Willem Janszoon
Willem Janszoon made the first recorded European landfall on Australia, and did not realise what he had found. He was a Dutch East India Company captain, in the East Indies from the 1590s, and in 1605 was sent from Bantam in the Duyfken — a small, fast vessel of about twenty metres — to investigate reports of gold in the land east of Java and to look for trade beyond New Guinea. He followed the southern coast of New Guinea east, and where the coast turned south he followed it, assuming it continued as the same landmass. He was in fact crossing the Torres Strait without noticing it, and the coast he then charted for some 300 kilometres was the western side of Cape York Peninsula. He made landfall at the Pennefather River in what is now Queensland in late February or early March 1606, and became the first European known to have set foot on the continent. Contact with the Wik people went badly. Several of his men were killed in encounters ashore, and Janszoon concluded that the country was barren and its inhabitants savage and that no useful trade could be had there. His chart labelled the coast as part of New Guinea, and the mistake was repeated for years. Luis Váez de Torres passed through the strait in the opposite direction a few months later, and the Spanish report was not published. The Dutch mapped much of the Australian coast over the following forty years and concluded that New Holland was worthless.
- Lived: 1570 CE – 1628 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: explorer, captain, voc_commander
