TIMELINE of W.A. MARITIME HISTORY: Dutch East India Company

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In 1579 the cities and provinces of the Netherlands united to gain their independence from Spanish dominion. They were not to succeed until 1648 but, throughout this period, their naval and commercial power steadily increased. A marked step forward came in 1602 when the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) was formed from various independent companies, which had experienced disappointing trading results from voyages to the Spice Islands. Competition between companies led to low selling prices at home for the goods obtained, while in the Indies, buying prices were high as the companies’ agents bid against each other . In addition, the ships of the separate companies were no match for the Portuguese fleet, which was based on a string of secure fortresses on the Indian coast. They were soon persuaded that unity promised economic and military strength.

Within 16 years the VOC had established a permanent base on the island of Java, capturing Jakarta and renaming it Batavia. Portuguese and English traders were excluded as the VOC swiftly developed into a tightly disciplined monopoly organization with firm control over its agents and administration in the East Indies. But it has to be underlined, the Company’ s sole mission was commerce, not discovery, and certainly not colonization. Dutch exploratory voyages to the south land were designed to boost commerce by finding new products and new markets. All VOC ships sailed with a high-ranking officer who was concerned not with navigation but who was ever alert to the Company’s best trading interests.

This is not to say that individual governors in the Indies had no concern for discovery, even discovery for its own sake, but they always needed economic reasons, or at the very least an optimistic forecast of the voyages’ commercial potential, if they were to gain the approval of the Heren XVII back in Amsterdam. A case in point was Governor-General Anthoniij van Diemen, who dispatched Abel Tasman’s voyages of discovery. He was anxious to settle the question of the south land in order to gather reliable intelligence of its trading worth and to find a new route to the Spanish settlement in Chile, for purposes of illicit trade. In the end the VOC had to face a hard truth: the south land offered nothing of commercial interest and, after 50 years of intermittent endeavor, it simply lost interest in further exploration and concentrated on its profitable trade in the Spice Islands.

Nevertheless the Dutch contribution to the discovery of Australia is clear. They were the first Europeans indisputably known to have landed on its shores, by intent in the Gulf of Carpentaria and by accident on the storm-wracked west coast. What is more, Tasman’s two voyages had virtually proven that New Holland was not part of a globe-encircling southern continent.

SOURCE: Day, J. (2003) Historical Dictionary of the discovery and exploration of Australia, Lanham, Maryland. Scarecrow Press, pp xxxv-xxxvi.

The exploration and mapping of Australia's coastline in the first half of the Seventeenth Century

Abel Tasman was employed by the VOC. [Click on the image above to read more.]
In 1644 Abel Janszoon Tasman commanded a second expedition with 3 ships,the Zeemeeuw, Limmen and Bracq explored and charted the northern and western coast from Cape York to Point Cloates in the West. He called the Western part of the new continent "New Holland".
VOC cartographers were now able to map most of Australia's coastline except the East Coast which still remained a mystery until it was charted by Captain Cook 126 years later in 1770.

SOURCE: The exploration and mapping of Australia's coastline in the first half of the Seventeenth Century, 2002 V.O.C. Historical Society, URL: http://www.vochistory.org.au/coastmapping.html