Holland in the 17th Century
In the year 1629 the Netherlands was wealthy, puritanical and in the beginning of the celebrated ‘Golden Age’. Painters like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, ter Borch, Dou and many others recorded the lives of the wealthy and the ordinary people alike. The Dutch had established the city of Batavia (now Djakarta) and the Dutch East Indies Company was in the process of suppressing the natives. Amsterdam bustled, merchants built houses on the canals and the harbours were filled with ships returning with goods from the East.
The Dutch vied with the Portugese for trade in India and in the East indies (modern day Indonesia). The Dutch at that time followed the Portugese route, up the east coast of Africa to Madagascar and then north-east to the Indies. Heat, weather, treacherous waters and adverse currents made the route slow and uncomfortable, with the trip from Europe taking sixteen months and more.
Then in 1610 Henrik Brouwer went south from what later became Cape Town down to the ‘roaring forties’ – latitude 40 south – and sailed east, taking advantage of the shorter distance and the reliable winds. When his ships reached the longitude of the Sunda Strait, he turned north and arrived in the Indies a little less than six months after leaving Amsterdam. He had cut the length of the journey by two thousand miles, and more than halved the time taken.
From 1616 on, all Dutch ships took this route. However, they soon discovered that it was not without danger. Apart from the fact that these waters were unknown, at that time there was no way to accurately measure longitude. Time was measured with an hour glass and speed with a ‘ship’s log’. A piece of wood was thrown over the side and its progress along the length of the ship in a thirty second interval was used to calculate speed. But external circumstances like prevailing currents were not taken into account. So the point at which ships should head north to reach the Sunda Strait could be described as an educated guess.
As a result, several Dutch ships recorded unexpected encounters with the unknown South Land. Dutch sailors landed on what is still known as Dirk Hartog Island, on the West Australian coast, in 1616. Then in 1619, ships under the command of Houtman encountered the Houtman Abrolhos – fortunately for them, during daylight. The Abrolhos is a strung-out archipelago of flat, unremarkable islands around 50 miles off the West Australian coast. But the exact positions of the islands was not known and even much later, when the group appeared on charts the locations were hazy at best.
Really, the fact that only four Dutch ships were wrecked in about one hundred years was pretty good going. In fact, two of the wrecks – the Batavia (1629) and the Zeewijk (1727) – struck the Abrolhos islands. The other two – the Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon) and the Zuytdorp – reached the South Land. The Vergulde Draeck sank along the line of reefs that protects the coast north of Perth (near Guilderton – so named because of Guilders found on the beach). The Zuytdorp hit the line of cliffs that tower above the ocean between Geraldton and Carnarvon.
