page_title: Beyond Capricorn
section_title: Synopsis
hierarchical_section_title: Beyond Capricorn / Synopsis
context_page_description: Beyond Capricorn: How Portuguese adventurers secretly discovered and mapped Australia and New Zealand 250 years before Captain Cook is a 2007 book by journalist Peter Trickett on the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia. Although its thesis is similar to that advanced by Kenneth McIntyre in 1977, Lawrence Fitzgerald in 1984 and others, the publisher and some news reports presented it as being a new theory on the discovery of Australia.
  Historical scholars, including Flinders University Associate Professor Bill Richardson, generally reject the premise on which the book is based, pointing out that only circumstantial evidence has been presented which supports the theory.
  The book has been translated into Portuguese. On 8 May 2008 the colloquium of specialists in Portuguese maritime history, "Os Portugueses na Austrália", was held at the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra in Portugal, to discuss Beyond Capricorn. The consensus of the experts was expressed by the chair of the colloquium, Francisco Domingues, who said: "the Portuguese went to Australia but Australia did not at all interest them", and "the Portuguese went to Australia; the English discovered it".
context_section_description: The title of the book refers to the sixteenth century Dieppe maps of France which in part show land in a continent extending south of the Tropic of Capricorn that is in the area of Australia. Trickett claims that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to discover Australia, between 1519–23, well before the first recognised landfall of Europeans in Australia in 1606 by Willem Janszoon. According to Trickett, a 1520 expedition searching for gold and led by Diogo Pacheco (a relative of Duarte Pacheco), may have been the first Europeans to sight Australia, in the present-day Kimberley region of Western Australia. Using an account from João de Barros's Décadas da Ásia, a 1786 history of the Portuguese empire in Asia, Trickett argues Pacheco was killed at Napier Broome Bay, in a battle with Aborigines. Trickett claims the Carronade Island cannons originate from this voyage.
  Most of the book, however, focuses on the claimed voyage of a fleet of four ships commanded by Cristóvão de Mendonça, along the eastern and southern coasts of Australia then to New Zealand shortly afterwards, and another Portuguese voyage along the west coast. Trickett uses one of the Dieppe maps in the highly decorated "Vallard" atlas of 1547 to demonstrate this. Trickett claims that Mendonça travelled down the east coast of Australia, sailing into Botany Bay and then around Wilsons Promontory to Kangaroo Island, before returning to Portuguese-controlled Malacca via the North Island of New Zealand. He also claims the Portuguese charted the Western Australian coast, as far south as the southwest tip of Australia. Trickett claims that the French Vallard maps were composed of several portolan charts that were incorrectly assembled from now lost Portuguese charts. Trickett adjusts parts of the Vallard maps by rotating them 90 degrees, giving what he claims is a remarkably accurate depiction of Australia's eastern, southern, and western coasts.
  Trickett goes through almost every written location on the Vallard maps, giving an English translation and explaining where he believes the place is located. He also mentions the Mahogany Ship, the ruins at Bittangabee Bay on the south coast of New South Wales, various Aboriginal legends and alleged linguistic similarities, and various artefacts found in Queensland and New Zealand which he claims pre-date known European exploration, as further evidence of a Portuguese discovery of Australia and New Zealand.
caption: The Terra Java section of the Vallard atlas, which is identified by Peter Trickett as the east coast of Australia. South is at the top.
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