Magazine Section

The great burst of silence (as Captain Brett Milder puts it) that followed the successful passage of de Torres through the Strait that now bears his name, is being made up for these days by an equal burst of vociferousness as politicians in Papua New Guinea and Australia argue about a border, de Torres was the first European to thread his way successfully through the maze of reefs, islands and shoals that divide the tip of Australia from the south coast of the big island of New Guinea. He did it in 1606 in unusual circumstances, as Captain Milder relates in this article, but his discoveries were virtually ignored and the sailors and navigators who came after him got no benefit from his experience. Torres Strait became a graveyard of ships and out of that grew, in compara tively modern times, one of the great pilot services of the world. Somewhere between 30 and 40 master mariners in the Torres Strait Pilot Service still provide pilotage from the western approaches to eastern Australian ports. But current interest in Torres Strait and its islands grows out of Australian frus tration of the 1870 s when, thwarted in its desire that Britain annex all of Eastern New Guinea, the border between the northern tip of Australia and the south coast of New Guinea was placed as close to the New Guinea coast as possible. The islands which are the remnants of the ice-age landbridge between the two countries are included in the State of Queensland.

With the imminence of independence, Papua New Guinea now wants the border moved south, not because it wants the islands or the people who live on them, but for fishing rights and potential off shore oil deposits.

Things were very much different in 1606 in the Strait but still fraught with many difficulties for the first European men to navigate it.