Willem Jansz Lands on the Australian Mainland and Sets Off a Century of Dutch Exploration of the Region
Overview
In 1606 Dutchman Willem Jansz (1570-?) arrived on the Australian mainland, becoming perhaps the first European to do so. His achievement did not lead to Dutch rule of the area, as the Dutch were not interested in colonizing it. Nevertheless, his voyage was a milestone because it launched almost a century of successful Dutch exploration of Australia.
Background
Scholars, including the ancient Greeks and Romans, had long contended that a continent must exist in the Southern Hemisphere to balance the large land areas in the Northern Hemisphere. Ptolemy's (fl. A.D. 127-145) world map in the second century and later Renaissance maps depicted a Pacific terra australis, Latin for "southern land." Gerardus Mercator's (1512-1594) 1541 map of the world referred similarly to a territory south of Indonesia.
Some sixteenth-century Portuguese maps clearly depict the outline of the northern part of Australia. The most important are the Dieppe maps, so-named after the then-famous cartographic center located in Dieppe, France. The Dieppe maps were well known to eminent geographers of France and England until the mid-nineteenth century; moreover, they were accepted as proof that Portugal had seen and charted the coast of Australia some 60 years before Jansz.
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