Dutch Explorers Trivia Quiz

Answer: Willem Barentsz

The Northeast Passage is a route along the northern coast of Europe, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. European explorers, especially those from the northern parts of Europe, were interested in finding shorter sea routes to the Pacific islands, with their valuable trade resources, than was afforded by travelling around the southern tips of either Africa or South America.

While English explorers concentrated on the Northwest Passage, north of Canada, Willem Barentsz (1550? - 1597) was one of many who searched for a passage to the north of Russia.

He went on three voyages, mapping much of the northern coast of Russia, and reached the Kara Sea (a part of the Arctic Ocean bordering Siberia), spending time on the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya when their way was blocked by ice.

He died on the third voyage, when they were stranded on Novaya Zemlya for nearly a year before the crew was able to return. The Barents Sea, to the west of Novaya Zemlya, was named after him.

Answer: Sebalt de Weert

Sailing for the Dutch East India Company, Sebalt de Weert (1567 - 1603) was on one of several expeditions setting out at roughly the same time in 1598 to investigate alternative routed to the Dutch East Indies, trying to work out the fastest way for trade vessels.

His course was through the Straits of Magellan at the south of Argentina and Chile, then to the Moluccas. A five-month layover in the Cape Verde islands saw a number of men dying of fever, including the leader of the expedition, Captain Jacques Mahut. Sebalt de Weert ended up in charge of the Gelouf.

The ships encountered terrible weather at the Straits of Magellan, and finally reached the Pacific in September of 1599. The ships in the flotilla got separated, some never getting past Patagonia, some deciding to head to Japan instead of the East Indies, and the Gelouf turning back for Europe.

It was at this stage that he noticed some islands that were not on his charts, so he duly made notes. While some others have been claimed as previously sighting the Falklands, de Weert's charts were the first to record his visit indisputably.

Answer: Willem Janszoon

You'll notice that a number of the names in this quiz are associated with Australia, as the Dutch concentrated most of their exploratory efforts on the lucrative South Pacific, with most voyages sponsored by trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company (in Dutch, "Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie", often abbreviated to VOC). Willem Janszoon (1570 - 1630) served the VOC for several periods of time between 1603 and 1616.

It was in 1605 that he was instructed to sail south from Bantam (on the island of Java) in an attempt to explore the coast of New Guinea, looking for new economic opportunities. What he thought to be a southern-jutting part of New Guinea turned out to be the western coast of the Cape York Peninsula, near what is now the town of Weipa, Queensland.

He travelled about 300 km south before turning back due to poor terrain and hostile residents. His map, which showed the peninsula as being part of New Guinea, were the first written record of a European landing in Australia, although there are reports of other, earlier, arrivals.

Answer: Adriaen Block

Adriaen Block (1567? - 1627) was a private trader (not employed by either the Dutch East India Company or the Dutch West India Company set up to exploit the North American fur trade) who explored the coast of North America between New Jersey and Massachusetts in a number of voyages between 1611 and 1614, in the course of which he established trade with the Native Americans of the region, and produced extensive maps.

These maps are responsible for the first use of some names which are now familiar, including naming the Dutch colony New Netherland.

He is credited as the first European to sail Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River, and was responsible for determining that Manhattan and Long Island are indeed islands. He reached them from the East River (which is actually an estuary on the east side of Manhattan that connects Upper New York Bay and Long Island Sound), to which he gave the name "Hellegat".

The choice of word is ambiguous - it could be translated either as Hell's Hole or as Bright Gate.

The former could be a reference to the turbulent waters found in the region still called Hell's Gate, where the tidal flows from Long Island Sound, New York Harbor and the Harlem River meet; the latter could describe the good lands to be found on the other side of the passage.

Answer: Dirk Hartog

And we're back in Australia. In 1611, Hendrik Brouwer came up with a new, faster route around the southern tip of Africa to reach Java which involved sailing due east from the Cape of Good Hope (rather than back up the east coast of Africa and around the northern coast of the Indian Ocean) taking advantage of the "Roaring Forties", and provided a rapid passage.

It was only a matter of time before someone sailed a bit more to the south (possibly blown off course, possibly intentionally) and ran into the west coast of Australia.

In 1616, Dirk Hartog (1580 - 1621), sailing for the VOC in the Eendracht, spotted some uninhabited islands in what is now known as Shark Bay, in Western Australia. The island on which he landed is now called Dirk Hartog Island.

He explored the nearby islands for three days, before heading off to his original destination. Before he left, he left an inscribed pewter plate, now known as the Hartog plate, attached to a post as a record of his visit.

Answer: Willem Schouten

Cape Horn is the most southerly point of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, to the north of which is the passage known as the Strait of Magellan, previously the usual sea route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific around the south of South America. It was named by Willem Cornelisz Schouten (1567? - 1625) after his home town when he (along with Jacob le Maire) led the first expedition to reach the Pacific Ocean by this route.

They showed that Tierra del Fuego was not a southerly continent, as had been conjectured.

After reaching the Pacific, they discovered and charted a number of South Pacific islands, including Tonga, New Ireland, and the Schouten Islands (also called the Le Maire Islands), part of Papua New Guinea.

Answer: Wiebbe Hayes

Unlike the others featured in this quiz, Wiebbe Hayes (1608? - sometime after 1629) did not set out to discover anything. Rather, he was a soldier sailing on the Batavia, which was shipwrecked near the coast of Western Australia in June of 1629. After the ship's captain (Adriaen Jacobzs) and the head merchant of the Dutch East India Company (Francisco Pelsaert) set out for Java to get help, Jeronimus Cornelisz felt that the men's admiration for Wiebbe Hayes's leadership during the shipwreck and its aftermath threatened his plans to hijack the rescue ship for use in piracy, as he had intended to do with the Batavia, and arranged to have Hayes and 20 of his supporters marooned on West Wallabi Island. Fortunately for them, they were able to locate fresh water on East Wallabi Island (accessible by a shallow channel) and fresh meat from the plentiful wallabies on the island. This put them in a much better position than the mutineers on Beacon Island, who proceeded to launch attacks. In anticipation of this, Hayes had organised his men to build shelters and defensive walls out of stones, and successfully repelled the first three attacks. During the fourth attack, which was not going well for the defenders, the rescue ship Sardam arrived. Because Hayes managed to warn them that the mutineers intended to capture the ship, they were prepared and successfully foiled the attempt. By the 21st century, little remained of the fort, but the residual walls are testimony of their survival skills.

When Hayes returned to Batavia he was awarded a decoration and a promotion for his actions. That is the last time his name appears in written records, so we have no details at all of the rest of his life, but the memory of his heroic efforts lives on.

Answer: Abel Tasman

It would not have required much guessing if I had told you that he gave the name of Van Diemen's Land to the island that is now the Australian state of Tasmania. Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603 - 1659) is best known for the voyages he made as an employee of the VOC. In 1642, he was sent off to look for the hypothesized "Terra Australis", a large landmass located south of the Spice Islands - what we now know as Australia. In the course of this voyage, he sailed from Mauritius, expecting to reach the Solomon Islands, but instead sailed south of Australia, and made landfall in Tasmania, claiming possession of the island on 3 December, 1642. He then headed east, across what is now called the Tasman Sea, reaching New Zealand on 13 December. He called it Staten Landt, thinking he had reached the western coast of Terra Australis. He then turned north, and made his way back to Batavia, island-hopping along the way.

In 1644, Tasman undertook a second voyage, sailing east along the southern coast of New Guinea before turning south and following the northern coast of Australia, from the east side of the Gulf of Carpentaria west to the North West Cape in Western Australia, mapping the coastline as he went.

Answer: Willem de Vlamingh

Willem Hesselsz de Vlamingh (1640 - sometime in or after 1698) was sent by the VOC to look for a ship that had been lost while on its way to Batavia. It was thought that it may have been wrecked on the west coast of Terra Australis, so de Vlamingh sailed there on what proved to be a disappointing trip from the perspective of recovering the lost goods.

However, the voyage remains significant for the time they spent in West Australia. In December 1696 and January 1697, his three ships explored the island they called "Rotte Nest" (Rat Nest), named for the marsupial quokkas which they mistook for large rats. From there, they sailed up the Swan River (named "Zwaanenrivier" for the many black swans found along the river).

Although de Vlamingh gets naming credit, his men were not the first Europeans to land on Rottnest Island - that credit is given to Abraham Leeman and his men, who landed there in 1658 while looking for survivors of a missing ship that was later found shipwrecked about 80 km north of the island.

Answer: Jacob Roggeveen

In 1722, Easter was on 5 April, and that is the date when Jacob Roggeveen (1659-1729) first landed on the island of Rapa Nui while on his way to find a viable westerly trade route to the Spice Islands in a voyage sponsored by the Dutch West India Company. After using the Strait of Le Maire to reach the Pacific, he landed in Valdivia, Chile before heading out to look for islands and, in theory, Terra Australis. Easter Island is only one of the islands he charted on his way to Batavia, where he was arrested for violating the VOC monopoly of the trade routes to the region. He was eventually released after a lengthy trial, because he hadn't actually set up any trade, and compensated for the confiscation of his ships.

Roggeveen reported seeing between two and three thousand inhabitants on Easter Island. The introduction of European diseases, Peruvian slave trade and emigration due to the difficult environmental conditions (already being caused by the introduction of the Polynesian rat by the earliest settlers around 1200) led to a substantial decrease of the following years - in 1877, the population of native inhabitants was recorded as slightly over 100.