Cook was pipped by 250 years

Mendonça's map comes into its own after he sails west into Bass Strait. The narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay is clearly marked, as well as the inner shoreline on either side. He clearly did not venture further north to the site of present-day Melbourne, though he did note on his chart, in dotted lines, a river emptying into the Bay in that area. What stopped him venturing any further might be explained by the following story.

In 1847, the Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, who was an amateur geologist, visited Geelong unannounced. He was well known for visiting various parts of the colony and was always interested in local features and developments. Geelong was then a noted producer of lime, and was still a key manufacturer of cement and lime well over a hundred years later. There was a small peninsula jutting into Corio Bay within the city limits called Limeburners' Point, where shafts and pits were dug, from which were extracted shells from ancient Aboriginal middens. La Trobe visited the Point because he was interested in examining the uncovered strata of shells and other marine deposits. To his surprise, the lime burners showed him a bunch of five old keys that they had just discovered in that pit. They were found above what would have been the high water mark. The keys were corroded but their features were still readily distinguishable. Some of the keys were sent to England for investigation and proved to be of Iberian manufacture from the early 1500s, which chronologically matched with where the shoreline would have been at the depth at which the lime burners discovered them.

It is possible that the keys were dropped by the visiting Portuguese when they were walking along the shore and were perhaps attacked by the local Aboriginal inhabitants.

The greatest part of Mendonça's story, catastrophic in nature, follows his departure from Port Phillip Bay. His map continues west, just beyond present-day Warrnambool, where it seems his ships encountered a severe Bass Strait storm. We know that one ship returned to Goa, with Mendonça and his charts and journals on board. But the other two disappeared. One of those is clearly what has been known, since it was discovered in the 1830s in extensive sand hills in the area, as The Mahogany Ship.

Long before Melbourne was established in 1834, sheep farmers from northern Tasmania were running sheep on the south coast of Victoria. There was a settlement at Port Fairy, from which wool was being shipped out and which Bass Strait whalers were also using as a base. One of their long boats was dumped by waves on the long beach that stretches west of Warrnambool towards Port Fairy in 1836. Heading back towards their base, they came across an ancient wreck, the hull and ribs of which had been washed high up into the sand dunes, and the design of which resembled a caravel that was common to the Spanish and Portuguese in the early 1500s. The timbers, possibly Portuguese oak, were so hard that visitors to the site, including naval men, could not carve off samples for testing.

The Mahogany Ship became a popular picnic site for settlers until it was covered by sand in the 1880s. It has not been sited since, despite numerous and extensive surveys. A number of settlers accurately sketched and recorded the distinctive features of the wreck, and those sketches still exist.

Is The Mahogany Ship one of Mendonça's other two vessels? Most likely it is. There are no records of Spanish voyages into that southern region in the early 1500s.

McIntyre, almost singlehandedly, uncovered fragments of information here and there in Portuguese and other archives, which he pieced together to present us with the picture we have today of Mendonça's secret mission. In acknowledgement of his remarkable endeavours, the Portuguese government in 1983 made McIntyre a Commander of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator. As an Australian citizen, to receive this foreign award, he needed to gain the approval of our Governor-General, who at the time was Sir Ninian Stephen, a former judge or renown. Through this process, Stephen and McIntyre became firm friends and shared an ongoing interest in early Portuguese discoveries. The Portuguese government also erected a memorial at Warrnambool to commemorate Mendonça's achievements.

In closing, it should be noted that following a television program in the 1990s on the Portuguese blockhouse at Bittangabee Bay, the lintel stone mentioned above – to McIntyre's great dismay – went missing. This writer first became interested in Portuguese settlements in Asia after going to Japan fifty years ago to study at the University of Tokyo. Hearing about McIntyre's researches he made contact from Japan and the pair remained friends until McIntyre's passing in 2004.