The Vlielander who charted Australia

By the harbour stands a man with binoculars under his arm, as if he has just stepped ashore. Willem de Vlamingh, born on Vlieland in 1640, departed for the other side of the world, and returned in bronze in the year 2000.

He grew up on the Dorpsstraat at a time when the Vlie was one of the busiest waterways in Europe. From these waters, fleets departed for the Baltic Sea, Greenland, and the East Indies. In 1668, De Vlamingh married Willempie Cornelis in the church on the island and subsequently left for Amsterdam. He sailed on whaling expeditions, reaching as far as the waters around Spitsbergen. Only at forty-eight, in 1688, did he enter the service of the VOC.

A mission into the unknown

Eight years later, he was given the mission that would carry his name. Two years earlier, the ship Ridderschap van Holland had vanished without trace on its way to Batavia, possibly wrecked on the unknown west coast of Nieuw-Holland. De Vlamingh had to go and search.

On 3 May 1696, he left the Netherlands with three ships: the frigate Geelvinck with 134 hands, the hoeker Nijptangh with fifty, and the galjoot 't Weseltje with fourteen — nearly two hundred men in total. After the Cape of Good Hope, they steered eastwards. On 29 December 1696, they arrived at an island off the Australian coast teeming with small marsupials. The crew had never seen anything like them and took them for rats the size of cats. De Vlamingh named the island Rottenest. It is still called Rottnest, and the animals turned out to be quokkas.

On the mainland, they sailed up a river where black swans swam. Black swans did not exist in the European imagination — they were the proverb for the impossible. They caught a few to take back to Batavia. The river is now called Swan River, and Perth lies on its banks.

A coast no one had charted

After that, they followed the coast northwards for thirty-nine days, charting it accurately. De Vlamingh wrote that from the sea the land looked like home: low and duned. But arid, he noted alongside, and not suitable for habitation. At night, they saw fires burning on the beach. They made no contact with the people who lit them.

On 30 January 1697, they landed on Dirk Hartog Eiland and found a pewter plate there, left in 1616 by Dirk Hartog and untouched for eighty years. De Vlamingh took it with him and left a plate of his own, recording his ships and crew. That gesture — preserving another's trace and adding your own — is perhaps the finest thing he ever did.

Of the Ridderschap van Holland, they found nothing.

A disappointing homecoming

In March 1697, the fleet arrived in Batavia. The VOC governors looked at what had been brought back: an old pewter plate, a box of shells, a pot of oil pressed from fragrant wood, and eleven small paintings by ship's artist Victor Victorsz. They were deeply disappointed. There was no profit, no recovered ship, no trade.

What they held in their hands was the first thorough chart of the Western Australian coast. That report later reached the English, who deemed the land suitable for sending convicts to.

And De Vlamingh himself? After Batavia, the trail ends. The fifty-six-year-old commander vanishes from the archives. There is no grave, no date of death, no final mention. Two researchers — Jan Houter from Vlieland and Kitty Nooy from Amsterdam — spent years combing through archives in the Netherlands, Denmark, South Africa, and Indonesia to find that date.

He is often called the discoverer of Australia. That is not correct: Hartog was there earlier, and the people whose fires he saw had been there for tens of thousands of years. What he did do was draw a coastline that until then had been merely a suspicion.

The statue has stood there since 2000, created by Christine Chiffrun. It is the first thing you see when you step off the boat.