September. October 89However, the myth persists that early
Dutch knowledge of Australia – which has
been home to Aboriginal Australians for tens
of thousands of years – was merely the result
of clumsy navigation, with Dutch ships acci-
dentally blundering onto the west coast while
en route to Indonesia. That certainly wasn’t
the case. Indeed, European exploration of
Australia began with a deliberate voyage by
Duyfken, a small Dutch ship captained by
Willem Janszoon.
In 1606 Janszoon and his crew made
the first authenticated European sightings
of Australia when they reached the west-
ern coast of Cape York Peninsula, in far
north Queensland. In the decades that fol-
lowed, more than 40 Dutch ships sailed to
Australia’s shores, with their navigators accu-
rately charting much of Australia’s northern,
western and southern coastlines, including
parts of Tasmania. The legacy of these explor-
ers remains with us today in place names such
as the Swan River, the Gulf of Carpentaria,
Dirk Hartog Island, and Cape Leeuwin.
Duyfken was a small, relatively fast armed
ship known as a “ jacht” – the term “ jacht”
comes from the Dutch verb “ jagen”, mean-
ing to hunt. (During the 17th century, the
Dutch invented what we now call yacht-ing using vessels known as “spiel-jachten”
(play-jachts), from which the term yacht
is derived.) Duyfken was tasked by
the Dutch East India Company, or
Vereenigde Oostidische Compagnie (VOC),
to explore what lay beyond the Spice Islands
of eastern Indonesia.
On 18 November 1605 Janszoon and his
crew, which included ship administrator,
or supercargo, Jan Rosengeyn, set off from
Bantam, on the Indonesian island of Java.
It is often claimed that Duyfken then sailed
along the southern coast of New Guinea,
turned south at Torres Strait, not noticing
the strait there, and accidentally chart-
ed about 350km of the Cape York
Peninsula coast (thinking it was part of
New Guinea) before heading back to the
Spice Islands.
However, a copy of the chart made by
either Janszoon or Rosengeyn, discov-
ered in archives in Vienna in 1933, shows
Duyfken was sailed due south from False
Cape, on the south coast of New Guinea,
into the middle of the Arafura Sea. From
there, they plotted an exploratory course to
a landfall on the western coast of Cape York
Peninsula, near what is now known as the
Pennefather River.It’s well known that Dutch mariners
visited Australia long before Cook
charted the east coast in 1770 for
Great Britain.
PHOTO CREDIT, PREVIOUS PAGE: SUZANNE LONG / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. THIS PAGE: CLASSIC COLLECTION / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. MAP: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY