Bruce's mention of De Quiros jogged something in the back of my mind and,
even though its a little "off topic" I thought it might interest some list
members.
George Collingridge's 1895 book on the "discovery" of Australia contains
some interesting insights into De Quiros and the various expeditions of
which he was member.
De Quiros's first foray into the region was as captain and chief pilot for
the Spanish Mendana expedition of 1595. (Mendana had originally
"discovered" the Solomon Islands in the course of an expedition from Peru
in 1567)
The 1595 expedition set out with the express purposes of founding a colony
on the island of "San Christoval in the Solomons and then finding and
colonising the Australian continent (they took their wives with them with a
view to establishing an ongoing presence).
According to Collingridge they mistook Santa Cruz for the Solomons, faced
hostility from the indigenous people of the island, mutiny and suffered
serious illness. Mendana died and the colonisation attempt was abandoned
within a year. According to Collingridge De Quiros took the survivors back
to Manila, but the French historian Robert Lacouer-Gayet suggests that it
was in fact Mendana's wife who took charge of the expedition.
De Quiros however didn't give up on establishing a European presence on the
great south land.
In 1605 he set off again from Peru, with Luis Vaez de Torres as his
admiral. (It is rather intriguing that De Quiros, who according to various
sources was Portuguese, should be given the command of a Spanish
expedition. It may have been related to the papal sponsorship of the
expedition - the Pope even personally consecrated the rosaries for use on
the voyage and provided a "splinter of the true cross". Then again
Columbus was an Italian. Then again Spain had annexed Portugal in 1580 and
Phillip III of Spain was also known as Phillip II of Portugal)
De Quiros , of course, landed on Espiritu Santo and set up (albeit briefly)
a government of 19 "ministers'. All of the members of the expedition were
made Knights of the Order of the Holy Ghost. They remained there for 50
days, when (according to Torres) De Quiros's ship suddenly departed without
warning at one o'clock in the morning, leaving him to his own devices!.
Contrary to a commonly held view, according to the accounts of the day the
island was not named " Australia del Espiritu Santo", but "Austrialia del
Espiritu Santo". De Quiro himself wrote to King Phillip III of Spain that
"For the happy memory of Your Majesty and for the sake of the name of
Austria, I named it La AUSTRIALIA del Espiritu Santo, because on your
(birth) day I took possession of it. (The Hapsburg Phillips 2 3 & 4,
Kings of Spain, were of Austrian descent on their fathers side at least -
real history plays havoc with those heavy Spanish accents that you always
here on movies and BBC historical docos about Queen Elizabeth and the
Spanish Armada etc ).
Now this was not a time of great religious tolerance in Europe. Remember
the Spanish Inquisition ("Nobody forgets the Spanish Inquisition!")
Philip III's dad, Philip II banned Protestantism in Holland (which he had
inherited from his Dad, Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire), and
had many thousands of them killed or exiled. He also decided to get rid of
the (by then christianised) Moors in Spain. (Spain had already expelled
the Jews in the late 15th Century), He also provoked a conflict with the
Turks, whose fleet his brother, John of Austria, destroyed at the battle of
Lepanto. After the Armada got blown off course and destroyed he decided to
take on the Hugenot King of France, Henry 5.
Phillip III was a little less aggressive about other peoples heretical
practices than his dad, but still managed to expel most of the remaining
Moors from Spain.
Now of course, the Portuguese were the first European power to get
seriously into the slave trade business (kicking it off in the 1400's -
notwithstanding a belief in transubstantiation). The Spanish followed suit
in the 1500's, first of all through the forced labour of the indigenous
inhabitants of their colonies in central and south America, and then by
getting the Portuguese to ship them over from their colonies in Africa etc.
Brasil, a former Portuguese Colony, was the last country to officially
renounce slavery as a practice, a hundred years after the English
occupation of Australia by yet another Phillip in 1788.
Nothwithstanding De Quiros's religious intentions its hard not feel that a
Portuguese / Spanish occupation of Australia at the height of the Spanish
Inquisition would not have been a good thing for the original occupants of
Australia. The accounts of the Torres and Don Diego De Prado (Senior
officers on De Quiros' expedition) provide a few more hints to the same
effect.
Firstly it is clear that extensive physical conflict occured between the
inhabitants of the islands which they visted and De Quiros' expedition.
While this might not have been to De Quiros liking , there are numerous
accounts of fighting with the "indians" prior to his separation from
Torres.
Secondly we can also see that the expedition was more than happy to kidnap
people from their homes and ship them off to Europe. Torres in fact was
probably the first to establish a practice which is currently the subject
of much debate and legal action in this country. The 'Stolen Generations"
really began in 1605! In a letter to the King, written in Manila in 1607,
he speaks of his passage through the area now known as the Torres Straits
(after separating from De Quiros):
"We could not go farther on for the many shoals and great currents , so we
were obliged to sail S.W in that depth to 11degrees S. latitide. There is
all over it an archipeleago of islands, without number, by which we passed,
and at the end of the eleventh degree the bank became shoaler. Here were
very large islands, and there appeared more to the southward. They were
inhabited by black people, very corpulent, and naked; their arms were
lances arrows, and clubs of stone ill-fashioned. We caught in all this land
twenty persons of different nations, that with trhem we might be able to
give a better account to Your Majesty. They give much notice of other
people, although as yet they do not make themselves well understood."
(Torres then went on to assist a group of christians and the local ruler on
the island of "Bachian" in what is now Indonesia to make war on "one of the
Ternate islands inhabited by revolted Mahometans")
De Prado also seems to have been involved in similar kidnapping on Espiritu
Santo, sending the Spanish King a present of "an Indian of the country
which was discovered as a witness to certify it, who is taken charge of
Senor Ruy Lorenzo de Tavora, the ex-Viceroy of India, with directions not
to give him up to anyone unless by order of your worship or mine.". (He
clearly didn't get on well with De Quiros, calling him "de Quiros, the
liar" and elswhere suggesting that one should not "take account of such low
and lying men.")
Within a few years the Dutch had taken effective control of much of the
region (perhaps , in so doing thumbing their nose at Spain, a country
which had treated them as colony themselves for the previous centuries,
with consequent religious, economic and social persecution.)
Now my own view is that the indigenous people of this region would have
been a damned site better off without either the protestant or the catholic
versions of life inflicted on them ("How would you like to suffer our
hellish and barbaric European practices ? With transubstantiation or
without?)
But it does raise a host of other questions.
If the Spanish had occupied Australia would they have hung on to it? Or
would it have been the something or other state of the US after the
Spanish American War? Or would the Russians have moved south? Or the French
(transubstantiators too - maybe indigenous Australians could check out the
feelings of the people of New Caledonia or Tahiti about the viryues of a
Catholic occupation!
No. The answers are NOT in this type of schismatic spiritual argument. Lets
face it. Christian invaders , in a host of guises, have done almost
irreparable damage to the lives of people all over the world. So too have
those who follow other dogmatic creeds.
Give me secularism any day. A God gives a king, or a bureaucrat or a
president too easy an excuse to destroy other peoples lives in the name of
piety. Keep God in the realm of the personal and the state in the realm of
the public. Its the only way to constrain official sins!
Rod Hagen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hurstbridge, Victoria, Australia
WWW http://www.netspace.net.au/~rodhagen
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