The bloody story of how Europeans first found the continent of Australia.
This video goes alongside our two episodes in the Mariner’s Mirror Podcast on the arrival of the Dutch in Australia in 1606 and the Duyfken, including the construction and voyages of the Duyfken replica, built in Fremantle, Western Australia and launched in 1999.
On Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...
At the Society for Nautical Research: snr.org.uk/the-mariners-mirro...
In 1606 a small, unremarkable ship named Duyfken, meaning ‘little dove’, carried the first Europeans ever to visit a strange land, completely unknown to the West. The ship’s captain had missed a 90 mile wide strait separating this land from New Guinea, and so assumed he had found a southern extension of that island. He didn’t know it but the land he had bumped into was in fact an entire continent, long conjectured but never seen by European eyes.
In the early 1600s the Dutch East India Company was in an ongoing struggle with the Portuguese for control of the Maluku Islands - then known as the Spice Islands, for the nutmeg, mace and cloves found there, a hugely profitable resource the new European corporate powers sought to extract from them. In 1605 the Duyfken, under captain Willem Janzoon, had been part of the fleet that recaptured the fort of Van Verre from the Portuguese, on the island of Ambon.
Ambon was the headquarters of the Dutch in the Indies, and once the fort was taken, the commander of the fleet, Steven va der Haghen, placed Duyfken at the disposal of the Governor of Ambon, before taking the rest of his fleet back to the Netherlands. The Governor, Frederick De Houtman, ordered Janzoon to take Duyfken and search for new trade opportunities in ‘the great land of New Guinea and other East and Southlands’. But before the journey could begin, Duyken urgently needed provisions, so she sailed back to Bantam in Java, before setting out on her voyage of discovery.
Janzoon headed east, passing through the Banda Islands, then the Kei Islands, and along the south coast of New Guinea. He then skirted round the dangerously shallow waters at the western point of Yos Sudarso Island, then known as False Cape, and struck out east-south-east. On 26 February 1606, Duyfken made landfall at the mouth of a river, later named by colonists the Pennefather, on a peninsula they would eventually call Cape York, in the north-eastern-most part of a long-inhabited continent that would eventually become known to the Europeans engaged in colonising it as Australia.
The oral histories of the Wik-Mungan people, whom the crew of the Duyfken encountered soon after disembarking, record that although initial contact was cordial, violence soon broke out as the Dutch attempted to kidnap women and children. The Dutch East India Company had issued orders that native adults and children should be captured so that their indigenous languages could be learnt, and later used to establish trade connections. The Wik-Mungan also record that the Dutch raped their women and forced their men to hunt for them. Nine of Janzoon’s 20-strong crew were killed, and they shot and killed an unknown number of people before taking ship and fleeing from the place they named ‘Cape Keerweer’, or ‘Cape Turnabout’. Janzoon later reported that the lands they had found were ‘for the greater part uncultivated, and certain parts inhabited by savage, cruel black barbarians who slew some of our sailors, so that no information was obtained … regarding the commodities obtainable and in demand there’.
Janzoon took the Duyfken north, charting about 200 miles of the coast before sailing back to Banda via the south coast of New Guinea. He returned to the Netherlands believing that the lands along which he had sailed were joined to New Guinea, although his own chart did not confirm this, and this mistaken belief was reproduced in many maps until James Cook’s first voyage of 1770, when he charted the Torres Strait. Ironically it has since been discovered that the first people to inhabit the continent that the Duyfken bumped into in 1606, likely walked from New Guinea to continental Australia, at a time when they were indeed contiguous landmasses, 65,000 years before Europeans ever arrived there.
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