Thread: Bring Flinders back to his spiritual country?

Interesting.
I read somewhere the Chinese had charts of northern Australia and they passed to the Portuguese, who took them back to Portugal.

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Interesting.
I read somewhere the Chinese had charts of northern Australia and they passed to the Portuguese, who took them back to Portugal.

This has been suggested by several sources, but evidence is rather lacking.

The reason for this is that by law all charts and navigational data in Portugal was required to be submitted to the government office in Lisbon and treated as a state secret. The government archives, together with most of the city, were destroyed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

Possibly one of the main reasons that British explorers and hydrographers get most press is that through most of exploration history charts and navigational data were considered state secrets - until 1795, when the British decided that the advantages of their merchant marine having the best possible charts and data was greater than the disadvantage of these falling into enemy hands, and appointed Alexander Dalrymple as the first hydrographer, with the first charts being published in 1800.

This policy resulted in most of the world's navigators using British charts by the middle of the century, and ultimately in the adoption of the Greenwich meridian as the international datum for longitude, despite the claims of Paris, Berlin, Washington etc.

It is likely that other countries produced navigators of the calibre of Cook and his followers such as Flinders, but their government's secrecy policies mean that they are largely lost to history - the British charts, with British names on them were the ones everyone used (except in their own national waters) until well into the 20th century.