
1697
Geelvink, Nijptangh and Weseltje (Willem de Vlamingh)
Flemish captain Willem de Vlamingh left Amsterdam on 3 May 1696 with three ships —the Geelvink, Nijptangh and Weseltje—and reached Australia’s west coast at the end of the year. The expedition had two aims: to explore New Holland, ‘the coast as well as the inland, as far as possible’, and to look for wreckage of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) ships that had come to grief on the wild west coast.
This was the VOC’s last great voyage of discovery. Tasman’s failure to open up new markets in the 1640s had left the VOC disenchanted with the idea of exploring the region any further. The death of the ambitious van Diemen in 1645 only heightened the company’s indifference to further investigation. For the following half-century, Dutch ships made contact with the Australian coast only by accident.
On 29 December, de Vlamingh encountered Rottnest Island, named for what he thought were the rats that lived there (they were in fact native marsupials, called quokkas). Less than a fortnight later, he found and named the Swan River, after its large number of black swans.
For five weeks, the ships mapped the coastline between Swan River and North West Cape. Along the way, landing parties made several unsuccessful attempts to make contact with the local Aboriginal people.
In early February 1697, de Vlamingh landed on Dirk Hartog Island, where he replaced Hartog’s pewter plate with one bearing a record of both visits. The substitute was in turn found in 1801 by members of Nicolas Baudin's French expedition, who nailed it to a new post. De Vlamingh’s plate remained at Cape Inscription until 1818, when it was recovered by French explorer Louis de Freycinet and taken to Paris. The French Government eventually returned the plate to Australia, and it now lies in the collection of the WA Maritime Museum.
Before heading for Batavia, one of de Vlamingh’s ships fired a volley ‘in farewell of the wretched South land’.
De Vlamingh’s voyage was, in the end, inconsequential and appears in only a few contemporary charts. Tasman’s explorations, and those of earlier Dutch explorers, appear to have quenched the public’s appetite for knowledge of the South Land.
The VOC mounted two smaller expeditions to the South Land in 1705 and 1756, and then gave up exploring entirely.
