Discovered in 1511 by the Portuguese Francisco Serrano, these shores
were successively visited by Don Jorge de Meneses in 1526, by Juan
de Grijalva in 1527, by the Spanish general Alvaro de Saavedra
in 1528, by Inigo Ortiz in 1545, by the Dutchman Schouten in 1616,
by Nicolas Sruick in 1753, by Tasman, Dampier, Fumel, Carteret,
Edwards, Bougainville, Cook, McClure, and Thomas Forrest,
by Rear Admiral d'Entrecasteaux in 1792, by Louis-Isidore Duperrey
in 1823, and by Captain Dumont d'Urville in 1827. "It's the heartland
of the blacks who occupy all Malaysia," Mr. de Rienzi has said;
and I hadn't the foggiest inkling that sailors' luck was about
to bring me face to face with these daunting Andaman aborigines.
So the Nautilus hove before the entrance to the world's
most dangerous strait, a passageway that even the boldest
navigators hesitated to clear: the strait that Luis Vaez de
Torres faced on returning from the South Seas in Melanesia,
the strait in which sloops of war under Captain Dumont d'Urville
ran aground in 1840 and nearly miscarried with all hands.
And even the Nautilus, rising superior to every danger in the sea,
was about to become intimate with its coral reefs.
The Torres Strait is about thirty-four leagues wide, but it's obstructed
by an incalculable number of islands, islets, breakers, and rocks
that make it nearly impossible to navigate.
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