In the meantime the Portuguese had at last won the sea route to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope, through the agency of Vasco da Gama (1464–1524), a native of Sines. He started from Lisbon in July, 1497. He was accompanied by a pilot who had been with Diaz, and he had a map on which the Portuguese discoveries on the African coast were shown so far as they extended. On November 22 he sailed round the Cape of Good Hope; by Christmas he reached a point beyond the furthest limit of Diaz, and named it Natal. Continuing northerly along the coast he met with a number of Arab settlements and a hostile reception from some of them; but from one he obtained a pilot across the Indian Ocean, and he reached Calicut on May 20, 1498, after a voyage of ten months and ten days. This is not the place to discuss the commercial and political difficulties which supervened upon the endeavours of the Portuguese to draw to themselves a share of the rich trade of the Indies; but Gama made a second successful voyage with this object in 1502–03, and subsequently became viceroy in India in the year of his death.
In 1511 the important town of Malacca was taken by the Portuguese, and became the starting-point for many journeys in all directions—first to Sumatra, Java,69 and the Philippines; in 1512 to the Moluccas, and in 1516 to Canton, and by 1520 a Portuguese embassy was established at Peking. After that exploration proceeded apace in the Malay islands and on the coast of China; and Borneo, New Guinea, and Celebes rapidly became important trade centres, though Japan was not reached till the beginning of the following century, when in 1542 a Portuguese sailor, Antonio de Mota, was driven to its shores. Some years later a mission was sent there by St. Francis Xavier, which brought back the first trustworthy accounts of the new country.
The Portuguese and Spanish ascendancy in the Malay Archipelago lasted until 1595; in the following year a Dutch fleet, under Cornelis Houtman, came to blows with the Portuguese off the coast of Java; in 1602 the Dutch East India Company was incorporated, and during the following decade Dutch influence was strongly established in the Archipelago. With this epoch in far eastern history is connected the discovery of Australia. At what early period the native peoples of the east—Malays, and even Chinese—had acquired knowledge of Australia, and what was the extent of that knowledge, it is impossible to determine; but Marco Polo had happened upon rumours of a southern continent. In the following chapter we shall discuss the early European conception of that continent, which gave rise to a wider problem in which the discovery of Australia is merely incidental.
A landing on Australian soil has been claimed for the French navigator Paulmyer, Sieur de Gonneville, in 1503, and Guillaume le Testu of Provence is asserted to have sighted the coast in 1531. There were certainly, about 1527–39, French pirates in the Malay Archipelago. There are similar early Portuguese claims to the first70 view of the island-continent. When Torres had passed through the strait which bears his name, south of New Guinea, in 1606, and when, in the same year, the crew of a Dutch vessel, the Duyfken, effected a landing in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the first definite steps were taken towards the exploration of Australia. By 1665 the Dutch had worked out and charted a general sketch of most of the western seaboard; in 1696 William de Vlamingh re-charted a large part of it with fair accuracy. In the meantime, in 1642, Abel Janszoon Tasman had sailed from Batavia to Mauritius, thence south-eastward, till he struck the southern and eastern coasts of Tasmania, whence he passed on to obtain the first sight of New Zealand. The exploration of the Australian coasts from the direction of the Pacific belongs to following chapters.
During this period England began to interest herself in the East Indian trade, and the great efforts which were made to reach Eastern Asia by way of the arctic region will be discussed in the following chapter. In 1591 James Lancaster made an adventurous voyage to the Malay Peninsula; the formation of the East India Company followed. In 1600 Lancaster, in its employ, started again for the East, and laid the foundations of English commerce in the Spice Islands, visiting the Nicobars, Sumatra, and Java. He was accompanied on this voyage by Davis, famous for his work in the Arctic, who was killed on a further voyage in Eastern waters in 1605. The work of the East India Company led to the undertaking of many important voyages of discovery. In 1607 Captain Hawkins travelled to Agra and the court of the great Mogul, and a factory was started in Japan in 1613. The men in the employ of the East India Company were not, however, the first71 Englishmen to reach Japan: William Adams, a trader, had been forced to anchor off the island of Kiu-shiu in 1600. He had been very kindly received, but had not been allowed to return home. Permission, however, was at length granted to him, and, after helping to found an English settlement in Japan, he spent the rest of his life in the service of the East India Company. On one of the early expeditions sent out by the trading company in 1612, under Captain Best, the first foothold of the British in India was gained by the establishment of factories.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Englishmen were also playing a prominent part in the gradual lifting of the veil which lay over Central and Western Asia. Between 1558 and 1579 traders in London made great efforts to open up to commerce the countries round the Caspian Sea, of which vague reports had been brought back by travellers, and embassies were sent to Bokhara, Persia, and Russia. Anthony Jenkinson did much to advance the knowledge of Persia by his journey as an accredited representative of Queen Elizabeth in 1579; Christopher Burroughs traded across the Caspian Sea at the end of the century, and Sir Anthony and Robert Shirley stayed at the court of the Shah of Persia. During the seventeenth century Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor were visited by many travellers, who brought back many tales of the new and strange countries, but added little to the store of geographical knowledge.
Up to the end of the seventeenth century, the only people to bring any news of China and Tibet were missionaries, of whom several made adventurous journeys from India. Tibet had been visited by Friar Odoric in 1325; but the next European to enter it was72 Antonio Andrada, in 1624. Between 1685 and 1687 P. Tachard journeyed to Cochin-China and Tongking, and made a number of astronomical observations, from which he was able to prove the gross errors in the longitudes of Ptolemy, which were still in use. After permission to enter the empire of China was granted in 1553 to the Jesuits, much valuable geographical work was done by them throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century the Russians were gradually pushing towards China by way of Siberia. In 1581 a Cossack made himself master of the country round the lower course of the River Irtish; early in the next century the Sea of Okhotsk was reached by Russian hunters; in the middle of the century the River Amur was navigated to the sea; and by its end Kamchatka had been explored, and a treaty had been concluded with the rulers of China. In 1768 and the following years an organized exploration of the whole of the Russian Empire was undertaken. Both the coasts and the inland provinces of Siberia were surveyed from Novaya Zemlya as far as the Sea of Okhotsk.
By the end of the seventeenth century the general outlines of the coast of Asia were known, though much of the interior was still unexplored. Such knowledge of central Asia as was acquired during that and the preceding century was mainly due to the travels of European missionaries following Andrada—Fra Desideri and Fra Freyre (1715), and Orazio della Penna (who was in Lhasa from 1735 to 1747), were among those who entered Tibet, while others actually carried out surveys in China in 1708–18 under the direction of the Emperor Kang-hi. The Dutchman Samuel van der Putte passed thirty-seven years of his life in Asia, and travelled73 widely, but at his death (1745) left no narrative. At the close of the century English missions began to make their way into Tibet from India. George Boyle led one in 1774, and Captain Turner another in 1783. English and French traders were opening up Persia in the eighteenth century, and in Arabia the principal journey was that of Carsten Niebuhr (1762–67), sole survivor of a Danish scientific mission.