Richardson, W. A. R. (Bill)
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William Arthur Ridley (Bill) Richardson, BA (Oxon), Dip.Ed. (Oxon), PhD (Flinders), was born in London 27 July 1924. After education at St John’s School, Leatherhead, Surrey (1937-42), he served in the British Army in the UK and SE Asia until 1947, and then studied at St John’s College, Oxford until 1952. He taught French and Spanish at Grammar Schools in Leytonstone, Winchester and Liverpool until 1965, when, together with his wife Helen and their two children he migrated to Australia to take up a lectureship at the University of Adelaide at Bedford Park, later Flinders University. There he taught Spanish, and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, until retirement as an Associate Professor in 1987; since then he has been a Visiting Scholar there.
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Item Autobiographical note and selected bibliography(2013-06-28) Richardson, W A RWilliam Arthur Ridley (Bill) Richardson, BA (Oxon), Dip.Ed. (Oxon), PhD (Flinders), was born in London 27 July 1924. After education at St John’s School, Leatherhead, Surrey (1937-42), he served in the British Army in the UK and SE Asia until 1947, and then studied at St John’s College, Oxford until 1952. He taught French and Spanish at Grammar Schools in Leytonstone, Winchester and Liverpool until 1965, when, together with his wife Helen and their two children he migrated to Australia to take up a lectureship at the University of Adelaide at Bedford Park, later Flinders University. There he taught Spanish, and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, until retirement as an Associate Professor in 1987; since then he has been a Visiting Scholar there.Item Barrosa alias 'Barossa'(National Library of Australia, 2007) Richardson, W A RIt is fairly well known that the name Barossa, identifying South Australia’s famous wine district, the Barossa Valley, is derived from the name originally bestowed by Colonel William Light, in 1837, to the Barossa Range. It commemorates the Peninsular War Battle of Barrosa that took place between the French and a mixed British–Spanish force on 5 March 1811.Item Cartographical Clues to Three Sixteenth-Century Shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean(The Great Circle. Australian Association for Maritime History, 1992) Richardson, W A RRecent place-name studies dealt with two variant, migratory inscriptions: the island of los romeros, actually Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean; and Psitacorum regio ('The Region of Parrots'), on a fictitious part of Gerard Mercator's southern continent. It is the purpose of this article to examine the background behind three shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean which have been recorded on maps and charts: all three wrecks are connected in one way or another with the above two inscriptions.Item A Cartographical Nightmare - Manuel de Godinho de Eredia's Search for India Meridional(Center for Portuguese Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, 1995) Richardson, W A RThe author examines the writings and maps of Manuel Godinho de Eredia from the early 1600s, and concludes that Eredia's "increasingly contradictory and far-fetched written and cartographical portrayals of India Meridional" should not be used to prove an earlier discovery of Australia.Item Coastal Place-Name Enigmas on Early Charts and in Early Sailing Directions(The English Place-Name Society, 1997) Richardson, W A RThose 14th, 15th, and 16th century mariners who could read almost certainly relied much more upon sailing directions (Rutters) than upon charts. Illiterate ones relied mainly upon practical experience, the lead-line and compass, some knowledge of the heavens, and upon sailing directions learned by rote.Item A Critique of Spanish and Portuguese Claims to Have Discovered Australia(Investigator. Geelong Historical Society, 1995) Richardson, W A RClaims that the Spanish and especially the Portuguese discovered Australia before the Dutch and English have gained a good deal of credence since they were first advanced. The matter is of some interest to the Geelong area particularly as Bonito's treasure at Queenscliff, the Geelong Keys and the Mahogany Ship near Warrnambool are often cited as "evidence". In this article Bill Richardson makes a detailed examination of these claims.Item An Elizabethan Pilot's Charts (1594): Spanish Intelligence Regarding the Coasts of England and Wales at the End of the Sixteenth Century(Journal of Navigation, 2000) Richardson, W A RFour manuscript charts of British ports, and notes on them, were made in the 1590s by an English Catholic pilot, N. Lambert. They were sent to Don Juan de Idiaquez, Philip II's secretary, through the mediation of an English Jesuit exile, Robert Persons (or Parsons). Lambert also offered to pilot Spanish ships and guide Spanish troops in raids on the coasts of England and Wales, and prepared a list of appropriate targets. Being some of the earliest charts of the ports concerned, and hitherto unpublished, they are here presented with relevant background material.Item Enigmatic Indian Ocean Coastlines on Early Maps and Charts(The Globe. The Australian Map Circle, 1998) Richardson, W A RMaps by early non-Iberian cartographers tended to rely heavily on Ptolemy's hopelessly inaccurate maps, and on a literal acceptance of Marco Polo's unreliable, second-hand writings. The identification of dubious, frequently imaginary coastlines on such maps is thus usually based on guesswork, or wishful thinking. Only critical examination of the inscriptions can provide reliable identifications. Maps of the Indian Ocean improved as Portuguese charts slowly supplanted Ptolemaic and Poloesque information.Item 'Imaginography': sensational pseudo-discoveries(Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia, 1999) Richardson, W A RThe latter half of the 20th century has witnessed a veritable spate of reports in the press about the finding of historical artifacts concerning whose significance sensational claims have been made.Item 'Imaginography': Sensational Pseudo-Discoveries(The Skeptic, 1999) Richardson, W A RThe latter half of the 20th century has witnessed a veritable spate of reports in the press about the finding of historical artifacts concerning whose significance sensational claims have been made.Item An Indian Ocean Pilgrimage in Search of an Island(The Great Circle. Australian Association for Maritime History, 1989) Richardson, W A RAs late as 1817, a chart of the Indian Ocean by L.S. de la Rochette was published in London by William Faden and approved by the Chart Committee of the British Admiralty. Among the numerous fascinating features on it is an island in approximately latitude 28 degrees south and longitude 74 degrees east; against it is the inscription 'Ilha dos Romeiros / in the Portuguese charts / very doubtful'. No island with any variation of that name exists on any chart today and there is no island anywhere near the indicated position. Yet an island with some version of the name appears on practically every map and chart on which the Indian Ocean is included, from the 16th century to the early 19th.Item Is Jave-la-Grande Australia? The Linguistic Evidence Concerning the West Coast(The Globe, 1983) Richardson, W A RAlexander Dalrymple was by no means alone in assuming that Jave-la-Grande was Australia. James Burney stated that he found too many similarities between the east coast of Jave-la-Grande and the then known outline of Australia's east coast to be produced solely by chance. The author sets out the evidence to counter this view.Item Jave-La-Grande is not Australia(The Globe. The Australian Map Circle, 1992) Richardson, W A RThe continent of Jave-la-Grande on the mid-16th century manuscript Dieppe maps has been the subject of much speculation for over two hundred years and has been claimed to provide evidence of an early Portuguese discovery of Australia. Mathematical and navigational arguments used by some writers to transform the outline of Jave-la-Grande into something more closely resembling that of Australia, and seeking to 'correct' its location and scale, have proved unsustainable.Item Jave-la-Grande: A Place Name Chart of its East Coast(The Great Circle, Australian Association for Maritime History, 1984) Richardson, W A RThe Harleian and other Dieppe maps made in France in the mid-16th century are manifestly based on Portuguese originals, yet no surviving Portuguese maps show any evidence of this mysterious landmass. Suggestions that the discovery of Australia was successfully kept secret seem hardly credible in view of the well-known presence in France of Portuguese cartographers, the defection to Spain of Magellan and the cartographer Diogo Ribeiro amongst others, and the fact that an Italian, Alberto Cantino, could illegally purchase in Lisbon in 1502 so important a world map as the one commonly called the 'Cantino' after him.Item Lyonesse and The Wolf: A Case Study in Place-Name Corruption(The English Place-Name Society, University of Nottingham, 1992) Richardson, W A RA valuable, though seldom exploited, source of place-name research material is that provided by early manuscript and printed maps and charts, and sailing directions or rutters. Most, if not all, of the earliest maps and charts which include reasonably detailed outlines of the southern coasts of the British Isles are by Italian, Catalan, Majorcan, French and Portuguese cartographers, whilst most of the earliest surviving rutters are also of southern European origin.Item Mercator's Southern Continent(The Globe. The Australian Map Circle, 1992) Richardson, W A RThe age-old concept that a vast southern landmass must of necessity exist to counterbalance that in the northern hemisphere was given graphic expression by many cartographers, including Ptolemy, Johannes Schoener and Oronce Fine, but undoubtedly the most famous one is that depicted by Gerard Mercator.Item A Non-Existent Continent(The Skeptic, 2001) Richardson, W A RToo many people today expect early maps and charts of newly discovered lands to have similar standards of accuracy. They are unaware of how incredibly inaccurate many were. Information from different sources could be combined, with no consistency of scale. Many coastlines, such as those of Mercator's southern continent, were but imaginative, graphic representations of written descriptions. Only the inscriptions can confirm what the cartographer concerned was depicting, or thought he was depicting.Item Northampton on the Welsh Coast? Some Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Sailing Directions(Cambrian Archaeological Association, 1995) Richardson, W A RThose fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mariners who were literate almost certainly relied much more upon sailing directions than upon charts. A mere glance at some of the earliest surviving charts of areas other than the Mediterranean and the Black Sea will show why, for they amounted to little more than aides-memoires.Item The Origin of Place-Names on Maps(The Map Collector, 1991) Richardson, W A RMany inscriptions on early maps and charts present problems of meaning and identity which can only be resolved beyond reasonable doubt by tracing them back to their earliest recorded appearance and reducing the risk of being misled by versions that have become corrupted over time.Item The Owers, Les Ours, Weembrug and 'The Old City': Place-Names, History and Submarine Archaeology(Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 2001) Richardson, W A RUntil recently, little attention has been paid to the names of features of particular interest to mariners around the coasts of the British Isles, perhaps because it was not generally realised that most of the earliest relevant evidence is only available from non-English sources. Four recent studies of English and Welsh coastal names have shown that some features were known by more than one name. Such naming variations occur also in the case of the shoals called The Owers, off Selsey Bill.