Abel Janszoon Tasman (ca. 1603-1659) was a Dutch navigator who discovered Tasmania and New Zealand's South Island and charted the northwest Australian coastline.

Abel Tasman was born at Lutjegast near Groningen. After his second marriage, to Joanna Tierex in 1633, he became a ship's captain in the Dutch East India Company and lived in Batavia, capital of the new Dutch commercial empire in the East Indies.

A southern continent had long been thought to exist, but Spanish navigators who crossed the Pacific Ocean from the Americas had failed to locate it. After 1611 Dutch vessels which were blown east by the "roaring forties" after rounding the Cape of Good Hope occasionally touched the coastline of "Terra Australis" en route to Java. The Batavian authorities soon decided to find out whether this "South Land" had any commercial potential, and in 1642, Governor General Anton Van Diemen chose Tasman to command an expedition...