In his unusual mid-20th century epic poem ‘Captain Quiros,’ Australian poet James McAuley reimagines European exploration of the southern hemisphere in retelling the two Pacific voyages of the lay Franciscan Portuguese sea captain (Pedro Fernandes de Queirós). “Quiros” crossed the Pacific in search for the fabled, utopia-laden Terra Australis with the last Spanish voyages of discovery of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The well-researched, deliberately ‘out-of-fashion’ long poem, drew on the 1904 Hakluyt society English translation from Spanish (1876) of the 17th century chronicle of Quiros and his secretary Belmonte and on McAuley’s own post-war experience in the Australian administration of New Guinea. This article focusses on the text’s compelling representation of the ocean through which the expeditions travel rather than on the narration of events and encounters. In exploring the archetype of early global travel it examines how, in his depiction of oceanic space, an alternative to an Australian inland ‘horizonal sublime’, McAuley embellishes the original Spanish text from his reading about ancient maps, the Portuguese Luis de Camões’ epic ‘Os Lusíadas’, and histories of South Pacific exploration and also, the mid-20th century perspective of pioneer environmental writer Rachel Carson. Her landmark ‘The Sea Around Us’ combined powerful scientific and literary descriptions of oceanic phenomena, some of which are traced in the high mimetic descriptive passages of McAuley’s poetic narrative.(1) McAuley’s portrait of ‘Ocean’ and its crossing conjures the sphere of the in-between between continent and islands, known and unknown places and peoples, past and future, faith and the abyss. This ambivalent ocean of indeterminate space, alternatively benign, chaotic and indifferent, is the stage on which the reader sees Quiros’ voyages to the land of desire unfold and transform into a dystopian, if more sombre, understanding of the world and more recent Australian history. In the identity-ridden 1950s, the poem helped elaborate Australia’s hitherto little acknowledged oceanic identity within a wider region, offering a richer variant on its customary insular interior profile.

1- Cf. Rachel Carson: The Sea Around Us.