Who discovered Australia?

The world is still arguing about who discovered Australia. Some say it's James Cook, a navigator from England. Others are sure that the discoverers of the continent were the Danes, who were looking for a way to their colony in Java.

In general, the first people here appeared long before the Europeans. More than forty thousand years ago this continent was chosen by natives from the southern regions of Asia. Mysterious terra incognita Australius (unknown southern land) - the ancient geographers knew about it. Already in the fifteenth century, on maps, they denoted a mysterious continent. True, the outlines on them of this vast territory of land do not resemble real Australia.

In the dispute about who discovered Australia, the Portuguese are also entering, claiming that Portuguese sailors received information about the new continent as far back as the sixteenth century from the aborigines of the Malay Islands, who were fishing trepangs in the coastal waters of an unknown continent. But the first leg of the European stepped on the Australian land only in the seventeenth century.

The history of the discovery of Australia for a long time was associated with the name of Cook, but still the first inhabitants of Europe to have visited the green continent (sometimes called Australia), the Dutch consider. No wonder the western part of this amazing continent later became known as New Holland.

In 1605, Willem Jansson from Holland, who crossed the Torres Strait, sailed along the Cape York Peninsula. A year later, Torres from Spain opened the strait, which separates the island of New Guinea from the continent. In 1642, the Dane Abel Tasman visited the south-western part of Tasmania, considering it part of Australia. Both Jansson and Tasman met on the mainland with Aborigines.

And the Dutch, and the Spaniards, and the Danes did not begin to publicly announce the opening of a new continent. It is because of the secrecy of the pioneers that the question of who discovered Australia and is being challenged now by the British who came to this land 150 years after the first Europeans.

In 1770 to the east coast of Australia the ships of James Cook, who immediately proclaimed new lands by English possessions, moored. Soon they created a royal "penal colony" for the criminal elements, and a little later for the British political exiles.

In 1788, the British, who arrived with the "first fleet" on Australian soil, founded the city of Sydney, which later became the center of the British colony. With the "second fleet" came the first free settlers, who began to vigorously explore the expanses of the green continent.

The mainland, originally called New Holland, was called Australia by the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, with the fluent English hydrographer Flinders. By this time the aborigines were cruelly exterminated by the colonialists. Indigenous people were raped, hunted, Aborigines were poisoned, and bonuses were paid for the dead. A hundred years after the appearance on the mainland of the British, most of the local inhabitants were exterminated, and the survivors were driven to the central regions of the continent, lifeless and deserted.

More recently, new facts have become known. So, even before James Cook on this southern continent visited another Briton - William Dampier. And in 1432, the Chinese seafarer Zeng He visited Australia.

Yet none of the modern world powers can be considered a country that has opened the world to a green continent. The first, long before the Europeans, the ancient Egyptians visited here . They used to mummify eucalyptus oil - a tree that grew only in the northeast of Australia. And on the rocks of this continent you can find ancient images of scarabs - sacred beetles of Ancient Egypt.

So, the question of who discovered Australia - this is a very controversial issue, which still beats historians.