A Trip to Australia and New Zealand
From The Bay of Islands through the Tasman Sea to Sydney, Australia
After Waitangi we were departing New Zealand for our return to Australia. On leaving the Bay of Islands a pod of common dolphins joined the ship for a bit and gave us a wonderful send off. Now we were heading off on a two day cruise back across the Tasman Sea. The idea that Maori pioneers had made this transit in outrigger canoes a millennium before staggers the imagination, but even the thought of seventeenth century seafarers making the voyage in tiny wooden sailing ships without adequate navigational tools and no reliable maps was awesome.
Abel Janszoon Tasman was an interesting fellow. Born in 1603 in the town of Lujegast in the Dutch Republic (the predecessor of the Kingdom of the Netherlands) Tasman was the very first European of record to visit New Zealand. He began exploring the Pacific Ocean in 1634 and in 1642 was sent by the Dutch East India Company on a mission to verify the existence of Marco Polo's Locach (probably the Thai Kingdom of Lop Buri) as well as the full extent of Terra Australis. Sailing out of Batavia, Tasman sighted what turned out to be a huge island on November 24, 1642, and named it after the Governor General of the Dutch East Indies - Anthony van Diemen. That name didn't stick. Today it is known as Tasmania. On December 13, 1642, he again sighted a previously unknown land. Once again he tried to name his find and once again history ignored him, Instead of Tasman's Staten Island the place is now known as New Zealand's South Island. (Zealand is a coruption of Zeeland which is a Dutch Province.)
Tasman made it back to Batavia on June 15, 1643, after sailing around both of New Zealand's islands and across what is now called the Tasman Sea. He went on to a full an interesting life at sea which included a successful mission to the King of Siam and an unsuccessful effort to capture one of the Spanish silver galleons sailing out of Manila. He was found guilty of hanging one of his men illegally, but it did not cause him to lose his favorable place in society. He died in October 1659 in Batavia. Amazingly, no one followed up on any of Tasman's discoveries until a century later when Captain Cook sailed into these waters.
