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The Duyfken
Duyfken replica entering the Dutch harbour of Oudenschild

The replica of the Duyfken entering the Dutch harbour of Oudenschild at the Isle of Texel.

Chris Jorgensen www.vocsite.nl/schepen/detail.html?id=12071

In 1606, the VOC (Dutch East India Company) ship Duyfken sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria and into history.

Under the command of Willem Janszoon, it became the first European vessel to make a recorded landfall on the Australian coast.

Built in the Netherlands in 1595, the Duyfken (Little Dove) was tiny, barely 20 metres from stem to stern, just six metres across the beam and with a draught (the depth of water it needed to float in) of only 2.45 metres.

The Duyfken was a pinnace, a fast and lightly armed three-masted vessel designed to carry a small but valuable cargo. She had a crew of 20 and could cruise at four knots (about 7 kmh) in moderate conditions.

Like all Dutch ships of the period, the Duyfken was built plank-first, an ancient boat-building technique that preceded the frame-first method. Heated planks were bent to conform to a desired shape, or shell, and were attached to each other by edge dowelling, tenons, skew nails, stitching or sewing. Selected shapes were then dropped into the shell to create a framework.

The results were remarkable. While the rest of Europe's sea-going nations had graduated to the frame-first method of shipbuilding, the plank-first Dutch ships were regarded as superior. It was their shape, not their structure, that gave them the edge over frame-first vessels: they were faster, had a shallow draft, required a smaller crew and had a better chance of surviving a grounding.

In 1601, the Duyfken served as the jacht, or scout, for the Moluccan fleet sailing to break the Portuguese blockade at Bantam. Its captain at the time, Willem Schouten, would later sail with Jacob le Maire through Cape Horn and up the western coast of Chile to the southern Pacific Ocean.

On 25 December, the five ships confronted a blockading fleet of eight Portuguese galleons and 22 galleys. After a six-day battle, the Dutch broke the blockade, and with it the dominance of the Portuguese and Spanish in the spice trade to Europe.

After returning to the Netherlands (although separated from the larger ships, the Duyfken arrived two months earlier), under the command of Willem Janszoon, the Duyfken accompanied a fleet sailing to the East Indies in 1603. Before reaching Bantam, the ships captured two Portuguese vessels in the Mozambique Channel.

In 1605, the Duyfken was part of a fleet that recaptured from the Portuguese the fort of Van Verre, at Ambon. In the following year, Willem Janszoon, under the instructions of the VOC to look for trading opportunities and a passage to the Pacific, steered the Duyfken south-east from Bantam along the south coast of New Guinea and into the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, at the northern tip of Australia, where it made landfall at Pennefather River. Before returning home, Janszoon mapped about 320 kilometres of coastline, thus beginning the Dutch mapping of Australia.

In June 1608, the Duyfken accompanied a fleet to capture the fortress of Taffaso, on Makian Island in present-day Indonesia. After sustaining damage during a five-hour battle with three Spanish galleys, she was taken to a reef at Ternate for repairs. The ship suffered further damage as she was being turned on her side and was declared to be irreparable.