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T. D. Mutch
The First Discovery of Australia
Published by Good Press, 2022
EAN 4066338087102
Table of Contents
PREFACE.
With an Account of the Voyage of the "Duyfken" and the Career. of Willem Jansz.
By T. D. MUTCH.
THE COMING OF THE DUTCH TO THE EAST.
THE FIRST FLEET OF THE DUTCH.
THE SECOND FLEET.
SUCCESS OF THE SECOND FLEET.
WILLIAM JANSZ, FIRST MATE.
WILLEM JANSZ, CAPTAIN.
STEVEN VAN DER HAGEN'S FLEET.
THE VOYAGE OF THE "DUYFKEN."
THE DIARY OF CAPTAIN SARIS.
OTHER EVIDENCE.
THE EVIDENCE OF MAPS.
HESSEL GERRITSZ'S MAP OF THE PACIFIC,. 1622.
DUTCH KNOWLEDGE OF TORRES STRAIT.
THE "DUYFKEN" CHART.
THE SOUTH COAST OF NEW GUINEA.
THE VOYAGE OF TORRES.
THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA.
CAPE KEERWEER.
THE BATAVIA RIVER.
TORRES STRAIT.
THE CHART'S INSCRIPTIONS.
JAN ROOSSENGIN.
THE CAREER OF WILLEM JANSZ.
JANSZ AS GOVERNOR OF SOLOR,. 1614-1615.
SECOND AUSTRALIAN DISCOVERY BY JANSZ.
BATAVIA ESTABLISHED.
JANSZ CAPTURES FOUR ENGLISH SHIPS.
ADMIRAL WILLEM JANSZ.
GOVERNOR OF BANDA.
LOTTERIES FOR SCHOOLS, 1625.
JANSZ COMMANDS "GULDEN ZEEPAERT."
WILLEM JANSZ GOES HOME.
ILLUSTRATIONS.
COMPARATIVE TABLE OF NAMES.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
THE END
"
PREFACE.
Table of Contents
When the chart of the Duyfken first came to my notice, I recognised that I had before me a fascinating document--a copy of the earliest record of the history of Australia as transcribed by the hand of man. It so interested me that I wrote an article upon it, which was published in two instalments in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 2nd and 9th of December, 1933.
My interest continued. I had made a visit to Java in 1929, returning convinced of the importance to Australia of these near-neighbour countries, of which we know so little, and with a profound respect for the Dutch as colonisers. It was therefore a congenial task I set myself when I resolved to find out what was known about the Dutch navigator who in 1606 sailed from Bantam to explore the southern coast of New Guinea, and extended his voyage to make the first discovery of Australian shores.
Who was Willem Jansz, or Janszoon (in plain English, William Johnson), the captain of the Duyfken? Who was Jan Lodewycksz van Roossengin, the Sub-cargo? What were the circumstances under which the expedition was made? What did they have to say about the strange new country they had found?
I searched in vain, in Dutch and Australian histories, for a connected narrative of the voyage. The log of the Duyfken had been lost. Like many another document of historical importance, its value was unrecognised by those who handled it in those busy and exciting early years of the Dutch East India Company. We do not have to go far from home to find examples of the same indifference and neglect.
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If the log, or copies of it, were sent to the headquarters of the company at Amsterdam, they may have been sent to the company's cartographers for the preparation of charts, and not returned; or some iconoclastic clerk may have decided that they took up too much room on the shelves of the record room, and sent them to the incinerator or the pulping-mill, or even to the butcher's; or through careless storage, they may have merely decayed. I do not exclude the possibility that they were stolen, but whatever happened, they disappeared.
There is some evidence that they were sought for in the Indies in 1616, without success; and it is certain that some particulars of the voyage, and a copy of the chart, were available to Jan Carstensz, who followed the Duyfken's track when he went to the Gulf of Carpentaria in command of the Pera and Arnhem in 1623.
Willem Jansz, the captain of the Duyfken, was then an Admiral, and a member of the Council of the Indies, but he was with his fleet in the Philippines when arrangements for the Carstensz voyage were made, and had scarcely returned to Batavia before Carstensz left Amboina. For that reason, Carstensz would have proceeded without the knowledge which Jansz could have given him, which accounts for the paucity of information about the Duyfken voyage in the Pera's log and chart.
The Duyfken chart had a better fate than the log or journal. It was still in existence in Amsterdam when Hessel Gerritsz made his Map of the Pacific in 1622, and placed the Duyfken geography upon it, thus providing us with the first map that contains any part of Australia; it was still in existence about 1670, when a copy was made, which eventually went to the Imperial Library in Vienna and remained buried there for 200 years.
With this copy of the chart as a beginning, I have made searches through the Dutch material available in Australia, the result of which is embodied in the following pages. Piecing together like a mosaic the items so gathered, it is here shown for the first time in English that Willem Jansz was in all probability the Willem Jansz who first went to the Indies in 1598, and, of a certainty, was the Willem Jansz who made a second discovery of the Australian coast in 1618. (Incidentally, on this voyage,
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as Supercargo of the Mauritius, he had with him Anthony van Diemen, travelling as a naval cadet under the assumed name of Teunis Meeuwsen, who became Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in 1636, and inspired Tasman's voyages in 1642 and 1644.)
Willem Jansz became an Admiral in 1620, and in the following year led a combined Dutch and English fleet against the Spaniards at Manilla.
The Duyfken was possibly the Duyfken of the Dutch first fleet (1595); certainly went to the Indies with Willem Schouten as captain in 1601, and with Willem Jansz as captain in 1603. It was a vessel of 30 lasten or 60 (English) tons, and would have measured about 63 feet in length, 17 or 18 feet in width, with a draught of 7 feet, and carrying 20 men.
The story of the early Dutch discoveries on the coasts of Australia is full of adventure, romance and tragedy. It is a story that has not yet been told. Through these voyages the history of Australia is linked with that of the Dutch East Indies from the very beginning. Jansz, Dirk Hartog, Houtman, Carstensz, Thyssens, Pelsart and Tasman--these and other Dutch discoverers of 1606-1644 commenced the work of placing a continent on the map which Cook triumphantly completed in 1770.
Australia's defence and its economy are as closely linked with the Dutch East Indies as its history, though we have failed to recognise it. The history, literature, science, art, music and trade of these richly-productive and and densely-populated countries which are our nearest northern neighbours are almost a closed book to us. The war has taught us that we must open wide that book of knowledge, if we are to survive as a factor in the Pacific.
T. D. M.
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The First Discovery of Australia.
Table of Contents
With an Account of the Voyage of the "Duyfken" and the Career of Willem Jansz.
Table of Contents
By T. D. MUTCH.
Table of Contents
(Read before the Royal Australian Historical Society, May 26, 1942.)
The story of the finding of Australia, and particularly the story of its first discovery, is one that has intrigued historians and geographers ever since the country was first inhabited. The possibility of its discovery from the west began only after the Cape of Good Hope had been rounded by Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, and, from the east, after Magellan had sailed through his Strait into the Pacific in November, 1520; but it was not until Europeans had been well established in the East Indies that serious thought was given to the likelihood that other richly productive
(No. 1) A Dutch ship of the Duyfken type and time.
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lands existed in the wide wastes of southern oceans.
The Portuguese arrived in the Strait of Malacca in 1509, and d 'Abreu reached the Moluccas in 1512. These dates limit the period of possible discovery from the north, but whatever information d'Abreu or those who followed him may have gained from the Malayans, the Arabs, or the Indian traders in the East Indies concerning lands to the southward of their own, none of it induced the Portuguese, so far as is known, to extend their voyages into Australian waters.
Belief in the existence of a southern land of continental dimensions was more in the minds of cartographers than of seamen, and they exercised their fancy freely on the maps they drew, combining the known with the unknown. Many a league of ocean was sailed in the search for land that was not there--conjectural coastlines of imagination.[1]
[1) An illuminating instance of the wrong conclusions that may be drawn from the evidence of maps alone, without the evidence of voyages to support them, is provided in the case of R. H. Major, who propounded the theory that because old French maps showed land where Australia should be, while Portuguese maps were blank in that region, and the names on the maps were in Provencal French, Australia must have been discovered by a Frenchman in the first half of the 16th century. He supported this theory by producing a copy of a map by Guillaume le Testu. Unfortunately for Major, the original Atlas dated April 5, 1555, was inspected in Paris by an interested Dutchman, who found something that had not been seen by Major. Opposite the map on which appeared the greater part of the alleged "South Land" was the following inscription: "This part is the same land of the south called 'Australie' which has not yet been discovered, because there is no record that anyone has yet searched it out, and because it is only drawn from imagination: I can describe nothing of its advantages, for which reason I shall leave more to be said until more ample discovery has been made. Although I have written and noted a few names on a few capes, this has only been to correct the statements depicted here (which are) the views of others; also in order that those who will be navigating will take care when they think they are approaching the said land."--Abstracted from I. Dornseiffen, "De Ontdekking van Australien," in Tijdschrift van het Aardrijksktundig Genootschap (1877), Deel 2, pp. 49-50. Apart from the revelation provided by the very frank Frenchman as to the manner in which his map was compiled, this statement has another interest. "Australie" is the French form of Australia, and this, if not the earliest, must be one of the earliest uses of the name as applied specifically to the region of the globe in which Australia is actually located.]
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Notwithstanding the claims advanced on behalf of Spanish, Portuguese and French navigators for the original discovery of Australia, mainly based on this misleading guesswork of cartographers, no evidence that will stand examination has been produced in proof of a single voyage that resulted in the discovery of any part of the known coastline of Australia until the Dutch sent the Duyfken to examine the south coast of New Guinea in 1606.[1]
Of this historic voyage, with which the history of Australia really commences, we have hitherto had but the merest fragments of information, and most of the written histories of Australia either dismiss it timidly, as if doubtful of its reality, or mention it not at all. The Duyfken did not fall like a bird out of the skies to light on a corner of Australia and then vanish as swiftly into thin air; its voyage of discovery was part of a pre-determined plan on the part of the merchants of the Netherlands who controlled the Dutch East India Company to extend their then limited possessions in the East--to seek new countries and new peoples with which to trade.
Its failure in that respect to a substantial degree determined the future of Australia. The Dutch merchants were more concerned with commerce than with discovery; they had neither time, vessels, nor money to spend upon non-essential exploration, and it was both easier and more profitable to them, at that stage of their enterprize, to take trading posts out of the failing hands of the Portuguese than to send their vessels and their men against the twin dangers of unknown coasts and hostile savages.
If, on the other hand, the voyage had been fruitful, or had shown prospects of profitable trade, Australia might well have become a possession of the Netherlands. It was Fate alone that determined that the Duyfken should have visited that portion of Australia's shores which even to-day remains partly unsurveyed and given over as reserves for its aboriginal inhabitants.
Seventeen years were to elapse before the Dutch sent
[1) For a convincing refutation of some of these claims, see G. A. Wood, "Was Australia Known in the Sixteenth Century?"--Royal Australian Historical Society's Journal (1918), Vol. IV., pp. 201-240; also his Discovery of Australia (1922).]
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out another expedition for the purposes of exploration. Even then, the voyage of the Pera and Arnhem of 1623 was ordered in consequence of a number of discoveries, commencing with that of the Eendracht in 1616, which were accidentally made on the western coast of Australia, as a result of an alteration of the sailing route from the Cape of Good Hope to the Indies, directing the vessels, for a quicker passage, to sail east in the region of the "roaring forties."
By 1642, these discoveries by the Dutch in Australian waters were so extensive that it was decided to send out Tasman for a more thorough examination of the southern seas. Tasman's famous voyages of 1642 and 1644 not only proved the non-existence of a continent in the southern Indian Ocean, but revealed the existence of Tasmania and New Zealand, of Tonga and the Fijis, and, on the second voyage, so linked the discoveries on the Australian coast that three-fifths of the outline of Australia was placed on his resultant map. All this was done by the Dutch before the seamen of any other nation had seen any portion of Australia, excepting, only the shipwrecked English sailors of the Trial in May, 1622.[1]
Even then, this extensive country did not attract the Dutch. The fact is that the thousands of miles of northern, western and southern coasts, from the vicinity of Cape York round to the head of the Great Australian Bight, were for the most part barren and offered no prospects of trade. It remained no man's land until 1770, when Lieutenant Cook, after examining Tasman's discovery of New Zealand, decided to "steer westward until we fall in with the E. Coast of New Holland." Thus, the extensive series of discoveries of Australia by the Dutch from 1606 to 1644 led Cook to turn west, instead of east, on his
[1) A Tasman map has been laid in marble mosaic on the floor of the vestibule of the new Public Library building in Sydney. This is not a reproduction of the original, which is in the possession of the Mitchell Library, but a reproduction of Jacob Swart's copy of the original with modernized script as published in his Journaal van Tasman's Reize (Amsterdam, 1860). For the wreck of the Trial, see Ida Lee, "The First Sighting of Australia by the English," in The Geographical Journal (April, 1934); reprinted in the Royal Australian Historical Society's Journal, Vol. XX., Part V., pp. 274-6.]
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homeward voyage from New Zealand, and, in consequence, to alter also the apparent course of Australia's destiny.
It is my purpose here to re-assemble the fragments of information printed in English, and to endeavour to reconstruct, mainly out of material that has lain buried in the obscurity of the Dutch language, the first of that series of voyages, which enabled a commencement to be made with a drawing of a map of the real, as distinct from the imaginary, Australian continent. At the same time, it is hoped to sketch in the Dutch background of the events in the East Indies which preceded the sending of the Duyfken on her voyage of discovery.
