Lands of Red and Gold #53: Meeting in Twain
“In granting the [English East India] Company a monopoly on trade with the Indies, the Crown has forgone all the wealth that it could have earned, but gained none of the benefits that it could have found by requiring merchants to compete with each other.”
- David Franklin, Fortune and Famine
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Wealth, uncounted and limitless. A land to rival the fortunes which the Spanish conquistadors had found in the Americas.
Or so an endless stream of rumours claimed. Filtered through sailors, barkeepers, drunkards, whores and optimists, the tales grew stranger with each retelling. Everyone in Europe know someone who had heard from someone about what could be found in this strange land, this place of gold and spices.
In England, the ever-rising crescendo of tales, combined with worsening relations with the Dutch, led the English East India Company, in time, to risk their peaceful accord to investigate the South Land.
The man they chose was William Baffin, one of the most accomplished captains in the Company’s service [1]. His instructions were thorough in their details, but simple in essence: find out that truth of the Great Spice Island, map what you can, establish whatever positive relations you can with the natives, and don’t interfere with the Dutch unless you can get away with it.
Baffin was, in truth, an excellent choice by the Company’s directors. An astute navigator by European standards of the time, his observations of coasts, tides and magnetism would be found to be astonishingly accurate when later explorers retraced his voyages. His techniques of instrumentation and charts were alien to the Islanders who were the premier navigators of his target land, and in some ways inferior to the accumulated traditions and lore possessed by those Nangu, but still more than sufficient to let him act as a pioneer for what would be generations of Company sailors to follow.
In July 1635, Baffin took command of the Intrepid, the lead ship in a fleet which also included Godspeed, Lady Harrington and Delight. Sailing from London, they made the long voyage to the South Land with several stopovers. These included Dutch-ruled northern Brazil where Baffin let the word be that he was sailing to India, as so many Company ships did, and afterward a stop in uninhabited Mauritius, which according to rumours had been the last resupply point used by François Thijssen before he became the first European to visit the eastern parts of the South Land. Baffin hoped to follow in his footsteps, in more ways than one.
As the Dutch had discovered before him, Baffin learned that sailing east was easier by dropping down into the latitude of the Roaring Forties, where the winds made for a fast if risky passage to the Orient. Lacking precise knowledge of the longitude of the South Land, he did not turn further north until he was already past the realms of the Atjuntja. Even then, that was fortunate for him, since by this time the Dutch had established a firm presence in the Middle Country and would be difficult to dislodge.
Baffin’s ships discovered [2] the same cliff-lined, dry, treeless coast that one of his Dutch predecessors had called the Nightmare Coast. One of the most hostile shores in the world, battered by endless waves and with winds that pushed any sailing ships straight into the cliffs, this unwelcoming landscape was one which Baffin’s normally scrupulously detailed charts would show only in sketchy outlines.
Persistence had always been one of Baffin’s virtues, and he had the advantage of knowing that somewhere to the east, wealth awaited. In time, breaks began to appear in the cliffs, and the shores were covered in trees and other greenery; the more fertile lands of the east. Baffin’s ships charted the coast which another history would call the Eyre Peninsula, and which the local Mutjing inhabitants called the Seven Sisters.
Baffin’s ships passed three coastal city-states, Luyandi [Port Kenny, South Australia], Nilkerloo [Elliston] and Yorta [Coffin Bay], but Baffin chose not to make contact until they arrived at what was clearly a major port. Pankala [Port Lincoln], its inhabitants called it, and they proudly proclaimed it the greatest of the Mutjing city-states [3].
In Pankala, Baffin found that several of the natives were passably fluent in Dutch. He found this welcome for its easing of communication, but distressing because it meant that the Dutch influence was strong even here. With his explicit orders not to break the peace with the Dutch, Baffin and his crew asked only elliptically about how the Dutch were viewed, and were left with an equally vague impression that the Dutch were occasional but valued traders “second to the Island”.
The first English contact with the Mutjing did not match the vision of stupendous wealth which the rumours had found. The Mutjing knew of gold, and had a few items of gold jewellery, but not in the abundant fortune which had been eagerly anticipated. For adornment, the natives made more common use of some unfamiliar opaque gemstone whose colours ranged from white to green.
In drugs and spices, Baffin found the new land more promising. It seemed that every man of substance had his food flavoured by a strange kind of intense peppery spice, and the appeal of such a crop was obvious. The Mutjing used other flavourings too, if not always with clear trading potential: river mint, some aromatic eucalyptus leaves, and a grass which reminded the Englishmen of lemon [4]. They also had a little of a drug which they called kunduri, but which Baffin christened “greater tobacco”.
To Baffin, though, the most valuable feature of all about Pankala was that it brought him into direct contact with the Islanders. He had arrived at the most-frequently visited port in all of the South Land; not a week went past without several Nangu ships arriving to trade for the red yams and wattleseeds needed to sustain life on an Island too crowded to grow its own food.
The Islanders were eager indeed to speak to the Englishmen. Baffin’s biggest problem was sorting through the endless questions, requests to view their goods, trade proposals, invitations to the Island, and efforts to persuade them to follow the Seven-fold Path. Plenty of them spoke Dutch, too; another reminder that the sons of Albion were latecomers to the South Land.
Baffin learned quickly of the rival bloodlines at the heart of Nangu commerce, and he recognised how this could be turned to the Company’s advantage in time. Any firm pacts would be premature, though, when he could come into contact with a Dutch ship or Dutch allies on any day, and with the nearest help at the Company outpost in the Indies. So he responded with generic overtures of friendship, but little more. After spending enough days in Pankala to suit his own assessment of the Mutjing, he did accept an invitation to follow a Nangu ship directly to the Island.
Once on the Island itself, Baffin realised that the signs of Nangu commerce he had seen in Pankala were merely faint shadows beside the buzzing activity of their homeland. The Islanders had plenty of ships in the port whose name they translated, apparently literally, as Crescent Bay. Thankfully, no Dutch ships were among those in the port, but several Islander ships arrived and departed each day. Finding out their destinations proved to be harder, for the Nangu viewed that sort of information as part of their trade secrets, and refused to describe it without receiving information or English goods in recompense.
Baffin was nothing if not persistent, though, and in time he learned that there was one port where almost every Islander urged him not to go. A native empire. The Yadji, the weavers of gold. Never mind the greater tobacco or sweet peppers they proffered, no matter how appealling those commodities might be. Gold was the ultimate lucre, the most convertible of trade goods, the source of glory, and what the Directors back in London wanted to find above all else.
Negotiations for a guide to the Yadji proved quite difficult; the Islanders were most reluctant to visit there. Baffin had to offer a substantial combination of English goods, particularly woollen textiles and a clock, before a captain of the Manyilti bloodline agreed to act as guide and translator in a visit to the Yadji realm.
With that deal struck, Baffin left the Island behind, to obvious consternation from the other Nangu bloodlines. The Manyilti captain proved an excellent navigator, guiding Baffin’s four ships to a Yadji port which they called Gurndjit [Portland, Victoria]. Here, Baffin’s men became the first Europeans to visit the Yadji Empire, and not coincidentally, the first to witness why their neighbours called them the weavers of gold. Baffin was so impressed that he decided to mark the name of this new land on his charts as Aururia, from the Latin for the land of gold.
Dealing with the Yadji proved to be frustrating in many respects, for they were disinclined to explain themselves, and the guide repeatedly warned about the dangers of asking questions which might be deemed impertinent. Yet the advantages of a pact with them were plain; here was the greatest native empire in Aururia, a source of gold, and one which so far had not entered into any alliances with the Dutch. Baffin arranged for some of his men to stay behind in Gurndjit until the next visit from English ships, together with dropping some apparently welcomed hints about a possible trade pact when the next Englishmen returned.
With that deal concluded, Baffin ordered his ships to sail on, with a stronger sense of urgency. He still had his existing orders to chart the coast and establish relations with the natives, but he doubted that anything he could find after Gurndjit would be as impressive as the gold he had found amongst the Yadji.
He was wrong.
Learning of his mistake took Baffin some time, as his exploration continued. He sailed over the strait which the natives called the Narrow Sea [Bass Strait], and established contact with another native people called the Tjunini. They had gold, too, but displayed it much less opulently [5], and cared little about trade or much of anything else except for any weapons which could aid them in their apparently endless war with some other group of natives called the Kurnawal. Baffin made similar promises of friendship, enjoyed the gum cider that was their main form of hospitality, and noted in his journal that this would be a market for selling whatever weapons the Company wished to provide, but did not make any immediate efforts to exploit the contact for profit.
In the Cider Isle, Baffin left his native guide behind as had been negotiated, and returned to the north side of the Narrow Sea. Here, he continued charting the coast of the Yadji Empire, although he was careful never to land on any of their towns. It had taken only brief contact with the Yadji for him to realise that their reputation for capriciousness was well-deserved.
The four ships of Baffin’s fleet made steady progress along the southern coast of Aururia, and they found in time that the coast turned to the north. Baffin naturally ordered that the ships turn north to follow the coast, recording in his journal that this corresponded with the eastern limit of the Yadji realm.
In fact, Baffin was mistaken, although the main error was not of his own making. The headland he had reached [Wingan Inlet, Victoria] was considerably east of any meaningful Yadji presence, but the Yadji claimed much further than they controlled.
After this, the fleet sailed north along Aururia’s eastern coast. None of them realised yet, but they were now exploring waters that no Europeans had ever reached before; François Thijssen, the only Dutch explorer to come nearly this far had sailed further east to Aotearoa instead of turning north.
Baffin found that the eastern coast of Aururia, at least at first, had little to commend it when compared to the wealth of the Yadji, or even the Tjunini of the Cider Isle. While not as bleak as the forbidding treeless cliffs earlier in his voyage, the coastline was generally rugged, with few areas of flat land or cultivation. Villages and towns clustered along some of the bays and harbours, but they looked to be small when compared to the previous places of wealth.
Baffin ordered his sailors to venture ashore twice during the first part of the eastern coast voyage, at places which the natives called Maliwa [Eden, NSW] and Wanderribee [Narooma, NSW]. He found little to interest him here, and for the next part of the voyage north he contented himself with charting the coast and did not risk landing to make contact with potentially hostile natives. He continued to believe that nothing else in Aururia could match what he had seen in Gurndjit.
In time, Baffin’s ships came far enough north to reach the coastline of what another history could call the Hunter Valley, and which in allohistory was inhabited by a people who called themselves the Patjimunra. These were a mostly inward-looking, caste-ridden society, whose political history was marked by alternating periods of near-complete unification and collapse into competing city-states.
In 1636, most of them had been reunited into a kingdom with its capital at Gogarra [Newcastle, NSW], but some of their outlying regions maintained their independence as city-states. Baffin would never see Gogarra itself; though the city was a port of sorts, the sandbars at the mouth of the Kuyal [Hunter River] appeared treacherous enough that his ship captains bypassed it altogether.
Not far north of Gogarra, though, the English fleet did find a place promising enough to land. A new harbour, its entrance marked by twin headlands, which would clearly give shelter from even the worst of storms [Port Stephens, NSW]. Baffin may have explored the harbour anyway, since it had such obvious promise, but at the time when his ships were sailing past, they saw a small fishing boat emerging from the harbour. This boat was a tiny, pitifully-made vessel by the standards of the Islanders, but its mere presence was an invitation to enter the harbour, in Baffin’s judgement.
What awaited the English inside the harbour was Torimi, a reasonably prosperous independent Patjimunra city-state. It proved to be about the same size as Gurndjit, although its inhabitants had less in the way of gold and the other adornments which the Yadji had possessed [6].
Fortunately, though, they included a few of their number who spoke the Nangu language, so communication was relatively straightforward. Even more fortunately, from Baffin’s perspective, they cultivated a range of spices much broader than those which he had found amongst the Mutjing or Yadji. These included more kinds of sweet peppers, a flavouring like lemon but sweeter, several other kinds of leaf spices with flavours like aniseed or cinnamon or with no alternatives that the Englishmen could name, and a couple of pungent fruits [7].
Baffin lost no time in procuring samples of those spices. But the new crop which he found most valuable of all was a beverage which the natives called jerree, but which called lemon tea. This beverage had a pleasing, refreshing, mildly calming effect, and Baffin deemed this to be as valuable a trade commodity as greater tobacco, although not all of his crew agreed.
While the Company’s ships were at Torimi, they received an even greater surprise. A fleet of great-ships and other Islander vessels sailed into the harbour. Baffin had known, of course, that the Nangu had contact here, as the natives’ knowledge of the language demonstrated, but he had not expected such a fleet.
Contact between the Englishmen and Islanders was wary, but in time the Islanders explained that they had returned from a voyage to the Indies, where they had traded with the Dutch. Knowledge of this opened many possibilities, but as he had done previously, Baffin knew better than to make any firm commitments. He settled for vague talk of friendship, and then led his ships north again. Again, he had the feeling that what he had seen in Torimi could not match Gurndjit, and that the rest of his voyage would not lead to anything much more promising.
Baffin kept that thought in his mind as his ships sailed further north.
Until one dawn, where the morning sky in the east had started to turn red and orange as the sun began to fight its way above the horizon. Baffin was on the Intrepid, as always, standing near the bow while he watched the land to the west. So it was that he was the first person on his ship to see a colossal, obviously man-made structure.
A step pyramid rose out of the western shoreline, built of some pale stone that looked almost golden in the dawn sun. The pyramid towering above his ship, but even that was not the most impressive feature. The steps of the pyramid glistened and shone, with some creation of glass or gemstone that reflected the light, brilliantly enough that as the sun rose, the reflection was so bright that Baffin could no longer look directly at the pyramid.
So William Baffin became the first European to glimpse the greatest religious monument of the kingdom of Daluming. And when he landed, he became the first to see the skulls which had been entombed behind that glistening glass, and it was he who christened the pyramid Glazkul.
* * *
[1] Historically, Baffin died in 1622 during a raid on a Portuguese fort in the Persian Gulf. Allohistorically, the raid was delayed, Baffin survived, and he has continued the service with the English East India Company which began in 1617.
[2] For a given value of ‘discovery’ which excludes the people who were actually born there and so don’t really count as discoverers.
[3] Pankala was not always the most important Mutjing city-state, but it has grown considerably in prominence over the last couple of centuries since it is the most convenient port for Nangu traders to visit.
[4] Baffin and his crewmen will naturally try to relate these spices to their closest Old World equivalents, although not all of them are close relatives. River mint (Mentha australis) is a true mint, and its flavour is similar to peppermint. The Mutjing also cultivate another spice called mintbush (Prostanthera rotundifolia), which has no close relative outside of Australia, but whose flavour has been described as somewhere between thyme and peppermint. The “sweet peppers” are pepperbushes (Tasmannia lanceolata and relatives) which have an intense peppery taste that is roughly ten times as strong as true peppers. The “lemon grass” is lemon-scented grass (Cymbopogon ambiguus), a relative of common lemongrass. The aromatic eucalyptus leaves include varieties from several species, the most common of which is blue-leaved mallee (Eucalyptus polybractea).
[5] The Cider Isle (Tasmania) produces if anything more gold than the Yadji realms, but the Tjunini and Kurnawal who live there do not value it quite as highly, and much of their gold is taken by the Nangu for export, mostly in exchange for kunduri.
[6] The Patjimunra are relatively wealthier than most other eastern coast peoples because they live far enough north that they can cultivate a range of spices unknown further south, and because the mountains west of the *Hunter Valley do not present much in the way of a barrier to inland travel. This has made them one of the major sources of spices for the kingdoms along the *Murray-Darling.
[7] These spices include some other kinds of sweet peppers, lemon myrtle, aniseed myrtle, cinnamon myrtle, curry myrtle, strawberry gum, and the fruit of the Illawarra plum (Podocarpus elatus).
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Thoughts?
P.S. The next post will be the long-delayed description of the fate of the Holy Roman Empire during the *Thirty Years War and the Aururian plagues. Before I can post that, though, I need some assistance from a mapmaker. Someone on another side has drawn a rough sketch that shows the changes, but this needs to be developed into a proper map. Any volunteers?
Incidentally, in OTL some Australian spices are used to flavour alcohol - there's a form of absinthe made in Australia which uses some of the local myrtles for flavouring (definitely aniseed myrtle, and I think some others as well).
