Outward Bound: Europeans
The sequence of events that brought European explorers into the waters around Australia is straightforward.
The Portuguese found their way around Africa, reached India, consolidated their control of the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and turned their attention further east. After seizing Malacca, their envoys reached China and the Moluccas. The Portuguese seaborne empire reigned supreme in their eastern hemisphere for a while. But did they reach Australia's east coast?
After Columbus set things in motion, the Spanish sailed west across the Atlantic. They investigated the West Indies and moved on to conquer Mexico, Central America and Peru, establishing Spanish dominance of the western hemisphere as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
A question mark over which hemisphere included the Spice Islands saw Magellan sail around South America and across the Pacific on what became the first circumnavigation.
Subsequent expeditions established a Spanish presence in the Spice Islands and the Philippines. That, in turn, opened up the China trade to Spanish interests. Gold and silver mines in the New World gave Spain the only currency the Celestial Empire would accept.
Spanish galleons tracking across the Pacific were lucrative targets for English, French and Dutch raiders who were pirates, privateers or buccaneers, depending on the observer's point of view.
The routes the Manila galleons followed meant the raiders' attention tended to focus on the Central Pacific rather than areas to the north and south.
Dutch merchants followed the Portuguese route around Africa. They combined to form the V.O.C. (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), wrested control of the spice trade from the Portuguese, and reduced the Portuguese hemisphere to a handful of isolated enclaves in less desirable or relatively insignificant locations.
English and French interests followed the Dutch but focussed on India rather than Indonesia until their attention turned to the South Pacific in the second half of the eighteenth century.
