I alluded in a previous post to the events surrounding the loss of other VOC merchantmen and the fact that quite a few Dutchmen actually reached land in Australia, then vanished. Of all the stories, that of the Zuytdorp is perhaps the most mysterious. And those breech blocks in the title of this post play…
For many years, Australia was known as New Holland. Anything more different to the flat, verdant and continually damp polders of the Netherlands than the forbidding, parched land of the central west Australian coast is hard to imagine. Be that as it may, two young Dutchmen from the Batavia were the first white inhabitants of…
It’s an interesting fact that of the four Dutch sailing ships known to have been wrecked off the coast of Western Australia, two of them – the Batavia and the Zeewijk – struck the reefs of the Abrolhos Islands and there has long been speculation that a third ship, the Aagtekerk, lies in the deep…