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1606

Duyfken (Willem Janszoon)

The first European ship to make landfall on the Australian continent was the VOC-owned Duyfken (Little Dove).

Captained by Willem Janszoon, the 50-tonne Dutch pinnace (a type of small sailing vessel) had left Bantam, a trading base on Java on 18 November 1605. His instructions were 'to discover the great land Nova Guinea and other unknown east and south lands'. VOC (Dutch East India Company) headquarters in Amsterdam had issued further orders: renew the search for a passage through to the Pacific Ocean. With its shallow beam, the Duyfken was ideally suited to exploring uncharted coastlines.

The Duyfken headed to the south coast of New Guinea to inspect the region for commercial potential. At one landing, Papuans killed eight crew members. Undeterred, Janszoon sailed south-east, past Torres Strait because he thought it was a bay, until he reached the western coast of Cape York Peninsula, assuming all the time that he was still following the New Guinea coastline.

The Duyfken made landfall on the Australian continent at Pennefather River, at 11ยบ45'S, before continuing south across Albatross Bay until it reached Cape Keer-Weer, where it turned and retraced its route. At the mouth of the Batavia River, just to the north of the original landfall, a crewmember in a longboat was killed in a skirmish with Aboriginal people. With half of his crew now dead, and those remaining running short of food and water, Janszoon set sail for home.

He had charted more than 300 kilometres of shoreline on his short voyage. But it was the first time that Australia had appeared on a map as a result of observation, not conjecture, and marked the beginning of the mapping of Terra Australis by Europeans.

Although the voyage did not reap the VOC any commercial benefits and Janszoon failed to discover Torres Strait, the long-coveted passage to the Pacific, the mapping of Australia had begun.

The original journal of the voyage was lost, but a manuscript chart made in about 1670 shows the map drawn aboard the Duyfken. The map marks the route of the ship and its first landfall on the Australian continent—on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula.