Abel Tasman: The Navigator Who Misread His Discovery
On 13 December 1642, from roughly a hundred kilometres offshore, the men aboard the *Heemskerck* saw what their commander recorded as "a large land, uplifted high" — almost certainly the Southern Alps, rising behind the coast near present-day Punakaiki. Abel Janszoon Tasman had become the first European to see New Zealand. He never set foot on it. Within a week four of his crew were dead in the water, he had named the anchorage Murderers Bay, and he sailed north convinced he might be looking at the edge of a continent that stretched to Cape Horn. Almost everything he concluded about the coastline was wrong. The coastline was still there.
A Sailor Who Learned Everything Afloat
Tasman was born at Lutjegast in Groningen, in the Dutch Republic, probably in 1602 or 1603 — the sources decline to be firmer than that. He was not an educated man; he learned navigation and seamanship on the job, at sea, in the only school available to a poor northern Dutchman with ambition. A marriage proclamation issued at Amsterdam in December 1631 describes him simply as a widower and a sailor. His first wife, Claesgie Heyndrix, had left him a daughter, Claesjen. His second wife was Jannetje Tjaerts, aged twenty-one; the accounts differ on whether the wedding fell at the end of December 1631 or in January 1632.
In 1633 he joined the Dutch East India Company — the VOC, the most formidable commercial organisation on earth — and sailed for Batavia. He rose quickly by the standards of a man with no patrons. By 1634 he was skipper of the *Mocha*. He worked the Maluku Islands and Seram, and in 1639 sailed into the north Pacific under Matthijs Quast. By 1642 he was the kind of officer the Company handed a hard, speculative voyage to: competent, obedient, expendable.
Visscher's Blueprint
The expedition that made Tasman's name was not, in its conception, his. In January 1642 Franz Jacobszoon Visscher drew up a memorandum setting out the plan. The VOC wanted two things: a southern sea route to Chile, and the "rich mines of precious metals and other treasures" it believed were waiting in the great southern continent that cartographers had drawn and nobody had seen. Visscher, credited by later historians with a keen scientific curiosity, sailed as pilot-major and chief adviser. Also aboard was Isaac Gilsemans, whose sketches would become the first European images of New Zealand.
Two small ships left Batavia on 14 August 1642 with 110 men: the *Heemskerck* and the *Zeehaen*. They made Mauritius on 5 September and left it on 8 October, then drove south into the Roaring Forties and turned east along the 45th parallel — further south than any European had sailed in those longitudes between Australia and Chile.
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On 24 November 1642 they raised the west coast of a large island. Tasman named it Van Diemen's Land, after Antonio van Diemen, the Governor-General who had sent him, and formally claimed it on 3 December. Weather prevented anything resembling a survey. Two centuries later it was renamed Tasmania after him, which is a generous return on nine days of bad visibility.
Then he ran east, and on 13 December the mountains appeared.
Murderers Bay
Tasman worked north and then east for five days before anchoring roughly seven kilometres off what is now Golden Bay. What happened next has been argued over ever since. A waka rammed a small boat rowing between the two ships, and four Dutchmen were clubbed to death with patu. As the ships got under way, twenty-two waka came out after them and the *Zeehaen* opened fire, wounding at least one man. The people were Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri. An archaeological reading suggests they were defending a kūmara cultivation under ritual protection during the growing season; the more general point is that they read the newcomers as threatening interlopers and acted accordingly. Tasman wrote the name Moordenaers Baij on his chart and left.
Sailing on, he passed the entrance to what Cook would later prove to be a strait, judged it a bay, and called it Zeehaen's Bight. He named the land Staten Landt, in the belief — the accounts vary on his exact reasoning — that it might be continuous with the Staten Landt already charted near Cape Horn. Only two of his New Zealand names have survived intact: Cape Maria van Diemen and the Three Kings Islands. The rest of it was renamed by Joan Blaeu, the Company's cartographer in Amsterdam, who called it Nieuw Zeeland after a Dutch maritime province.
He touched Tonga on 20 January 1643, nearly lost both ships on the reefs of Fiji, and brought them home to Batavia on 15 June 1643 after ten months at sea.
The Second Voyage and the Company's Verdict
On 30 January 1644 he sailed again, with the *Limmen*, the *Zeemeeuw* and the tender *Braek*, to follow the south coast of New Guinea and find a way round to the eastern side of New Holland. He ran straight past Torres Strait without seeing it, and instead charted the northern Australian coast around the Gulf of Carpentaria, returning about August.
The VOC was unimpressed. He had found no promising area for trade and no useful new shipping route, and the Company criticised him for failing to explore properly the lands he had touched. He was nonetheless appointed to Batavia's Council of Justice on 2 November 1644. He retired in 1653 at fifty, holding 288 acres and running a small cargo ship. He wrote his will in April 1657, describing himself as ill but not bedridden, and leaving twenty-five guilders to the poor of Lutjegast. He died at Batavia — one account gives 10 October 1659, another will say only that he was certainly dead by early 1661.
Why Abel Is Called a Genius
He is not, really, and the honest version is more interesting than the inflated one. None of the standard reference accounts of Tasman reach for the word. What he possessed was a hard, specific, physical competence: the ability to keep two small wooden ships alive through the Southern Ocean for ten months, on an unknown eastward run at latitudes where the westerlies do not stop, and bring 110 men home. That is seamanship of a very high order, and it should not be patronised. Ships and crews were routinely lost doing far less.
But the intellectual work on that voyage largely belonged to someone else. The plan was Visscher's memorandum; the scientific curiosity is attributed to Visscher; the visual record is Gilsemans's. Tasman's own interpretive record is a catalogue of misreadings — he took Cook Strait for a bay, missed Torres Strait entirely, and supposed the land he had found might run to South America. His own employers judged the whole enterprise a commercial failure and faulted his incuriosity directly. J. C. Beaglehole's dry verdict, that New Zealand played but a small part in Tasman's life, cuts both ways: the discovery mattered enormously, and it mattered to Tasman hardly at all. He was an executor of other men's ideas who happened to execute one of them across the right stretch of empty ocean.
Legacy
The negative result was the real one: he demonstrated that Australia was not attached to any larger sixth continent, and his ragged line on the world map was the first hint that something substantial lay in the southwest Pacific. Then Europe left both Tasmania and New Zealand alone for well over a century until Cook. His name now attaches to an island state, a sea, a glacier, a national park, a bridge, a highway, warships in two navies and an asteroid — a density of commemoration owing less to what he understood than to where, one December morning, he happened to be looking.
Achievements
- Recorded as explorer, seafarer and author
