Dirk Hartog
Dirk Hartog (
1580â€"
1621), the
17th Century Dutch sea captain and
explorer, whose expedition was the second
European group to land on
Australian soil. He left behind an artefact to record his visit, the
Hartog plate. His name is sometimes alternately spelled
Dirck Hartog,
Dirck Hartog or
Dirch Hartichs.
Born into a sea-faring family, at the age of 30 he received his first ships' command, and spent several years engaged in successful trading ventures in the
Baltic and
Mediterranean seas.
He then gained employment with the
Dutch East India Company (VOC) in
1615, and was appointed master of a ship (the
Eendracht, meaning "Concord" or "Unity") in a fleet voyaging from the
Netherlands to the
Dutch East Indies. Setting sail in January 1616 in the company of several other VOC ships, Hartog and the
Eendracht became separated from the others in a storm, and arrived independently at the
Cape of Good Hope (later to become the site of
Cape Town,
South Africa).
Leaving there, Hartog set off across the
Indian Ocean for
Batavia (present-day
Jakarta), utilising (or perhaps blown off course by) the strong westerly winds known as the
"Roaring Forties" which had been earlier noted by the Dutch navigator
Henderik Brouwer as a quicker route to
Java. On
October 25 1616, at approximately 26°
latitude south, Hartog and crew came unexpectedly upon "various islands, which were, however, found uninhabited." He made landfall at an
island off the coast of
Shark Bay,
Western Australia, which is now called
Dirk Hartog Island after him. His was the second recorded European expedition to land on the Australian continent (having been preceded by
Willem Janszoon), but the first to do so on the western coastline.
Hartog spent three days examining the coast and nearby islands. He named the area
Eendrachtsland after his ship, but this name has not endured. When he left he affixed a
pewter plate to a post, now known as the
Hartog plate. On the plate he had etched a record of his visit to the island. Its inscription (translated from the original
Dutch) read:
1616 On 25 October arrived the ship Eendracht, of Amsterdam: Supercargo Gilles Miebais of Liege, skipper Dirch Hatichs of Amsterdam. on 27 d[itt]o. she set sail again for Bantam. Deputy supercargo Jan Stins, upper steersman Pieter Doores of Bil. In the year 1616.Finding nothing of interest or of use, Hartog continued sailing northwards along this previously undiscovered coastline of Western Australia, making
nautical charts up to about 22° lat. south. He then left the coast and continued onwards to Batavia, eventually arriving safely in December 1616, some five months after his expected arrival.
Eighty years later in
1696 the
Flemish explorer
Willem de Vlamingh landed on the island and by chance found the plate, which now lay half-buried in sand. He replaced it with a new plate which reproduced Hartog's original inscription and added notes of his own, and took Hartog's original back to
Amsterdam, where it may now be seen in the
Rijksmuseum.
In
2000 the Hartog plate was temporarily brought to Australia as part of an exhibition at the
Sydney Maritime Museum. This led to suggestions that the plate, considered important as the oldest-known written artifact from Australia's European history, should be acquired for an Australian museum, but the Dutch authorities have made it clear that the plate is not for sale.
Dirk Hartog left the employ of the VOC upon his return to
Amsterdam in
1617, resuming private trading ventures in the Baltic. He died in
1621.
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