Willem Janszoon
Dutch navigator and colonial governor
1570 CE to 1630 CE
Willem Janszoon (c. 1570–1630), Dutch navigator and colonial governor, is the first European known to have seen the coast of Australia.
His name is sometimes abbreviated to Willem Jansz.
(with or without the full stop).
He was probably born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
World
Southern Oceania
View →Related Events
Showing 4 events out of 4 total
The Dutch East India Company in Bantam dispatches Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, or Jansz, to investigate New Guinea’s potential in gold and spices in 1605.
Janszoon, of whose early life nothing is known, is first recorded as entering into the service of the Oude compagnie, one of the predecessors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), as a mate aboard the Hollandia, part of the second fleet dispatched by the Dutch to the Dutch East Indies in 1598.
On May 5, 1601, he had again sailed for the East Indies as master of the Lam, one of three ships in the fleet of Joris van Spilbergen.
Janszoon had sailed from the Netherlands for the East Indies for the third time on December 18, 1603, as captain of the Duyfken (or Duijfken, meaning “Little Dove”), one of twelve ships of the great fleet of Steven van der Hagen.
Once in the Indies, Janszoon had been sent to search for other outlets of trade, particularly in “the great land of New Guinea and other East and Southlands.”
The Duyfken had sailed from Bantam on November 18, 1605, to the coast of western New Guinea.
After coasting New Guinea for two hundred miles, Janszoon had crossed the eastern end of the Arafura Sea, without seeing the Torres Strait, into the Gulf of Carpentaria.
He makes landfall on February 26, 1606, at the Pennefather River on the western shore of Cape York in Queensland, near the modern town of Weipa.
This is the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent.
Janszoon proceeds to chart some three hundred and twenty kilometers of the coastline, which he thinks is a southerly extension of New Guinea.
Willem Janszoon decides at Cape Keerweer (“Turnabout”), south of Albatross Bay, to return, finding the land swampy and the people inhospitable: ten of his men have been killed on various shore expeditions.
The Duyfken is actually in the Torres Strait in March 1606, a few weeks before Luís Vaz de Torres sails through it.
Janszoon, arriving at Bantam in June 1606, calls the land he has discovered “Nieu Zeland” after the Dutch province of Zeeland, but the name is not adopted and will later be used by Abel Tasman for New Zealand.
Janszoon will return to the Netherlands believing that the south coast of New Guinea is joined to the land along which he sailed, and Dutch maps will reproduce this error for many years.
Though there have been suggestions that earlier navigators from China, France, or Portugal may have discovered parts of Australia, the Duyfken is the first European vessel definitely known to have done so.