Abel Tasman

Abel Janszoon Tasman was born in 1603 in Lutjegast, a small farming village in the province of Groningen in the northern Netherlands ^[1]. Nothing certain survives about his parents or schooling, a common gap in the records of seventeenth century Dutch commoners. The patronymic Janszoon indicates only that his father was named Jan.

By the early 1630s Tasman had moved to Amsterdam, then the busiest port in Europe and the commercial heart of the young Dutch Republic. A church record from 1632 shows him, already a widower, marrying Jannetje Tjaers in that city ^[2]. The document describes him as a common sailor living in a modest quarter, which suggests he learned seamanship the hard way, working the North Sea and Baltic trades rather than studying navigation in any formal setting.

In 1633 he signed on with the Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch initials as the VOC, and sailed for Batavia, the company capital on Java, today the Indonesian city of Jakarta ^[1]. For an ambitious man without family wealth, VOC service offered one of the few routes to advancement, though it carried brutal risks from disease, shipwreck and combat.

Tasman rose quickly through the company hierarchy in Asia. He served as mate and then skipper on ships working the spice routes around the Indonesian archipelago, and he saw action against Spanish and Portuguese rivals as well as local rulers resisting the company monopoly ^[2]. After a return visit to the Netherlands in 1637, during which his wife joined him for the voyage back east, he settled into VOC service based at Batavia.

In 1639 he sailed as second in command under Matthijs Quast on an expedition into the North Pacific searching for islands of gold and silver rumored to lie east of Japan ^[3]. The voyage found nothing of the kind and scurvy killed much of the crew, but Tasman brought his ship home and his handling of the disaster raised his standing with the company leadership. Further voyages took him to Japan, Formosa (present day Taiwan), Cambodia and Sumatra.

The governor general at Batavia, Anthony van Diemen, was an expansionist who wanted to know what lay in the unexplored ocean south and east of the Indies. Dutch ships had already stumbled onto the western and northern coasts of the landmass then called New Holland, but no one knew its southern limits or whether a navigable route ran south of it toward Chile and the silver of Spanish America. Van Diemen chose Tasman to find out ^[1].

Tasman sailed from Batavia on August 14, 1642 with two small ships, the war yacht Heemskerck and the transport Zeehaen, carrying about 110 men ^[3]. His sailing master and chief navigator was Frans Jacobszoon Visscher, whose planning shaped the route: first west to Mauritius to catch the strong westerly winds of the high southern latitudes, then east across the empty ocean below New Holland.

On November 24, 1642 the lookouts sighted a mountainous coast never before recorded by Europeans. Tasman named it Van Diemen's Land in honor of his patron; since 1856 it has been called Tasmania in his own honor ^[1]. A landing party could not get ashore through heavy surf, so the ship's carpenter swam through the waves and planted a flag claiming the land for the Dutch Republic. The crews saw notches cut into tree trunks and heard sounds they took for human activity, but they never met the Aboriginal Tasmanians who lived there.

Continuing east across the sea that now bears his name, Tasman sighted the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand on December 13, 1642, the first European to record the country ^[4]. The encounter turned violent at what he named Murderers Bay, now Golden Bay, where Maori waka rammed a ship's boat and four Dutch sailors were killed on December 19 ^[4]. Tasman withdrew without landing, sailed up the western coasts of both main islands, and mistakenly charted the land as possibly part of a continuous southern continent. On the homeward arc he became the first European to sight the Tonga islands, where the reception was friendly and the ships resupplied, and then Fiji, whose reefs nearly wrecked the expedition ^[3]. He returned to Batavia in June 1643 after a ten month voyage that had circled Australia entirely without ever seeing it.

The VOC directors judged the great voyage a commercial failure. Tasman had found no gold, no spices and no new trading partners, and his cautious refusal to land in dangerous places drew criticism from men who had risked nothing themselves ^[2]. Van Diemen nevertheless sent him out again in 1644 with three ships to settle a nagging geographic question: whether New Guinea was joined to the northern coast of New Holland.

Sailing along the southern shore of New Guinea, Tasman missed the entrance to Torres Strait, probably because of shoals, reefs and poor visibility, and concluded wrongly that the two landmasses were connected ^[1]. He then charted the Gulf of Carpentaria and long sections of Australia's northern and northwestern coasts with an accuracy that stood for generations. The 1644 voyage produced no trade either, and after Van Diemen died in 1645 the company lost its appetite for southern exploration for more than a century.

Among the lasting products of these expeditions is the Tasman map, a large chart summarizing Dutch knowledge of Australia and New Zealand drawn from his voyages; a celebrated version is held by the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, where a marble mosaic copy decorates the Mitchell Library vestibule floor ^[5]. A journal of the 1642 voyage, with coastal profiles and drawings, survives in the Dutch National Archives and remains a key primary source ^[6].

Tasman's first marriage produced a daughter, Claesgen, before his first wife died young. His second wife, Jannetje Tjaers, lived with him in Batavia, where the couple belonged to the small elite of senior company servants ^[2]. Records show him owning property in the town and trading on his own account, a tolerated practice that made many VOC officers wealthy.

His later career was solid rather than glorious. He was promoted to commander, sat as a member of the Batavia Council of Justice, and in 1648 led a fleet sent to harass Spanish shipping in the Philippines ^[1]. That expedition damaged his reputation: in a drunken episode he ordered two of his sailors hanged without trial for disobedience, and one died. A court in Batavia suspended him from office in 1649, fined him and made him pay compensation to the dead man's family. He was formally reinstated in 1651 but never held a major command again ^[2].

Tasman spent his final years as a prosperous merchant and landowner in Batavia. He signed his will in 1657, leaving money to the poor of Lutjegast, the village of his birth, and died in Batavia on October 10, 1659 ^[1]. His estate passed to his widow and his daughter.

Measured by the company balance sheet, Tasman's voyages failed; measured by what they added to human knowledge of the planet, they were among the most productive of the seventeenth century. Any list of Abel Tasman achievements begins with the European discoveries of Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga and Fiji in a single voyage, and with proof that a great ocean, not a polar continent, lay south of Australia ^[3]. His charts of Australia's northern coast guided navigators until the era of James Cook, who carried Dutch maps derived from Tasman's work when he charted New Zealand in 1769 ^[4].

His name is written across the region he explored. Tasmania, the Tasman Sea, the Tasman Glacier and Abel Tasman National Park at the top of New Zealand's South Island all commemorate him, and monuments stand in Lutjegast, where a small museum, the Abel Tasman Kabinet, tells his story ^[5]. New Zealand marked the 350th anniversary of his landfall in 1992, an occasion that also prompted franker discussion of the deadly first contact at Golden Bay and its meaning for Maori communities ^[4].

Historians still debate the man behind the Abel Tasman facts: a superb seaman and careful chartmaker to some, an unimaginative servant of company orders to others. Any full Abel Tasman biography has to hold both judgments together. He sailed farther into the unknown south than anyone before him, missed Australia's east coast by a wide margin, and came home to an employer that wanted cargo rather than coastlines. The coastlines turned out to matter more ^[1].