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Cargando... The Savage Shore: Extraordinary Stories of Survival and Tragedy from the Early Voyages of Discoverypor Graham Seal
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For centuries before the arrival in Australia of Captain Cook and the so-called First Fleet in 1788, intrepid seafaring explorers had been searching, with varied results, for the fabled "Great Southland." In this enthralling history of early discovery, Graham Seal offers breathtaking tales of shipwrecks, perilous landings, and Aboriginal encounters with the more than three hundred Europeans who washed up on these distant shores long before the land was claimed by Cook for England. The author relates dramatic, previously untold legends of survival gleaned from the centuries of Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Indonesian voyages to Australia, and debunks commonly held misconceptions about the earliest European settlements: ships of the Dutch East Indies Company were already active in the region by the early seventeenth century, and the Dutch, rather than the English, were probably the first European settlers on the continent. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)994.02History and Geography Oceania and elsewhere AustraliaClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Seal tells these tales in a gripping fashion and there is much here to interest the casual reader. There are no illustrations, however, and only one meager outline map of Australia, when several detailed maps would have been helpful. For a scholarly reader, however, the book has some significant problems. Seal’s zeal to counter the idea that Australian history begins in 1788 is laudable. (Indeed, The Savage Shore serves as a corrective to the idea that, as Paul Carter posited in The Road to Botany Bay, that Australia did not conceptually exist in the European mind until Cook and Flinders gave it names.) But the notion that Australians (or well-informed readers outside Australia) actually think Cook was the first European to reach Australia in 1788 is a straw man at best. (It is akin to believing that most intelligent Americans know nothing of the Viking voyages and think Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas in 1492.) Worse, though, for a scholarly reader, is that there is no new information here. Seal has simply synthesized previously published material. His too sparse endnotes refer mostly to widely-published secondary sources like books, periodicals, and news websites. There are very few primary sources cited and those are only a smattering of previously printed material. Seal, a folklorist and not a historian, did no archival research in original documents. Indeed, Seal twice derisively refers to museums as “history zoos” (249, 261). What must he think of archives? For what are archives if not “history zoos” made for paper? The dearth of primary sources is a major drawback for a serious researcher in the history of exploration.
Though Seal has no overarching thesis, he does make a few points in his final chapter. He recognizes some patterns in the pre-Cook explorations and shipwrecks that historians of discovery will recognize from other regions. He also highlights the fact that more than three hundred Europeans were castaways on Australia’s shores before 1788, people who interacted with (and probably reproduced with) the continent’s first peoples. These relationships between Europeans and Aborigines were complex. Seal also shrewdly observes: “Just as it is inaccurate and unhelpful to think of indigenous Australians as a single group, so it is to think that all colonisers were heartless thugs intent on destroying the many different cultures and lifestyles they encountered in Australia” (254). Seal wants to ensure that the stories of these encounters will serve Australia as a “richer mythology and history” (258). He succeeds on this score. ( )