1616
Dirk Hartog’s plate
The Dutch lack of interest
Dirk Hartog (or Dyrck Hartoochz, as he signed his name) was not the first European to land in Australia, but he is famous because he was the first to leave anything behind – specifically, a pewter plate nailed to an oak post. On it he inscribed in Dutch:
1616, 25 October, is here arrived the ship the Eendracht of Amsterdam, the upper-merchant Gillis Miebais of Liege, skipper Direk Hatichs of Amsterdam; the 27th ditto set sail again for Bantam, the under-merchant Jan Stins, the uppersteersman Pieter Dookes van Bill, Anno 1616
Hartog was one of the many Dutchmen who wrote off Australia. In 1616 he was appointed captain of the United East India Company ship Eendracht (meaning ‘concord’) for a voyage from the Netherlands to Indonesia.
Five years earlier, in 1611, Hendrik Brouwer had charted a route that used the roaring forties to zip across the Indian Ocean and then turn north to the Dutch East Indies. This route almost halved the previous distance, which hugged the coasts of Africa and India. It was only a matter of time until someone misjudged the Indian Ocean leg and hit Australia, and Hartog was that captain. The Eendracht made landfall on 25 October 1616 at what is now known as Cape Inscription on Dirk Hartog Island, Western Australia. This is where Hartog left the pewter plate.
Hartog was underwhelmed, to say the least, by Australia. After only three days of exploration, during which time he encountered no Indigenous people, Hartog and the Eendracht set sail northwards and Hartog continued his trading ventures. His charts of the west coast of Australia greatly expanded the knowledge of the continent, which he called Landt van de Eendracht (Land of the Eendracht). Fortunately the name didn’t catch on and the continent became known as Hollandia Nova (New Holland).
The first European to set foot on Australia had been Willem Janszoon (aka Jansz), who landed near Weipa in the Gulf of Carpentaria on 26 February 1606. Janszoon made some assumptions about the land he encountered around northern Australia and then kept moving.
The Dutch were very active in what was known as the East Indies. The United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) was for a time in the 17th century the world’s largest trading company. It had a virtual monopoly on the trade in cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and pepper. At the time, nutmeg was more valuable than gold. The waters around the Indonesian archipelago were hotly contested by the Portuguese and the Dutch but they had little interest in Australia. It’s likely that those with local knowledge were telling adventurers that Australia was largely barren and certainly had none of the spices that were so highly valued.
The best-known Dutchman to visit the new continent was Abel Tasman. In 1642, at the instruction of Anthonie van Diemen, governor-general of the East Indies, Tasman embarked on a voyage to explore the southern oceans. On that trip he discovered the island he called Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), New Zealand, Tonga and parts of Fiji and New Guinea.
In 1697 Willem de Vlamingh led a mission of three ships to Western Australia to look for survivors of a previous voyage to the East Indies. He had no luck with his mission but did explore the west coast, discovering and naming Rottnest Island and sailing up the Swan River. He found Hartog’s island and the plate that Hartog had left there 80 years before. A new plate was erected on the spot and Hartog’s original was taken to the Rijksmuseum, where it has remained.
The part-time pirate William Dampier, an Englishman, anchored and surveyed the northern end of Dirk Hartog Island in August 1699. He spent nine days in the Shark Bay area before sailing north around North West Cape. He found the land to be barren and dry and described the locals as ‘the miserablest People in the World’.
The French made the occasional foray to Australia. Louis Aleno de St Aloüarn landed on Dirk Hartog Island in March 1772 and claimed it for France. He buried a parchment, a bottle and two French coins but they lay undetected until 1998, by which time sovereignty had been settled by someone else.
In 1801, the Naturalist, under Captain Emmanuel Hamelin, arrived at Shark Bay and found de Vlamingh’s plate half buried in the sand. One of Hamelin’s officers, Louis de Freycinet, wanted to take it back to Europe but was forbidden from doing so by his captain. Freycinet and another Frenchman, Nicolas Baudin, both spent some years exploring Australia in tandem with each other. Freycinet returned to the west coast in 1818, collected the Dutch plate and took it to Paris, where it was filed away and lost until 1940.
These early explorers showed considerable courage and were excited by the prospect of describing the Great Southern Land, but it has to be said that none of them were much excited by the place when they found it.