HOME > Online Exhibitions
Voyages
1627

Gulden Zeepaert (Francois Thyssen and Peter Nuyts)

While Dutch sailors were beginning to observe Australia’s west and north coasts at regular intervals, the continent’s south coast remained a mystery. All that changed, however, on 26 June 1627.

On that day, Captain Francois Thyssen and Peter Nuyts, Extraordinary Councillor of the Indies, became the first Europeans to see the Australia’s southern seaboard. The VOC-owned Gulden Zeepaert (Golden Seahorse) had left the Netherlands for Java on 22 May 1626. It is not known why the voyage took so long, although records reveal that 30 men died of sickness along the way. Why they came to be so far east is also a mystery—it is thought that bad weather had blown the ship off-course or the captain had made a serious navigational error.

The ship charted the southern coast from Cape Leeuwin, discovered by the Leeuwin five years before, all the way to Nuyts Archipelago, about 1800 km to the east. The vessel travelled about 17° of longitude, from the most easterly point mapped by the Leeuwin, Point D’Entrecasteaux or Point Nuyts, to present-day Fowlers Bay, where they named two islands St Francis and St Pieter, before retracing their route and sailing on to Java.

It is believed they kept sailing east in the hope they would see the coastline begin to turn northward. They named the region Nuyt’s Land. Coincidentally, Nuyts was also aboard the Leeuwin in 1622, when it discovered Australia’s most south-westerly point.

This is shown on the Chart of the Malay Archipelago, which contains all the Dutch discoveries to 1628, including the coastlines of western and southern Australia.