounding of Cape Horn.
Although only 270 km long and 150 km wide, the strait's tropical waters contain over 274 islands and 580 coral reefs. The passage is full of strong and unpredictable currents, 3 m high tide heights, a culture of headhunting practiced by the inhabitants and many other potential hazards. As many as 200 shipwrecks have occurred in the Torres Strait and its vicinity between the years 1800 and 1900 with the loss of more than 333 lives.
Shipwrecked crews sought refuge on islands such as the Dutch settlement of Kupang on the west coast of Timor, a life-saving port where broken ships limped into for repair and where crews could bring themselves back to health. With its natural harbor and strategic position, Kupang was the nearest European settlement, coveted for its valuable sandalwood trees, the furthest end of the Dutch seaborne empire, violently fought over by the Dutch and the Portuguese. Kupang’s most famous visitor, William Bligh arrived in Kupang with his crew who had been cast adrift after the mutiny on the ship Bounty.
Since the 1600s, the Spanish, Dutch and English navigators have tried to find a route from the Pacific or Indian oceans through the Torres Strait. Early navigators attempted to find a route through the strait without any maps. Torres, Cook, Bligh, Flinders and King contributed to the charting of this treacherous passage. The passage of the first commercial ship through the Torres Strait took 72 days.
The strait first caught the attention of Europeans who settled in Australia in 1788. Shipmasters were looking for economical routes to and from the new colony. Finding a passage through a gap in the Great Barrier Reef and across the strait was a logical shortcut for ships sailing to and from India, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies port of Batavia (Jakarta). The passage would save around six weeks on a voyage from Australia’s penal colony at Sydney Cove to the British ports of India, the main source of supplies.
1606: The first chapter deals with the geography and the physical environment of the islands in the strait. With this necessary background information out-of-the-way, the second chapter launches into how the strait was discovered by Luis vas de Torres on October 9, 1606.
Torres became the first European to navigate the strait that now bears his name and by doing so proved that New Guinea was an island. It took his ship the San Pedrico 34 days to navigate the strait between the Arafura Sea and the Coral Sea in only four or five fathoms of water (and invented a new method of sailing) before they reached the deeper waters of the Arafura Sea.
1623: The extraordinary voyage of the Pera in 1623 captained by Jen Carstenz followed the same route along the south coast of New Guinea as the Duyfken in 1606. The crew was astonished to see the central mountains of that huge island covered in clouds and soaring to 5000 m above sea level. At one point in the voyage, the crew could see that the peaks were covered in snow. When Cartstenz returned to Europe, he was accused of suffering from tropic fever and laughed at. How could there be snow-capped mountains along the equator? Carstens observation was later proved correct by later explorers. The Dutch named the highest peak Carstenz Toppen in his honor.
1770: James Cook’s discovery of what became Botany Bay on Australia’s east coast. Burnet details how Cook’s ship the Endeavor ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, the crew’s desperate attempts to save her, the reactions and observations of these first English explorers, their 47 days ashore, their first contact with aborigines, the botanist Banks collecting of strange plant specimens and encountering a kangaroo for the first time on a hunting party. A few days after their departure, the Endeavor was nearly smashed to pieces on the Great Barrier Reef. Captain Cook navigated the hazardous shoals and reefs of the Torres Strait which he called the Endeavor Strait after his sturdy ship.
1784: The Torres Strait came to the attention of the world in 1784 when two crew and one passenger in a whaleboat landed on Darnley island looking for food and water. When the men didn’t return to the ship after three days, a search party was sent out and discovered that they had been murdered, their bodies mutilated and their heads severed and put on display.
1789: Captain William Bligh arrived in Kupang on the island of Timor with 18 of his crew who had been cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after the mutiny on his ship Bounty. With only a pittance of food and supplies, Bligh and his men had sailed their 23 foot open boat 6000 km across the Pacific Ocean and through the Torres Strait to reach Kupang, the nearest outpost of European civilization, in only six weeks in one of the greatest open boat voyages in maritime history. Burnet provides a condensed version of all the events leading up to and after the mutiny. An entire chapter is devoted to the dramatic story of how a ship sent from England to capture the mutineers sank, its crew also navigating like Bligh in an open boat to Kupang.
1791: While transversing the Torres Strait, eight men and one woman and two young children made a harrowing escape from Port Jackson in an open six-oared boat, enduring near starvation, hostile natives, treacherous gales and powerful currents in the chapter Escape from Port Jackson. The convicts landing in Kupang after an remarkable voyage of 69 days covering 5200 km.
1795: The chapter, Matthew Flinders Sales to Port Jackson, 1795, tells the story of Flinders charting the coastline of Van Diemen’s Island (Tasmania), the first European to have ever done so.
Flinders was among a new breed of professional navigators who turned the art of surveying into a science with the use of a chronometer. He was the first person to recognize that the Great Barrier Reef stretched for 2300 km in a single connected line from Harvey Bay to Queensland near the coast of New Guinea. It was also Flinders who named it t
the Great Barrier Reef.
Flinders accomplished his passage in his ship Investigator through the Torres Strait in only six days when the usual voyage around the north coast of New Guinea usually took six weeks, a consequential discovery.
Flinders had completed the first circumnavigation of Terra Australia and charted hundreds of miles of the coast when the Investigator sailed into Port Jackson on June 9, 1803. His voyages of 1802 to 1803 confirmed that the continent
was a single landmass and gathered the information needed to compile the first complete map of New Holland and New South Wales. It was, however, at the expense of the lives of 1/4 of his crew, as 19 of the men had died of either scurvy or dysentery during the voyage. The ordeal also adversely affected his own personal health.
Flinders had demonstrated in his 1814 chart that the new Holland of the Dutch and the New South Wales of the British were part of a single continent. Though Flinders unquestionably charted uncharted land and his circumnavigation of the continent of Australia was a significant contribution, he is now best remembered because his map of the island continent was the first to use the name Australia.
Many of us have read that Flinders was one of the Age of Discovery explorers who had gone where no man had gone before. But of course, Flinders was not the first to “discover“ Australia as the lands that he sailed past had been populated for millennia.
In fact, when Flinders got to the north of Australia, near present-day Darwin, the crew spotted several vessels in the distance that were definitely not European. He approached them with trepidation, suspecting they were Chinese pirates, but soon discovered that these were Makassarese sailors from Sulawesi harvesting sea cucumber (trepang).
The commander of the fleet of six ships, Poboso, even exchanged information and goods with Flinders, communicating through the Malay cook on Flinders' ship. Proboso told Flinders that he had visited the Australian coast often to trade with the natives. We now know that Makassarese seamen had been visiting Australia since at least 1720 and Aboriginal rock art suggests that contact stretched back to the 1600s.
1823: In spite of contrary winds, the Zenobia was the first ship to transverse the west to east passage through the Torres Strait in 1823 that proved that voyages of ships from Asian ports to Port Jackson could be successfully completed.
1837: A safe route through the Torres Strait became important for Britain who sought a trading route between Australia, China and India. In 1837, the Royal Navy hydrographic service began extensive surveying which continued for the next 13 years. But it wasn’t until the 1840s with the advent of steam ships that the Torres Strait would ultimately be used as a major shipping route.
1840: The French navigator Dumont D’Urville captained voyages (called campaigns) around the world, including in the Pacific by way of Australia and New Zealand. He was the first navigator to land on the Antarctic continent. The major success of one of his expeditions was the visit to Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands.
1849: One of the most fascinating stories in Burnet’s book is about the rescue of Barbara Thompson in 1849 who was to make a substantial contribution to the ethnological studies of the region. Thompson was the teenage bride of a former convict who took her aboard a small cutter named America. Off the south coast of Prince of Wales Island in the Torres Strait, the cutter was driven onto a reef during a storm. All were lost except Barbara Thompson who was rescued by a party of natives. One of the chiefs took possession of her, believing that white people were ghosts. She lived among the Kaurareg community in Muralag for four years.
While surveying near Cape York, the crew of the HMS Rattlesnake encountered her. Barbara Thompson became an invaluable source of knowledge about native life and culture - childbirth practices, the crafting of baskets, fish traps and grass skirts, the islander’s skills at canoe building and sailing, the Kaurareg kinship structure, what the islanders foraged and hunted, how they cooked and what they ate, their secret rituals, initiations, taboos, sorcerer curses and magic, death and mortuary rights and the tribes foundational myths - all contributing invaluable insights into the traditional way of life of this indigenous people.
1864: In 1864, Port Albany was established on the Torres Strait on a small sandy bay on Albany Island along the narrow channel that separated it from the Australian mainland. The purpose was to provide a coaling and water station, resupply port of call for steamers carrying mail, cargo and passengers from Britain, Calcutta and Singapore to the Australian colonies.
Port Albany also served as a port of refuge that was much closer than Timor in the event of shipwrecks. But in the face of constant hostile aborigine attacks, buildings ravaged by bad weather, government, equipment and supplies deteriorating, cattle running wild and settled increasingly by and an unsavory assortment of pearlers and black birders, the settlement was abandoned by 1876.
1870: Starting around 1870 and for the next 20 years, schooners and pearl luggers and their multinational crews and divers expanded across the Torres Strait to collect many hundreds of tons of mother of pearl shell that was in high demand for making cutlery handles, buttons, buckles, jewelry and inlay. The booming mother of pearl trade resulted in the Torres Strait to become a melting pot of races, for the most part Pacific Islanders, Japanese, Malay and Filipinos.
Australia: Australia plays a prominent role in multiple narratives in the book. Indeed, in many respects, the author recounts all the defining events of Australia’s early history. It is as much about the maritime history of that continent as it is about the Torres Strait. Burnet is himself proudly Australian, relishing with the bright eyed earnestness of a schoolboy the harrowing stories of the the country’s great heroes of yesteryear.
Burnet regularly touches upon the history of Australia through out the entire book, beginning with the sighting of the Cape York Peninsula by Dutch explorers in the brave little scout vessel Duyfken in March of 1606. At the time the low, dry, monotonous and featureless landmass was inhabited by what were believed to be hostile barbarians. It was given the name Nova Guinea, and held out very little economic promise for the Dutch.
Headhunting: A unique aspect of the life of the Torres Strait Islanders that Burnet was surprised to discover in his research was the practice of headhunting. In earlier times, the islanders were intensely xenophobic and widely feared. It’s fascinating to read of European encounters with Australian aborigines and the muscular, dark chocolate skinned Torres Strait natives, encounters which didn’t always end well. There were many instances of natives assembling in “a hostile array” upon the hills, shooting off arrows and sounding conch shells in alarm. The book abounds with legends and stories of raids, ambushes, massacres and captured heads.
Actually, headhunting was carried out to increase spiritual, ritual and totemic power in various ceremonial contexts. Ship castaways were put to death because they were viewed as metaphysically unstable and thus posed a threat. To the islanders, these exhausted, hungry, desperate and ragged individuals appeared to be white zombies. Their skulls were collected in the belief that their owners will be their servants and followers in the next world.
However, these were isolated incidences. Torres Strait islanders actually lived in simple villages with fine houses, cultivated gardens of yams and plantains, wove fabrics, produced carvings, intricate crafts and lethal weapons. Many craved iron hatchets which they traded for plantains, pearl shells, cowrie shell necklaces and joints of bamboo filled with water.
The islanders were master seafarers, the only navigators who knew the waters Torres Strait well. Voyaging and trade were part of their livelihood. They built dugout canoes, elaborate prows, and their magnificent twin-hulled sailing vessels stood out compared to the more utilitarian watercraft of the Australian aborigines.
Present Day: Today, around 4000 people live on the 17 islands of the strait, descendants of aborigine, Melanesian and Papuan migrations. The Torres Strait islanders, who are Christian, have married with South Sea Islanders and have adopted their customs, all of which differentiates them from both the neighboring Papuan and Australia’s aboriginal peoples.
Some of the original inhabitants of some islands still survive on the subsistence farming of cassava, taro, bananas, yam, and coconuts, and by hunting turtles, dugongs and varieties of fish. Torres Strait islanders have their own language, called Pacific Pidgin or Torres Island Broken, which is commonly spoken as every islander’s first or second language.
Commercial fishing is the most economically important activity. Thursday Island, the main administrative center, has the biggest population and today has become a flourishing port. As greater employment opportunities exist on the Australian mainland, many Torres Strait Islanders now live and work in Queensland. Administratively, the islands have been a part of Queensland since 1872, a constituent State of the Commonwealth of Australia, but are administered by the Torres Strait Regional Authority, a statutory authority of the Australian federal government.
Finally, be prepared in this highly readable book for a great number of references to, for example, how the unfurling of sails, the sinking of anchors and other mishaps at the wrong time can result in a ship running aground, dramatic descriptions of ships breaking up on reefs, an historic voyage’s location of latitude, ship’s pilot misjudgments, a whole chapter on hydrography, fateful weather conditions such riptides and wind, details on the islands where ship repairs took place, the health of the crew and officers, and so forth.
Dangerous Passage would be of great interest to sailors, nautical engineers, navigators, scientists, maritime and cartographic historians, and especially to those who specialize in the relatively little studied Southwest Pacific and Australasian regions. I enjoyed mostly the stories of raids, ambushes, massacres, treacheries, mutinies, the escapes from prison colonies as well as the ritualistic taking of heads by the Torres Strait islanders. I especially enjoyed the fascinating rescue stories like the one about Barbara Thompson who had been shipwrecked and captured by Torres Strait islanders in 1849. I got the impression that you had covered new ground in these stories and that coverage made for lively and eye-opening reading.