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Willem Jansz (about 1570 - after 1628), Dutch navigator and colonial governor, is the first
European known to have seen the coast of Australia.
Nothing is known of Jansz's early life. He entered the service of the Dutch East Indies
Company (VOC) sometime before 1600, and sailed from the Netherlands for the East Indies in December 1603 as skipper of the
Duyfken (or Duijfken, meaning Little Dove), part of a fleet of twelve ships. Once in the Indies, Jansz was sent
to search out other outlets for trade, particularly in "the great land of Nova Guinea and other East and Southlands."
On November 18, 1605, the
Duyfken sailed from Bantam to the coast of western New Guinea. She then crossed eastern end of the Arafura Sea, without seeing Torres
Strait, into the Gulf of Carpentaria, and made a landfall
on the western shore of Cape York in Queensland, near the modern town of Weipa. Jansz charted 320km of the Australian coast, which he thought was a southern extension of New Guinea.
Finding the land swampy and the people inhospitable (ten of his men were killed on various shore expeditions), at Cape
Keerveer ("Turnabout"), south of Albatross Bay, Jansz headed home and arrived at Bantam in June 1606. He called the land he had discovered "Nieu Zelandt," but this name was not adopted, and was later used by
Abel Tasman to name New
Zealand.
Although there have been many suggestions that earlier navigators from China, France or Portugal may have discovered parts of
Australia, the Duyfken is the first European vessel known to have done so.
Jansz served in the Netherlands East Indies for
several periods (1603-11, 1612-16, including a period as governor of Fort Henricus on Solor, and 1618-28, during which time was served as admiral of the Dutch
fleet and as governor of Banda 1623-27). Jansz was
awarded a chain of honour in 1619 for his part in capturing four ships of the English
East India Company which had aided the Javanese in their
defence of the town of Jakarta against the Dutch. In 1628 he retired to the Netherlands with the rank of admiral.
The original journals and charts made during Jansz's 1606 voyage have been lost, but the
National Library of Austria in Vienna holds a copy of
the map made around 1670. The map, which shows the location of the first landfall in
Australia by the Duyfken, is part of the Atlas Blaeu Van der Hem, brought to Vienna in 1730 by Prince Eugene of Savoy.
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