Qualla: Dampier Strait (Papua New Guinea)

Dampier Strait (Papua New Guinea): Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1700, a British buccaneer-turned-explorer named William Dampier discovered he was wrong about the map. The hydrographers had drawn the easternmost land beyond New Guinea as a continuous coast, an unbroken extension of the same great island. Sailing along that coast aboard the *Roebuck*, Dampier saw an opening. Water where water was not supposed to be. He steered through it, kept looking north, and saw only more water - no land closing the horizon, no trick of the eye. The mass to the east was not New Guinea at all. It was a separate island. He named it New Britain. The strait that proved it is still called Dampier Strait today.

Image: Public domain

Dampier Strait (Papua New Guinea): The Pirate Who Drew the Coast

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Dampier was an unlikely geographer. A former privateer who had already circumnavigated the globe twice by the time he sailed into these waters - the first person to circumnavigate the world three times - he was both scientist and scoundrel, a meticulous observer of plants, winds,...

Image: Public domain

Dampier Strait (Papua New Guinea): Between Two Seas

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The strait links two bodies of water with very different personalities. To the north lies the Bismarck Sea, shallow, warm, fringed with reefs. To the south lies the Solomon Sea, which plunges fast into some of the deepest water in the western Pacific. In between, Dampier Strait r...

Image: Public domain

Dampier Strait (Papua New Guinea): Colonies and Cartographers

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. For nearly two centuries after Dampier, the strait remained mostly a line on charts, a navigational note for ships between Australia and the Spice Islands. In 1883 the colony of Queensland tried to annex eastern New Guinea, only to see Britain undo the annexation the following ye...

Image: Public domain

Dampier Strait (Papua New Guinea): The Straits at War Again

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The Second World War turned Dampier Strait into a strategic choke point. On March 8, 1942, two Japanese battalions landed at Lae and Salamaua on the Huon Gulf, immediately west of the strait. With those footholds, Imperial Japan controlled both the Dampier and the neighboring Vit...

Image: Public domain

Dampier Strait (Papua New Guinea): Flying the Strait

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. From the cockpit, Dampier Strait still presents itself the way its namesake first saw it: a gap of blue between two great coasts, dotted with islands. Umboi fills much of the view to the west, a wedge of jungle and mountain that is actually a dormant volcano complex. New Britain ...

Image: Public domain