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1616 to 1829 !1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be re-produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder. Thomas Vanderveldt © 2017 ISBN 1 876763 25 6 Layout and Printing: New Holland Bulletin !2 The New Holland Story By Thomas van der Veldt “In the Aboriginal world we have a belief that our spirit is born in the mother earth, the sun provides the warmth to ensure the grass and other feed is available for animals to eat, which we then eat to survive, and when we die our spirit returns to the earth.“ (John Alexander) !3 Acknowledgement I would like to thank all the people who have helped me to provide the many small pieces of the puzzle that in the end produced the contents of this book. Adriaan de Jong, John and Alice Alexander, the late Peter van der Kuil, Lisa Drage, Uncle Clayton Drage Clayton Drage Jnr, the late Jean Eley and her husband Laurie, Paul Eley, Maria Eley, Len Ogilvie and his wife Jean, Jan “Kabarli” James, Tim and Margaret Hargreaves, Neville Green,, Anita Jarvis, Sid de Burgh, Tim Coleman, The Battye Library, State Records Office, Department of Aboriginal Affairs and many others I may have omitted unintentionally. !4 Foreword Did you know that Western Australia has a history that dates back to 154 years before James Cook landed on the East Coast of this great continent? This history is barely touched upon in schools and we persist in celebrating Captain Cook’s discovery. Yet this was not of James Cook’s making because he clearly wrote in his journal: " [since I] sic. may land no more upon this Eastern coast of New Holland, and on the Western side I can make no new discovery the honour of which belongs to the Dutch navigators and as such they may lay Claim to it as their property." 22 August 1770 p 387, n. 4 Cook knew the situation so it can only be hierarchy in those early days who created a myth out of an otherwise great achievement. Yes, it was the Dutch who landed on the west coast in 1616 leaving a flattened pewter plate nailed to a post. !5 West Australians clearly have their own history, with the first two Europeans becoming marooned in 1629, after the cruel mutiny on the shipwrecked Batavia. 200 years before the British annexed New Holland. Evidence of this event is the stern portion of the United East Indies Company (VOC) ship, Batavia, that foundered on the Abrolhos group of islands in 1629. Painstaking efforts have been made to preserve the timbers that had been submerged for more than 300 years. The shipwreck and the mutiny that preceded it have been well documented as has the massacre of 125 innocent people by the mutineers. The resultant trials and punishments of the murderers included the marooning on the mainland of two young mutineers. Those were the first Europeans to settle in New Holland, albeit it perforce. There are ample indicators that they survived and befriended the Aboriginal people. Twenty seven years later another Dutch ship, the Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon) ran onto a reef about 100 kilometres north of Perth. The wreck site was not discovered until 1963 although word of the disaster !6 had reached Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) in June 1656. There were sixty eight survivors, among whom was the captain Pieter Albertz. The survivors disappeared and were never heard of again. What could have happened to them? In 1712 another large trading vessel, called the Zuytdorp ran onto cliffs about 64 kilometres south of Shark Bay. The wreck was not discovered until 1955, the fate of the crew being a mystery to this day. An ABC documentary about a ‘White Tribe’ in Central Australia, with Les Hiddens, inspired me to investigate in more detail. This emphasised the question as to what happened to the people who survived the ordeal. The common belief was that had perished in this harsh and inhospitable land. Nonsense. Conversely, it showed that these Hollanders became accepted and produced offspring that supported the anecdotes about natives with blonde hair and blue eyes. !7 The British on the other hand established the Swan River Colony and before long all Aboriginals became British Subject. A Royal gesture you might think but the term subject had a darker side. (No pun intended) The became subject to laws that they did not understand and before long the two cultures began te clash due to Aboriginal ignorance of those rules and the high-handed application of the conquerors.. This book describes the journey over the past 15 years to find this new race of mixed blood people. The Aboriginals had no writen history, instead had the Dreamtime carried from Father to son. This New Holland Story covers a 200 year peiod where the Aboriginals shared with European sailors the events depict herein. !8 Introduction Linschoten “Itinerario” Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611), a merchant and explorer, left the Netherlands in 1576 to join his brother in Sevilla. After working for some years in Portugal and Spain, he got a position with the newly appointed Archbishop of Goa, João Vicente da Fonseca. Linschoten spent about five years as Secretary to the Archbishop and had access to maps and portolans and sensitive commercial information. On his return to the Netherlands, Linschoten sold the story of his travels to the Amsterdam publisher Cornelis Claesz, who published it in 1596 under the title Itinerario: Voyagie ofte schipvaert van Jan Huyghen van Linschoten naar Oost ofte Portugaels Indien … 1579-1592. (Translation: Voyage of the ship of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten to the East or Portuguese Indies ...1579-1592) In this volume, which was lavishly illustrated, Linschoten shared the commercially sensitive information he had had access to in Goa, thereby giving Dutch merchants information on Portuguese sea-routes to the Far East, of Portuguese territories, !9 and of spice trees (and spice growing areas) and other commodities. The book, which played a key role in shaping modes of Dutch colonial expansion, was a huge success. Following the first Dutch edition (1596) were a German and an English edition in 1598, a latin edition (1599) and a number of French editions (1610, 1619, 1638). Some of these editions include the plates, but do not include the maps which had added to the success of the first Dutch edition. When in 1562 Spain invaded Portugal in a war that lasted seven years, the spice trade came to a halt. So far the Dutch traders had bought spices in Lisbon and distributed those to countries in the north of Europe. As a result the Dutch undertook the journey to the Spice Islands (present day Indonesia), brought back the spices and made massive profits. In order to stop competition between the different trading companies, a new company was founded under government charter in which the different companies participated as stakeholders and !10 with a 21 year patent for the sole trading rights in the East Indian region. Thus the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) or United East Indies Company was formed in 1602 that lasted until 1795 and made thousands of journeys to the east. Until 1611 the Portuguese maps were used, following the eastern coast of Africa when a Dutch Captain Brouwer initiated a new route that took ships south from the Cape of Good Hope (which is at 34° South latitude south) into the Roaring Forties (at 40°-50° South), then east across the Indian Ocean before turning northward for Java. Thus it took advantage of the strong westerly winds for which the Roaring Forties are named, greatly increasing travel speed.[1] The problem with the route, however, was that there was no easy way at the time to determine longitude. The map below shows the so-called Brouwer route which is the latter part of the outward bound voyage to Batavia. !11 ! !12 CHAPTER ONE The White Tribe of Central Australia It all began in 1832 when an expedition to inland Australia commanded by a Lieutenant Nixon who allegedly discovered a group of Dutch people comprising 300 men and women living in a desert oasis in the Northern Territory. The first report of this discovery appeared in an English newspaper, The Leeds Mercury, in February 1834. Similar reports were published in a Dutch journal Nederlandsch Magazine and The Perth Gazette in 1837. The Leeds Mercury account claimed that Lt Nixon had spoken to the settlers in a broken form of Old Dutch and the leader of the group was a descendant of an officer named Van Baerle from a Dutch ship, wrecked 170 years ago. The exploration party remained with the group for eight days. So far a search through Army and Navy records has failed to identify a Lt. Nixon. Neither was there evidence of an order to conduct an expedition as described. Adding confusion to the story has been a recent conjecture that the Dutch ship was the Concordia. The Concordia was a large ship of approximately 900 tons and had been built in Amsterdam 1696. On 15 January 1708, under the command of Joris Vis, it set out from Batavia on a return trip to the Netherlands with two other VOC ships, Zuiderberg and Mercurius. Included in the 130 passengers and crew on board Concordia were several women returning home and !13 some Balinese who had been deported from the Dutch East Indies to the Cape of Good Hope to serve a sentence for bad conduct.