Abel Tasman's Voyage (1642-1643): Tasmania and New Zealand

Abel Tasman’s voyage of 1642–1643 was a Dutch East India Company (VOC) expedition that sailed from Batavia (now Jakarta) into the unknown southern seas. In ten months Tasman became the first European known to reach Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga and Fiji, and he proved that Australia was not part of a vast southern continent. The voyage also produced the first recorded encounter between Europeans and Maori, a violent clash at Golden Bay.

Background: the VOC and the Southland

By the 1640s the Dutch East India Company controlled a trading empire from its headquarters at Batavia on Java. Dutch ships following the fast “Brouwer route” across the southern Indian Ocean had repeatedly run into the west coast of a land they called the Southland or New Holland, beginning with Dirk Hartog’s landing in 1616. They had charted pieces of its western, north-western and southern shores, but nobody knew how large it was or what lay to the east.

European geographers had long imagined a great southern continent, Terra Australis, balancing the land masses of the north. The governor-general in Batavia, Anthony van Diemen, hoped such lands might hold gold, silver or new markets. He also wanted to know whether a sea passage existed from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific south of New Holland, which might give the Dutch a route to attack Spanish Chile and Peru.

Who was Abel Tasman?

Abel Janszoon Tasman was born in 1603 in Lutjegast, in the Dutch province of Groningen. He joined the VOC in the early 1630s and rose quickly to command ships in the East Indies. In 1639 he had taken part in an expedition into the North Pacific searching for legendary “islands of gold and silver” east of Japan.

For the southern voyage Tasman was given two vessels: the Heemskerck, a small warship, and the Zeehaen, a flute (a cargo ship). Together they carried about 110 men. His most important colleague was the pilot-major Frans Jacobszoon Visscher, an experienced navigator who drew up the route plan. The merchant Isaack Gilsemans made drawings and charts that survive as the earliest European images of the places they visited.

The route south and east

The ships left Batavia on 14 August 1642 and sailed first to Mauritius, then a Dutch outpost, arriving in early September. After refitting they departed on 8 October and headed far to the south, into cold, stormy latitudes, before turning east.

On 24 November 1642 the crews sighted a mountainous coast, the west of the island now called Tasmania. Tasman named it Anthonie van Diemenslandt after the governor-general. The ships rounded its southern end and anchored on the east coast in early December. Men sent ashore found fresh water, tall trees with notches cut into the bark as footholds, and signs of fires, and they heard sounds they took for voices or a trumpet, but they did not meet the Aboriginal Tasmanian people. On 3 December, with the sea too rough for the boat to land, the ship’s carpenter swam ashore through the surf to plant a flag post as a mark of possession.

The clash at Golden Bay

Sailing east across what is now the Tasman Sea, the expedition sighted a “large land, uplifted high” on 13 December 1642: the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Tasman believed it might be connected to Staten Land, an island off the southern tip of South America, and named it Staten Landt.

The ships worked north and on 18 December anchored in a wide bay at the top of the South Island. That evening Maori in two canoes came out, called to the ships and blew a horn or shell trumpet; the Dutch replied with trumpets of their own. Historians think the Maori calls were a challenge or a warning, a normal part of encountering strangers.

The next morning, 19 December, more canoes approached. When a boat carrying men between the two Dutch ships passed close by, a canoe rammed it and its crew attacked. Four Dutch sailors were killed. The Dutch fired as they weighed anchor and left; any Maori casualties are not reliably recorded. The local people were Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri, who may have been defending their fishing and cultivation grounds. Tasman named the place Moordenaers Baij, Murderers’ Bay. Today it is called Golden Bay (Mohua).

Along New Zealand and into the Pacific

Tasman never landed in New Zealand. He sailed north, mistaking the entrance to what is now Cook Strait for a bay, and followed the west coast of the North Island. On 4 January 1643 the ships reached a group of islets off the northern tip, which Tasman named the Three Kings Islands for the Epiphany. An attempt to land for water there was abandoned after people were seen on the heights.

The expedition then sailed north-east. In January 1643 it reached Tonga, where Tasman called ‘Eua “Middelburg” and Tongatapu “Amsterdam”. Here relations were friendly: the Tongans traded food and water, and the Dutch recorded their houses, canoes and gardens. In February the ships passed through dangerous reefs in the north-east of Fiji, then sailed north of New Guinea and returned to Batavia on 15 June 1643.

Key people

• Abel Tasman (1603–1659): commander of the expedition and later of further VOC voyages.
• Anthony van Diemen (1593–1645): governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, who ordered the voyage.
• Frans Jacobszoon Visscher: pilot-major and the expedition’s leading navigator.
• Isaack Gilsemans: merchant and artist whose drawings record Tasmania, Golden Bay and Tonga.
• Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri: the Maori people of Golden Bay who confronted the Dutch ships.

Results and a second voyage

Tasman had sailed right around Australia without seeing its mainland, which proved that New Holland was not joined to a giant polar continent. He had also found a large new land to the south-east, though he did not know that New Zealand consisted of two main islands.

The voyage’s charts and journals were kept within the VOC, which treated geographical knowledge as a commercial secret. Even so, Tasman’s discoveries soon appeared on printed maps, and the great hemisphere maps set into the marble floor of the new town hall of Amsterdam (now the Royal Palace on the Dam) included his coastlines. For more than a century, Tasman’s partial coastlines of Tasmania and New Zealand were the only European record of these lands, often drawn as the edges of a still larger unknown continent.

The expedition also showed the limits of what two small ships could achieve. Tasman covered great distances quickly, but he was cautious about landing on unknown coasts. Critics in Batavia and later historians have argued that he could have learned far more about the lands he sighted if he had explored them more closely.

The VOC directors were disappointed. Tasman had found no gold, no spices and no trading partners, and they judged that he had not explored thoroughly enough. In 1644 he led a second, smaller voyage that charted the north coast of Australia from Cape York round the Gulf of Carpentaria to the north-west. The combined results let Dutch mapmakers draw a far more complete outline of “Nova Hollandia”.

Tasman’s later career was uneven. He commanded a fleet against the Spanish in the Philippines in 1648, but was suspended for a time after hanging a sailor without trial. He left VOC service, became a landowner and merchant in Batavia, and died there in 1659.

Legacy and names

Dutch cartographers soon used the name Nova Zeelandia, after the province of Zeeland, for Tasman’s Staten Landt, giving New Zealand its modern name. No European ship visited New Zealand again until James Cook arrived in 1769 on his first voyage, and Cook was aware of Tasman’s partial chart of the coast.

Van Diemen’s Land became a British penal colony in the 19th century and was renamed Tasmania in 1856. The Tasman Sea, Abel Tasman National Park near Golden Bay and Mount Tasman also bear his name.

In New Zealand the 1642 encounter is now remembered from both sides. Historians stress that Maori had lived in New Zealand for centuries (see Maori settlement of New Zealand) and that the Golden Bay clash reflects a misunderstanding between two peoples with no shared language or customs.

Myths and facts

Myth: Tasman discovered Australia. Dutch sailors had reached Australian shores from 1606 onwards, and Aboriginal Australians had lived there for tens of thousands of years. Tasman’s first voyage did not even sight the Australian mainland; his second charted part of its north coast.

Myth: Tasman landed in New Zealand and claimed it. He never went ashore in New Zealand, and the Dutch made no attempt to settle there.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1642, 14 August: Heemskerck and Zeehaen leave Batavia.
• 1642, 8 October: The ships depart Mauritius and head south.
• 1642, 24 November: Tasman sights Tasmania and names it Anthonie van Diemenslandt.
• 1642, 3 December: A Dutch flag post is planted on the east coast of Tasmania.
• 1642, 13 December: The west coast of New Zealand’s South Island is sighted.
• 1642, 19 December: Four Dutch sailors are killed in the clash at Golden Bay.
• 1643, 4 January: The ships reach the Three Kings Islands.
• 1643, January: Friendly contacts with Tongans at ‘Eua and Tongatapu.
• 1643, 15 June: The expedition returns to Batavia.
• 1644: Tasman’s second voyage charts Australia’s north coast.

Why it matters

Tasman’s voyage redrew the European map of the southern hemisphere. It revealed Tasmania and New Zealand to Europe, ruled out a giant continent joined to Australia, and prepared the way for later voyages by Cook and others. It also began the long, often difficult history of contact between Europeans and the peoples of Oceania.