MISADVENTURES IN NATURE'S PARADISE : australia's cocos (keeling) islands and christmas island... during the dutch era

Misadventures in Nature's Paradise explores the earliest history of Australia's Indian Ocean territories of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island. Seafarers from Africa, the Middle East and Asia developed trade routes across the northern Indian Ocean. The first Europeans venturing eastward relied on local pilots, some of whom had travelled southward, collecting natural products from uninhabited islands. These pilots told of terrible dangers, including strong ocean currents, and giant birds of prey. Their stories frightened European sailors wrestling with unfamiliar environments and cultures. The Dutch developed shorter trade routes between South Africa and the Indonesian Spice Islands, taking European vessels close to the Christmas and Cocos islands. They produced charts, making voyaging in the southern Indian Ocean safer, but this could not prevent the odd shipwreck disaster. The authors, maritime archaeologists Graeme Henderson, Robert de Hoop and Andy Viduka, tease out real-life ramifications of the Indian Ocean and European myths upon the destiny of the Cocos (Keeling) and Christmas islands and provide evidence indicating that several eighteenth-century Dutch ships foundered near these beautiful islands. Their wrecks still await discovery. "Einstein gave us a vision of a new universe in which time and space are warped and rippling in response to everything else in the universe. Vast bursts of energy in the form of ripples of pure and empty space are passing through us at light speed, carrying messages about a dying universe and about the places where space, time and matter all cease to exist. It took a century of struggle to understand Einstein's prophesy. Einstein doubted his predictions, and eventually, it took 1000 physicists to detect his greatest prophecy of all, gravitational waves. The definitive proof of Einstein's new universe began with donkey trains and sailing ships at Wallal in 1922. A century of struggle by an array of eccentric and determined scientists brought us to the era of gravitational wave astronomy where our detectors, like bionic ears, have given us a brand new sense, an ability to hear across the vast scale of the universe. This book tells the international story from an Australian perspective, from the Wallal Expedition, instigated by Alexander Ross of the University of Western Australia, to the Australia-wide team that participated in the discovery of gravitational waves and continues to lead national efforts in gravitational wave discovery. David Blair leads the Einstein-First project that is bringing Einstein's universe into classrooms across Australia. This book is part of that project. Ron Burman is an astrophysicist who has uncovered the Wallal history. Paul Davies is a renowned cosmologist and thinker"--Publisher's description The book provides a pre-settlement historical account of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island in their Indian Ocean context. The project began as a search for clues to locations of two 18th century Dutch shipwrecks, and was expanded into a general account of the early island histories and associated mythological Indian Ocean islands and creatures.