Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [66]
In the first years of the VOC, the Company’s sailors had largely kept to the sea lanes established by the Portuguese. From the Cape of Good Hope, these ran north along the African coast to Madagascar, and then northeast across the Indian Ocean to the Indies. There were, however, significant problems with this route. The heat was frequently unbearable, the Portuguese unfriendly, and there were numerous shoals and shallows to negotiate along the way. Furthermore, once north of the Cape, contrary winds and currents made the voyage extremely slow; journeys of up to 16 months were not uncommon. Frequent hurricanes also occurred, which caused the loss of many ships. The Dutch persisted with the Portuguese route, unsatisfactory as it clearly was, only because they knew of no alternative.
Then, in 1610, a senior VOC official named Henrik Brouwer discovered an alternate passage far to the south of the established sea lanes. Heading south rather than north from the Cape of Good Hope until he reached the northern limits of the Roaring Forties, he found a belt of strong, consistent westerlies that hurried his ships toward the Indies. When Brouwer estimated that he had reached the longitude of the Sunda Strait, which divides Java and Sumatra, he had his ships turn north and reached the port of Bantam only five months and 24 days after leaving the United Provinces. He had cut about 2,000 miles from the journey, outflanked the Portuguese, more than halved the time taken to complete the outward voyage, and arrived in Java with a healthy crew to boot.
The Gentlemen XVII were suitably impressed. Faster voyages meant increased profits, and from 1616 all Dutch ships were enjoined to follow the “fairway” Brouwer had discovered. So long as the VOC’s skippers kept an accurate reckoning of their position, it was undoubtedly a far superior route. But the strong winds and fast currents of the Southern Ocean made it all too easy to underestimate how far east a ship had sailed. When this occurred, the vessel would miss the turn to the north and find herself sailing dangerously close to the barren coast of Western Australia.
There were several near disasters. In 1616 the East Indiaman Eendracht*25 unexpectedly encountered the South-Land after an unusually fast passage from the Cape, and sailed north along the coast for a few hundred miles. The charts her officers drew were incorporated into the VOC’s rutters, which henceforth indicated the existence of a small portion of the Australian shore, called Eendrachtsland; but it was by no means certain at the time whether this new coast was the South-Land or some smaller island. In any case, communication with Europe was so slow that news of the discovery took a long time to reach the ears of many skippers and when, two years later, another ship—the Zeewolf*26—chanced on what was almost certainly the North West Cape, her skipper was considerably alarmed “as we have never heard of this discovery, and the chart shows nothing but open ocean at this place.”
The Eendracht and the Zeewolf were fortunate to come on the coast in daylight and light weather. A clumsy, square-rigged East Indiaman encountering land by night or with a strong wind at her back could easily find herself ashore long before she could turn away. Only a few months before