
1616
Eendracht (Dirk Hartog)
In January 1616, Dirk Hartog and his crew of 200 left the Netherlands aboard the 200-tonne VOC (Dutch East India Company) ship Eendracht, bound for the East Indies.
Hartog's mission was trade, not exploration—it was a simple navigational error that turned commerce into discovery. Following the route that was later recommended in the Seynbrief, Hartog delayed the turn north to Java too long, making landfall on an island off the coast of Western Australia at about 25°S, just north of present-day Shark Bay.
Before resuming his journey, Hartog recorded his position, known today as Cape Inscription, and left a flattened pewter plate nailed to a stake, inscribed with the details of the date, ship and crew. (Eighty-one years later, Willem de Vlamingh, another VOC captain, found the plate and took it back to the Netherlands. Hartog's plate is today held in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.)
Hartog gave his own name to the roadstead (a sheltered stretch of water just off-shore where a ship can anchor) where the Eendracht lay for two days, and to the island where he stepped ashore. On 27 October 1616, the crew weighed anchor and sailed north along the coast, a region they named Landt van d'Eendracht, or Eendracht's Land. Sailing as far as North West Cape, and charting as he went, Hartog began unveiling the west coast of the new land.
Hartog's discovery had a major impact on world mapping. Before long, Dutch discoveries began to appear on regional and world maps, and the South Land, much reduced in size, began to take shape.
Hartog's historic voyage was documented in the 1620s by chief VOC cartographer Hessel Gerritsz, whose large-scale map covers the extent of Dutch discoveries between 1616 and 1622.
