The decision to begin the expedition with a voyage west to Mauritius seems retrospectively bizarre until it is realised that the intention was then to sail back eastward, taking advantage of westerly winds at high latitudes and thereby discover once and for all if there was any land to the south of the Indian Ocean. Tasman was instructed, after leaving Mauritius, to sail eastward along the 52–54th parallel until the longitude of the Isles of Solomon was reached and then turn north; this brief was precise but not immutable; he could vary it, especially if they encountered severe cold and bad weather in higher latitudes. This is in fact what happened and the two ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen, after meeting snow and hail and violent seas at 49 degrees south, turned north and sailed first along the 44th, later the 40th parallel. This was the course that brought them, on 24 November 1642, to the first land in the South Sea – that is, Tasmania, which they called Van Diemen’s Land.
It was the southwest coast of the island the Dutch came upon and they followed it south and east until they found a safe anchorage in North Bay. Visscher went ashore with some men; they met no one but heard some sound of People, also playing almost like a horn or small gong, saw smoke rising and found trees with steps freshly cut into their trunks so wide apart that they thought the unseen inhabitants must either be giants or knew a different way of climbing. Other trees were burnt by fires as hard as stones; still others bore fruit. They gathered greens to eat, took some fine Gum which is dripping from trees, and has an Odour of Gommalacca and noticed the tracks and stools of an animal they took to be some kind of tiger. A later attempt to land and take possession was thwarted by bad weather and in the end the ship’s carpenter had to swim through surf to plant a marked stake and a flag ashore. And then, for reasons unknown – perhaps it was simply the prevailing westerly winds – the council decided not to trace the coast of the new land northwards but to sail further east in search of the Isles of Solomon.
Nine days later they saw a large high elevated land ahead and following it north anchored, on 17 December, near Cape Farewell at the tip of the South Island of what is now New Zealand; they called it Staten Landt because they thought it might have been the western shore of a land their countryman Le Maire had, in 1616, called by the same name. Le Maire’s Staten Landt was an ocean away off the southeastern tip of Tierra del Fuego in the vicinity of Cape Horn, suggesting that Tasman’s notional continent was a Great South Land of vast extent.
The next day they saw smoke rising from the very fine country they had found and the next evening, anchored below Cape Farewell in what is now Golden Bay, saw lights ashore. Two canoes (waka) came out, whose men called out in a gruff hollow voice but we could not in the least understand any of it. They would not come near the Dutch ships and blew also many times on an instrument which gave sound like the moors’ Trumpets. The Dutch answered with trumpets of their own and the strange duet continued, calling eerily back and forth across the darkening waters until night fell and the waka paddled away.
It has been said, with what authority it is impossible to know, that the men of Ngāti Tūmatakokiri called out in their own language to the strangers: Come here, come here, so we can kill you! If so it was a threat they made good. The next day a single waka made a reconnaissance and then seven came out together, seemingly intending to board the Dutch ships. As the Heemskerck’s cockboat made its way back from the Zeehaen, one of the waka rammed it and four of the seven men aboard were speared or clubbed; the rest swam for their lives. The boat was later recovered with a dead and a dying man aboard; one of the others was lost in the water and the fourth body seems to have been taken ashore by Māori to be eaten. Later that day a larger flotilla of eleven waka (there were eleven more still on shore) came out from the land, perhaps intending a full-scale assault; but the Dutch fired upon them and one man at least, standing with a small white flag in hand, was hit and fell. The rest turned about and went back to shore. Subsequently the council decided to leave that place since the detestable act … is a teacher to us, to hold this land’s inhabitants as enemies.
Tasman’s ships sailed towards the strait, now known as Cook’s, between the North and South Islands but did not confirm there was a passage through to the Pacific. Clearly one was suspected and Visscher’s map of the area shows a gap where the strait might have been and indeed is; but Tasman, ever cautious, refused to validate what he had not with his own eyes seen and the official version closes the strait. It is said that Tasman had on board a map that called that wide delusive stretch of water the Bay of the Portuguese, raising once again the possibility of earlier voyages. The Dutch ships, having failed to replenish their water supplies or to find fresh food, sailed past Taranaki and on up the west coast of the North Island before attempting another landfall at Three Kings Islands off Cape Maria van Diemen. Here too they encountered Māori and here too found them intimidating: about 30 to 35 persons of tall stature, with staffs or clubs, who called out with rough loud voice … going on, they made mighty great large steps and strides, during the rowing round some few in number showed themselves sometimes on top of the mountains … Māori also threw stones at the Dutch, who did not manage to get water here either, and sailed away north apparently without ever touching Staten Landt; although it has recently been suggested some sailors might in fact have gone ashore at Golden or, as Tasman called it, Moordenaers Bay.
North of Staten Landt one of the intentions of the voyage was fulfilled: the great swell runs at present from the South east, this waterway from Batavia to Chile, that is an even waterway, so that there is nothing in the way in order to traverse this waterway … Tasman was now hoping to replenish his supplies at the Horne or the Cocos Islands, found by Le Maire; he missed both but found the more southerly of the Tongan group, of which the Cocos were northern atolls. It was in every respect the opposite of the experience of Staten Landt: water and fresh food were obtained, friendly relations with the Tongan people were established, trade proceeded, the Dutch giving nails, beads, Chinese mirrors, knives, cloth, even dungarees; a glass filled with wine was poured out and the empty vessel kept. In return the Tongans gave coconuts, yams, plantains, bananas, pigs and fowls, the latter in large numbers: 100 head of pigs 150 fowls … for both ships.
There were no disputes, no killings, but Tasman remained wary: these people seemed well-disposed nevertheless we cannot know what sticks in the heart. Later he remarks with some asperity that they are excessively lascivious wanton and thievish so that argus eyes Are scarcely enough for a person to watch out. Whatever degree of fraternisation there was between the Dutch sailors and soldiers and the islanders seems to have led to a slackening of discipline and the council soon decided upon a tightening of rules for the watch and a range of punishments, including whipping, fines and suspension of pay, for those found in dereliction of their duty. Tonga was a paradise of beautifully ordered gardens and bountiful food; but in Tasman’s view already corrupted: it was a pleasure to behold, giving from It all round a lovely pleasant aroma and odour … this people … had the form of man but inhuman Morals and customs … of religion or God’s service, these people know nothing, nor have also any idols images or other heathen relics, nor clergy, none the less they are superstitious.
Isaac Gilsemans, as he had at Murderers Bay, made some superb, remarkably detailed, synoptic drawings of the islands, the people, their boats, houses and gardens, which at the same time depict the Dutch ships at anchor and the crew filling water barrels ashore. One of these drawings shows a meeting on shore between a Tongan welcoming party and a Dutch delegation. Tasman stands alone beside his ranked and armed countrymen, his back to us, facing a group of seated women with coconuts and peace flags. They seem to be singing and moving their upper bodies and arms in time while Tasman, pikestaff in hand, with his Dutch hat on, makes a figure of lonely perplexity in amongst the opulence and the display. Perhaps after all he was suspicious of pleasure and uneasy too when he was not on his ship and his ship at sea.
They sailed north
and west after leaving Tonga and skirted, with great danger to themselves, the mazy shoals to the extreme north and east of the Fiji group, without landing and without encountering any Fijians. The weather for the next six weeks was appalling even though this was summer in the tropics; it was one reason, though not the only one, that Tasman abandoned his attempt to see if it were possible to sail to the south of New Guinea and thereby prove it was an island; his fear of embayment on unknown shores was another. Instead, they traversed the north coast of the big island, making numerous discoveries and meeting all sorts of people, encountering live volcanoes and earthquakes at sea, before returning south of Gilolo, now called Halmahera, to Batavia. The final part of his mission, to map the north coast of Endraacts Land and the south of New Guinea, was accomplished on his next, 1644, voyage, though again without finding the strait that Torres had sailed through.
ABEL TASMAN WAS criticised upon return from his great voyage – effectively a long-range circumnavigation of Australia – for his failure properly to explore the countries he had discovered; behind that criticism is a disappointment that what he did find seemed so unpromising. The censure was muted and Tasman remained in the service of the VOC for another ten years or so. He had a position as an examiner of ship’s journals; he set out the course for navigation from Batavia to Ceylon; and for ships going to the Philippines. There were more trading voyages, for instance to Sumatra to buy pepper; and a diplomatic mission to Siam; in 1648 he was given a flotilla of eight ships with which to assault the Spanish and perhaps capture either the annual silver ship from Acapulco or the galleon sailing thence from Manila. They missed the Manila sailing and, although they saw and pursued the silver ship, it was abandoned and set on fire before they could secure it. And then, after a successful engagement with the Spanish at Luzon, on one of the Babuyan Islands to the north there occurred an event that gives us a rare, though not unequivocal, glimpse of the man.
It was alleged that, while returning to camp after banqueting and carousing – in some accounts in a monastery – Tasman came across two young sailors from his party who had gone out foraging. They had done so on the authority of one of their officers but Tasman thought them in contravention of an order he had made against the quitting of quarters and fell into a rage. A halter was made for the neck of one of the young men, then Tasman’s vice-commander was told to climb a tree and hang the youth. This was done; but while Tasman was putting a noose around the other’s neck the vice-commander, seeing the first youth was near to death, cut him down. On his return to Batavia Tasman was tried for the attempted hanging and suspended, fined, instructed to make a full confession in open court and ordered to pay compensation for his illegal and shameful treatment of the young man he had hanged. His defence sounds specious – he was not banqueting and carousing, he had good reason to discipline his men, the hanging was not serious but a threat and warning.
The suspension was rescinded less than a year later but not long after Tasman retired from the company. Yet he did not cease his maritime or his trading activities: there is a later record of him bringing a small craft, with two rafts and a number of cattle, from another port in Java to Batavia. He may have owned quite a large amount of land – 288 acres – there too; his will, verified on 22 October 1659, bequeathed a small amount of money to the poor in his home town of Lutjegast and the rest of his goods to his wife, his daughter in Holland and his grandchildren. That wife, his second, remarried in Batavia a couple of years after his death, at which time she was described as widow of the late Commander Abel Tasman.
TASMAN’S DISCOVERIES were quickly incorporated on to Dutch maps, one of which was set into the floor of the Amsterdam Town Hall; curiously his Staten Landt was omitted from it. By 1648 globes were no longer using this name but Hollandia Nova for Australia and Zeelandia Nova for New Zealand. The Dutch knew by 1643 that Le Maire’s Staten Landt was an island and so could not be the east coast of some Great South Land stretching across the Pacific; the name change is probably consequent upon this knowledge. Within twenty years, by 1666, the broad mapping of Tasman’s contribution to discovery had appeared in published form and was widely distributed; but the journal of his voyage, and therefore its nature and events, was still unknown.
In 1671 a brief, vivid, entertaining and highly coloured account of the voyage focused almost entirely on contacts with native peoples was published in a geographical work by Arnoldus Montanus. Written by the wound healer and barber aboard one of the ships, Henrik Haelbos, it resembles in its insouciance and picaresque tone a return of the inimitable voice of Mendes Pinto. A few years later, in 1674, a summary of Tasman’s own journal was printed in Dirck Rembrandtszoon van Nierop’s Eenige Oefeningen; this was influential and was translated into French and English; a hundred years later Cook, off Tasmania, would refer to it in his own journal. Joseph Banks, after his return from Cook’s first voyage, purchased a copy of Tasman’s journal, had it translated from the Dutch and an abridgement was published in 1813; but it wasn’t until later in the nineteenth century that a full version achieved publication.
Tasman remains a difficult figure to get a handle on. Later editors and commentators on his work ascribed to him fantastical beliefs, including one advanced by British astronomer Edmond Halley: that the earth was hollow and included other spheres, differently magnetised, within; but it seems unlikely that he theorised much about anything at all, being most of all a tough, plain sailor with a good practical grasp of navigation and map-making. Whether he was also an entrepreneur and hoped to make himself rich by discovery is also unclear: perhaps he was contributing his own skills to an enterprise defined and promoted mainly by his colleagues Gilsemans and Visscher. He does not seem to have had much of a talent for human relationships; was neither a literary man nor a very good writer; even his curiosity, an essential in an explorer, was limited. He seems to have been happiest at sea and spent most of his adult life aboard ship. All sailors, we are told, are superstitious but we don’t even have any examples of Tasman’s superstition. He seems a typically pious Calvinist with no great passion for anything except the sea. It is strange how his obdurate, recessive, occasionally violent, always puritanical character seems somehow to be mirrored in aspects of the New Zealand psyche.
AFTER TASMAN’S FAILURE to find anything much at all the Dutch effectively, and explicitly, abandoned their territorial dreams east of the Moluccas and ceased to scheme to get their hands on the Spanish treasure ships. It was decided that trade in the Indies was the gold-and silver-mining that would best serve the VOC’s interest. However those treasure ships, the ones that took the silver from Peru north to the isthmus and the annual galleon to Manila carrying gold and silver to purchase the fabulous cargoes of textiles and spices that came each year back across the Pacific to Acapulco, were still a magnet for other sea rovers and the goal of pirates of several kinds in the later part of the seventeenth century. Among the buccaneers – the word comes from their habit of smoke-drying beef – of the Caribbean and the Pacific coast of Central and South America was the paradoxical and intriguing figure of William Dampier.
Dampier (the name is French, from Dom. Pierre or St Peter) was born at East Coker in Somerset in 1651 during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. One of his biographers claims the family, who were farmers, must have known the Eliots of East Coker: Andrew Eliot emigrated to America in 1660 when Dampier was nine; his descendant, the poet T. S. Eliot, is buried at East Coker. By the time William was fourteen both Dampier parents were dead; at eighteen he went to sea, sailing on merchant vessels to France, Newfoundland and Java. He joined the Royal Navy in 1672 and saw action against the Dutch in the Battle of Texel. In 1674 he went out to Jamaica to work on a sugar plantation but the arrangement turned out not to suit him and he joined a group of buccaneers in the Caribbean. Rather than sacking towns and taking ships, these men were engaged in an illegal trade in Spanish territory on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, harvesting campeachy or bloodwood trees, whose dark red hea
rtwood was valuable for its dyes, its medicinal astringents and as an ink.
Buccaneers were loose associations of free men who typically drew up articles with which they would all attempt to abide. Leadership was by election with every man voting; a captain who lost the confidence of his men could not continue. Many buccaneers were ex-navy men and most abhorred the floggings and the other vicious punishments common on navy ships. It’s possible too that they were a homosexual fraternity, practising a kind of male bonding called matelotage – or mateship – which generally took the form of an older man in consort with a younger boy, often an apprentice recruited, or press-ganged, out of the great flockes of Chyldren who roamed the English countryside. Captain John Avery, an infamous buccaneer, was known as Long Ben – not because of his height. Pirate chiefs jealously guarded their favourite boys though not perhaps during shipboard orgies of drinking and carousing when every soul aboard from captain to ten-year-old powder-monkey was stone drunk.
At this early stage in his career Dampier appears as a young man who is turbulent and self-confident, a hard worker who wants to get ahead, with a curious turn of mind: he takes note of everything he sees and writes it down; as an observer he is both meticulous and exacting. He is also innovative in his language. The campeachy wood harvesters, who lived in swamps and were paid in rum, used to sleep on wooden frames raised above the wet ground which they called barbecues. This arrangement was also used to cook their food and thus the word, which Dampier was the first to use, entered English. There are said to be more than a thousand of his innovations or transliterations in English dictionaries: avocado, breadfruit, cashew, chopstick and sub-species are among them; so are posse, serrated, tortilla; rambling (as an adjective) and caress (as a verb).
Dampier returned to England in 1678, married, and then almost immediately set off once more for the Caribbean. Here he joined another group of buccaneers and with them crossed the isthmus of Panama, sacked towns on the Pacific coast, captured a ship and sailed it as far as the Juan Fernández Islands looking for prizes; before returning to Darien and, in an epic journey, walking back across to the Caribbean coast. On this return trip Dampier carried his writings in a hollow tube of bamboo stoppered at both ends with wax to preserve the contents against the wet on the frequent occasions they had to swim streams. He was a committed writer: he had also to carry paper and pen, and to grind up pigment to make his ink. Leaving Juan Fernández, a known pirate base, in a hurry to avoid a Spanish patrol out of Chile, the buccaneers inadvertently left behind a Mosquito Indian by the name of William. Some years later, in 1684, William was recovered by a ship that Dampier also sailed upon. His brother Robin met him weeping with joy and amazement upon the sands of the beach at Grand Bay. William is the probable original of Defoe’s Man Friday and his rescue is the first instalment in the strange tale of Dampier’s connections with castaways on Juan Fernández.
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