Fake News- the busted thread or is it?

[NavyDiver]

Our very own with yarns of picnics abounding and similar evaporating.
Mahogany Ship legend promised to rewrite Australian history, but is it just 19th-century fake news?

Mahogany Ship legend promised to rewrite Australian history, but is it just 19th-century fake news? - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[Tote]

Read that story this morning, the first I heard about the Mahogany ship was in a kids Australian encyclopedia in the 1970s. It was presented as a factual entity in that book and I always wondered why a more thorough search was not made to rediscover it. Seems it may not exist after all.......

Regards,
Tote

[bob10]

The Mahogany ship and the spanish sword stuck in coral up in the barrier reef are good yarns. Both are probably feasible, but unlikely.

[JDNSW]

An interesting bit of trivia.

One of the reasons that there is plenty of room for speculation about Portuguese exploration is that by law, all exploration reports, maps etc were required to be kept at the Archives in Lisbon. And publishing or copying any of these (without permission) was a capital offence.

On the morning of the 1st November 1755, at about 0940 local time, Lisbon, including the Archives of the Indies, was totally destroyed by an earthquake estimated to have had a magnitude of 8.5-9. Only a tiny proportion of Portuguese exploration prior to that date had been copied or published.

[bob10]

Yes it's fascinating the history of Portuguese voyages of discovery. Columbus actually sailed with the Portuguese before his "discovery " of America. It is regarded now that the Portuguese discovered Florida before Columbus went on his voyage of exploration. And all Portuguese voyages to the spice islands went east, around the Cape of Good Hope, while all Spanish attempts to find China went west, because they thought the American mainland was China. Portugal had the maps, and shared them with no one. The earthquake and resultant Tsunami destroyed centuries of recorded exploration.

The Portuguese 1436 Map and New World Cartography, bu Gunnar Thompson