Willem Jansz
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Willem Jansz (c.1570 - 1630), more properly Willem Janszoon (Jansz is an abbreviation of Janszoon), Dutch navigator and colonial governor, is the first European known to have seen the coast of Australia. Jansz was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Nothing is known of Jansz's early life*. He entered the service of the Dutch East India 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 British 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.
* The surname Jansz means "son of Jan", or son of "Johannes" (Janszoon in Dutch). This is similar to Johnson in English. Surnames were often not used and children were simply named for their father's given name. In areas where not many people lived he would simply have been given the name Willem Jansz. So all we know about him is that his father's name was Johannes, or Jan. Like many countries genealogy and historical research in the Netherlands can be a nightmare for this reason.
External link
- The Voyage of the Duyfken Replica, 1999 (http://www.carijansen.com/ships/duyfken/duyfken.html)de:Willem Jansz