Abel Tasman
Abel Tasman charted more of the world than almost any of his contemporaries and disappointed his employers throughout. Born around 1603 in a village in Groningen, he was probably illiterate as a young man and went to sea early, entering the Dutch East India Company's service by 1633 and sailing in the East Indies, to Formosa, Japan and Cambodia. Anthony van Diemen, the governor-general at Batavia, sent him in 1642 to find out what lay in the southern ocean and whether a passage ran east towards Chile. The route decided everything. He sailed west to Mauritius and then far south into the roaring forties before turning east, and passed south of the Australian continent without seeing it. He found Van Diemen's Land in November 1642 — now Tasmania — and then New Zealand in December, the first European to reach it. An encounter at what he named Murderers' Bay cost four of his men, and he left without landing, and sailed north through Tonga and Fiji. He had circumnavigated Australia without once sighting it. The second voyage in 1644 mapped the Gulf of Carpentaria and the northern and western coasts in detail, and concluded that Torres Strait was a bay. The Company found no trade in any of it and lost interest, and Dutch exploration of the continent effectively stopped. He was suspended in 1649 for hanging a sailor without trial while drunk, reinstated, and left the service wealthy. He died at Batavia in 1659. The island he found in 1642 was renamed for him in 1856, and the sea between it and Australia carries his name too.
- Lived: 1603 CE – 1659 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: explorer, navigator, voc_captain
