Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [67]
In such circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that a ship would come to grief somewhere on the Australian coast sooner rather than later. In the event, the English East India Company—which in 1621 ordered its ships to follow the new Dutch route without really understanding its dangers or having access to even the fragmentary charts that the VOC possessed—was the first to lose a vessel. The ship in question was the East Indiaman Tryall, which sailed from Plymouth under the command of one John Brookes and struck an undiscovered shoal somewhere off the North West Cape shortly before midnight on 25 May 1623.
It might almost have been a dress rehearsal for the loss of the Batavia. As the Tryall filled with water, Brookes took the sounding lead and found less than 20 feet of water under the stern. Realizing that his ship could not be saved, he spent the next two hours loading as many of his employer’s “spangles” as he could into a skiff. At four in the morning, “like a Judas running,” in the words of his own first mate, Thomas Bright, the captain of the Tryall “lowered himself privately into the boat with only nine men and his boy, and stood for the Straits of Sunda that instant without care.” He was only just in time to save himself. Half an hour later, the ship broke up under the pounding of the surf, and although Bright managed to launch the longboat and save another 36 members of the crew, almost a hundred sailors were left to drown.
Brookes and Bright separately succeeded in reaching Java, where the first mate wrote a disgusted letter accusing his captain of stealing Company property and abandoning his men. For his part, Brookes composed a comprehensively mendacious report, claiming to have followed the established Dutch route to the Indies when he had in fact been sailing several hundred miles to the east of the accepted sea lanes. His error not only led directly to the loss of his ship; it also provided an early warning of the unknown dangers of the South-Land coast that Jan Company would have done well to heed.
The extreme difficulty that both the VOC and the English East India Company had in determining the position of their ships had its root in the most intractable navigational problem of the day: the impossibility of finding longitude at sea. Latitude, the measure of a ship’s distance from the equator, can easily be determined by measuring the angle that the sun makes with the horizon at its zenith. Calculating longitude is much more difficult. The prime meridian is a purely artificial creation in any case—in the 1620s the Dutch measured longitude west and east from the tallest peak on Tenerife—but, wherever it is said to lie, the sun passes directly overhead once each 24 hours on its way to lighting the whole 360 degrees of the globe in the course of a single day. In one hour, therefore, it traverses 15 degrees of longitude, and it follows that a ship’s position can be determined by comparing the time in a known location (such as a home port) with the local time at sea. This feat became possible only with the invention of dependable chronometers in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1629, Ariaen Jacobsz and his men tracked the passage of time with hourglasses, which were not remotely accurate enough for navigation.
Unable to determine their longitude precisely, Dutch sailors resorted to dead reckoning. They calculated their position from the color of the water, the appearance of seaweed, and birds circling overhead. Far out to sea, the only way of plotting progress on a chart was to estimate the distance run since the last landfall. The Dutch did this with a ship’s log—which in the seventeenth century meant tossing what was literally a chip of wood into the sea from the bows and timing it as it bobbed between two notches on the gunwale. From this they calculated their speed,