Explorers is my third Australian history book for children, after Who’s on the Money? and Stuck on History. One of the best things about researching these books is discovering things I didn’t learn at school, or rediscovering things I’d forgotten (or possibly hadn’t paid attention to in the first place).
I knew there’d been Dutch landings on the Australian coast before James Cook claimed the eastern half of the continent for Britain in 1770. But apart from knowing about Dirk Hartog’s pewter plate, I didn’t really know much about who landed where, what they’d discovered, and what happened to them when they got there.
I’m pretty sure I never learnt about the Dutch captain Willem Janszoon and his voyage aboard the Duyfken.
Long story short: in 1606, Janszoon and his crew were searching for trading opportunities along the southern shores of New Guinea when they made what is believed to be the first European landing on the Australian coast.
Of all the voyages of discovery I researched for Explorers, the voyage of the Duyfken was the hardest to piece together. There’s no surviving journal or ship’s log to study. We only know the date of the Duyfken‘s departure from the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) because John Saris, an Englishman, happened to mention it in his diary:
[25 November 1605]…heere departed a small pinnasse [a light boat] of the Flemmings [Dutch], for the discovery of the nand [sic] called Nova ginnea [New Guinea], which, as it is said, affordeth great store of Gold…
Saris J. Quoted in Mutch TD. ‘The first discovery of Australia’. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 1942;28(5)
In June the next year, Saris learned that the Duyfken had returned — and that its mission to find treasure in New Guinea had been unsuccessful.
So we have a date for Janszoon’s departure and a rough date for his return — but how do we know where the Duyfken actually went, and how can we try to work out what happened along the way?
For a long time, historians could only guess what route the Duyfken took on its historic voyage of discovery. But in 1931, a map specialist named Frederick Caspar Wieder was studying an atlas at the Hofbibliothek in Vienna when he discovered the so-called “Secret Atlas of the East-India Company” — East India Company being the spice-trading company that sent Janszoon on his mission to New Guinea.
Inside the secret atlas was a copy of the East India Company’s chart of the Duyfken’s voyage. Wieder had discovered the first known example of the European charting of any part of Australia.
Dese pascaerte vertoont (route of the Duyfken). Reproduction from Monumenta cartographica. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1925. MAP RA265 Part 125. National Library of Australia.
The National Library of Australia holds a copy of the Duyfken chart. I was lucky enough to be able to have a look at it when I visited Canberra in 2008.
The bit at the bottom right is part of the eastern coast of Cape York Peninsula — the part of Australia Janszoon and his crew explored. It’s a little hard to tell what’s going on in that chart without zooming back to see where this piece of land fits within the whole picture of Australia — so, using some internet voodoo and my ninja coding skills, I’ve put together a Google Map that lets you do just that.
We only have sketchy accounts of what actually happened during the voyage. For instance, the journal of Jan Carstenszoon, a Dutch sailor who explored the area for the East India Company in 1624, mentions a deadly encounter between the crew of the Duyfken and local Aborigines at the river now known as Wenlock River:
In the morning of the 11th [May 1623]… we sailed past a large river (which the men of the Duifken [Dutch spelling of Duyfken] went up with a boat in 1606, and where one of them was killed by the arrows [spears] of the blacks)
Journal kept by Jan Carstenszoon on his voyage to Nova Guinea. Quoted in Mutch TD. ‘The first discovery of Australia’. London: Royal Dutch Geographical Society, 1899. Chapter 8.
Another source of information about the voyage of the Duyfken are the oral histories of the Aboriginal people of Cape York Peninsula.
Historians have spoken to the descendants of the people who lived in the area where the Duyfken landed, giving us another view of the first known European contact with Australia:
The Aboriginal people saw the first Dutch ship north of the mouth of the river in 1606. They saw a big mob of logs that were huge, very big with lots of devils on them. The devils looked strange. Their skin looked different and they were white…
…
There was much fighting between the Dutch and the warriors. The Dutch shot many Aboriginal people along the river and in the bush land. Also, the warriors speared and killed some Dutchmen and made the Dutch go back to their ship. The warriors and the Aboriginal people saw the Dutch return back to where they came from.
Yuknaporta F. ‘Aboriginal tradition re the Duyfken’, 1999. Quoted in Henderson J. Sent forth a dove: discovery of the Duyfken. Nedlands (WA): University of Western Australia Press, 1999
(More Aboriginal oral histories of the Dutch explorers in Australia can be found in This is what happened: historical narratives by Aborigines published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, and Living black by Kevin Gilbert.)
We can put these few sources together and get a rough picture of what happened when the Duyfken landed on the Australian coast, but it’s disappointing that we don’t have a fuller account of this historic voyage.
Maybe Janszoon’s journal will surface one day in some library somewhere, and we can find out just what the crew of the Duyfken — as far as we know, the first Europeans to visit Australia — thought about the land they’d discovered.