Tasman's Second Voyage
Abel Tasman made his second voyage for the Dutch East India Company in 1644, sailing from Batavia with three ships to complete the survey his celebrated first voyage had left unfinished. The 1642 expedition had been a navigational triumph and a commercial failure. Tasman had sailed so far south of the Australian landmass that he missed it entirely, discovering Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand and circumnavigating the continent without ever seeing its populated eastern coast. The Company directors wanted trade, and he had found none. The second voyage was therefore given a narrower brief: to establish whether New Guinea was joined to the land the Dutch called New Holland, and whether a passage ran between them into the Pacific. He followed the south coast of New Guinea eastward, reached the Torres Strait, and — like several before him — concluded from the shoals and islands that it was a bay rather than a channel. He turned south and charted the Gulf of Carpentaria and the northern and western coasts of Australia in considerable detail. The mapping was accurate and the conclusion was wrong. The strait exists; Luis Váez de Torres had passed through it in 1606, and the Spanish record was not public. The directors were again disappointed. The coasts were arid, the inhabitants uninterested in trade, and the Company concluded that New Holland offered nothing worth the expense. Dutch exploration of the continent effectively stopped. It was left to Cook, 126 years later. Tasman was reprimanded on other grounds and ended his career in trade at Batavia, where he died in 1659. The island he found in 1642 kept the name Van Diemen's Land until 1856, when it was renamed Tasmania for him.
- Year: 1644 CE
