Duyfken Voyage (1606): First European Landing in Australia

The Duyfken voyage was a Dutch exploring expedition of 1605-1606 that made the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent. In early 1606 the small ship Duyfken, commanded by Willem Janszoon, charted about 300 km of the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in what is now Queensland. Janszoon thought the land was part of New Guinea, and the Dutch concluded that it offered nothing worth trading for.

Background

In 1602 the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, was founded to control the spice trade of the East Indies. Its base in these early years was at Banten (Bantam) in western Java, and it also had a strong presence in the Banda Islands, the source of nutmeg and mace.

The company was interested in the unknown lands to the south and east of its trading area. New Guinea was rumoured to have gold, and there were stories of a great southern land. The VOC sent the Duyfken (“Little Dove”), a fast and lightly built ship of only about 20 m, to investigate the coast of New Guinea and any lands beyond it.

The Duyfken already had a fighting record. In late 1601, as part of a Dutch fleet, it had taken part in a battle with a larger Portuguese force off Banten. It carried a crew of around 20 men.

The voyage

The Duyfken left Banten on 18 November 1605 and sailed east to the Banda Islands, then to the Kai Islands and the south-western coast of New Guinea. Janszoon followed the low, swampy coast eastwards. Where the coast turned, he missed the entrance to Torres Strait, taking the islands and shoals there for part of a continuous shoreline.

Sailing south, the ship reached the west coast of Cape York Peninsula on the Gulf of Carpentaria. This was Australian soil, though Janszoon did not know it. The first landfall is usually dated to about 26 February 1606 and placed near the mouth of the Pennefather River, north of modern Weipa.

The Duyfken followed the coast southwards for roughly 300 km. At a point the Dutch named Cape Keerweer, meaning “turn back”, Janszoon turned the ship around, short of supplies and having found nothing of value. The Duyfken returned to Banda by about June 1606.

Encounters with Aboriginal people

The coast the Dutch reached was the country of Aboriginal peoples, among them the Wik peoples whose descendants still live in the region. The encounters went badly. Dutch sources record that members of the crew were killed when they went ashore, and earlier in the voyage men had also been lost in clashes on the New Guinea coast.

The Wik and neighbouring peoples have oral traditions of conflict with men who arrived by ship long ago, including the killing of local people and the taking of women. Historians cannot match these traditions to specific events with certainty, but they form an important Aboriginal perspective on a meeting known otherwise only from Dutch summaries.

What the Dutch made of the land

Janszoon’s own log and journal have not survived. What is known of the voyage comes mainly from later Dutch maps that show the coast he charted, and from a summary included in the instructions given to Abel Tasman in 1644. That summary described the land as largely barren, inhabited in places by people the Dutch called wild and cruel, and noted that some of the crew had been killed.

For a company seeking spices, gold and markets, this was a discouraging report. The VOC did not follow up the voyage for years. In 1623 Jan Carstenszoon sailed the Pera and Arnhem into the Gulf of Carpentaria and reached similar conclusions. Later VOC captains who met the west coast of Australia on the route to Java, such as Dirk Hartog in 1616, gradually filled in the outline of the continent the Dutch called New Holland.

Mapping the coast

The clearest surviving record of the voyage is a manuscript chart, known as the Duyfken chart, which shows the south coast of New Guinea and the west coast of Cape York as a single continuous shoreline. It survives as a copy in a seventeenth-century Dutch atlas now held in Vienna. The chart marks features named by the Dutch, including Cape Keerweer, a name still used today.

The chart shows how much the Dutch saw and how much they missed. Because Janszoon did not find Torres Strait, Dutch maps for decades joined New Guinea and Australia. Later VOC expeditions, including the voyages of Jan Carstenszoon in 1623 and Abel Tasman in 1644, were sent partly to test whether a passage existed. The question was only settled for Europeans in the eighteenth century.

The voyage also left little mark in public memory for centuries. Janszoon’s report was treated as a company document, and its results were known mainly to VOC officials and mapmakers. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did historians piece the story together from charts and archival summaries.

The replica and the anniversary

A full-scale replica of the Duyfken was built in Fremantle, Western Australia, using traditional methods and materials, and launched in 1999. In 2006, for the 400th anniversary of the landing, it sailed to the Gulf of Carpentaria and retraced the route along the Cape York coast. The commemorations included events with Aboriginal communities whose ancestors had met the Dutch, and the anniversary prompted wider discussion of the contact from both Dutch and Aboriginal perspectives.

Key people

Willem Janszoon (c. 1570-c. 1630) was a Dutch navigator and VOC officer. After the Duyfken voyage he held senior posts in the company in Asia, including as governor of Banda, before returning to the Netherlands.

Luís Vaz de Torres was a Spanish navigator who, later in 1606, sailed west through the strait between New Guinea and Australia that now bears his name. Neither he nor Janszoon knew of the other’s voyage, and Torres’s discovery was kept secret by Spain for many years.

The Wik peoples and their neighbours of western Cape York were the first Aboriginal Australians to meet Europeans in recorded history.

Myths and facts

It is still sometimes said that James Cook “discovered” Australia in 1770. In fact Aboriginal people had lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years, and Dutch ships had charted much of its northern, western and southern coasts more than a century before Cook’s Endeavour voyage.

Some writers argue that Portuguese sailors reached Australia before 1606, pointing to the sixteenth-century Dieppe maps. These theories are disputed and lack firm evidence, so the Duyfken landing remains the first documented European contact.

Timeline

• 1601, December: The Duyfken fights in a Dutch fleet against the Portuguese off Banten.
• 1605, 18 November: The Duyfken leaves Banten to explore New Guinea.
• 1606, February: The ship reaches the west coast of Cape York Peninsula; first recorded European landfall in Australia.
• 1606, March or April: Janszoon turns back at Cape Keerweer.
• 1606, c. June: The Duyfken returns to Banda.
• 1606, later in the year: Luís Vaz de Torres sails through Torres Strait.
• 1999: A replica of the Duyfken is launched in Fremantle.
• 2006: The replica re-enacts the voyage for the 400th anniversary.

Why it matters

The Duyfken voyage was the first documented meeting between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians and the beginning of European mapping of the continent. It opened a period of Dutch exploration that shaped the early European image of Australia, long before British settlement in 1788.