1603–1659
Abel Tasman
Attributed to Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp
National Library of Australia
The VOC (Dutch East India Company) captain who put Australia well and truly on the map was Abel Tasman, the best known of all Dutch mariners. Born in Lutjegast in 1603, Tasman was by 1642 a most skilled and experienced sailor, whose ability had been proven in hard and dangerous service for the VOC.
Tasman commanded two voyages to Australia in 1642–43 and 1644. In the first, he charted Van Diemen's Land, New Zealand, Tonga and Fiji. A year later he mapped the north coast from east to west.
The VOC, however, considered Tasman's voyages unsuccessful. The real motive of the voyages was the hope of finding wealthy lands in the south and east. He had found neither new markets nor a new shipping route to the Pacific.
The first voyage, in 1642, took Tasman across the Indian Ocean and beneath the Australian continent to the shores of Tasmania, and then to New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji and north to New Guinea. Tasman proved beyond doubt that Australia did not belong to a larger southern continent stretching to the South Pole.
His second voyage traced Australia's north and west coastline all the way from Cape York to Shark Bay, but failed to find Torres Strait.
Following Tasman's voyages, the Dutch abandoned the use of Zuid Landt (South Land) and Terra Australis, and began calling the land New Holland.
Read more information about Tasman, translated from the Dutch National Archives website.
It's all Dutch to me