SYDNEY, March 20 (UPI) -- A historian argues that Portuguese navigators sailed along Australia's east coast in the early 16th century and charted it.
Peter Trickett's book, "Beyond Capricorn," lays out a theory based on his study of the Vallard Atlas, The Telegraph reports. The maps were drawn by French cartographers based on Portuguese charts.
If Trickett is correct, that would put the Portuguese in Australia 250 years before Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay in what is now Sydney.
Trickett's theory is based on one map in the atlas. Other scholars had noticed that part of the map looks very much like the coast of Queensland, but they were puzzled by a place where the shoreline takes a sudden turn. Trickett believes that the cartographers made a mistake in putting two Portuguese charts together. He tried rotating the bottom half of the map and discovered that gave him an excellent chart of the east coast and part of the south coast.
Trickett attributes the charts to Christopher de Mendonca, who left a Portuguese fort in what is now Malaysia to look for a supposed land of gold.
