Australia's First Ship

Nick Burningham, Duyfken Foundation, Western Australia

 

As the dark monsoonal rain clouds and storms set in from the west, in the last week of 1605, the small Dutch ship Duyfken set out from the Spice Island of Banda (now part of Eastern Indonesia) on a voyage beyond the edge of the known world. A voyage which would result in the first historically recorded visit to Australia.

 

Duyfken was a fast armed ship, a jacht, probably built for smuggling or for privateering in the Netherlands struggle for independence from Spain. She was selected as the scout for one of the first Dutch fleets to venture around the Cape of Good Hope and challenge the Portuguese monopoly in the lucrative spice trade. Those Dutch voyagers were equipped with maps less accurate than you might find in the back of a cheap diary, in some areas they had only blank sheets of paper to fill in as they went. Small, manoeuvrable and relatively expendable vessels searched ahead for reefs and islands, and that was Duyfken's dangerous role.

 

The log from the flagship of the fleet, Gelderlandt, still exists in huge Dutch state archives (Rijksarchief: ARA136/137) and it reveals that Duyfken sometimes scouted too far ahead. As they sailed west on the latitude of Mauritius, searching for that island, Duyfken was over the horizon ahead and the fleet could not catch her even carrying full sail at night which they preferred not to do while approaching a landfall.

 

She survived the voyage out to the Indies and a return to the Netherlands during which she became separated from the larger ships in a storm off the south of Africa and reached home two months ahead of them. Her captain for that voyage was Willem Corneliszoon Schouten who is credited with the discovery of Cape Horn in 1616. While she was on the voyage back to the Netherlands Duyfken was bought by the newly formed United East India Company (VOC) and at the end of 1603 she was sent back to the Indies to operate there carrying urgent messages and supplies between VOC outposts and to make further voyages of exploration. Her captain was then Willem Janszoon.

 

On her first visit to the Indies Duyfken had already explored parts of the land that we call New Guinea but which the Dutch navigators knew by the Portuguese name Os Papuas. In 1605 Duyfken was sent to search for the mythical island of Nova Guinea and other "East and Southlands". Nova Guinea was believed by biblical scholars to be a large island where King Solomon's gold mines were located lying away to the southeast of the spice islands. The name of the Solomon Islands today reflects the theorised position of Nova Guinea's eastern coast.

 

A seventeenth century chart of Duyfken's historic voyage shows that she sailed first to the remote Kei and Aru islands, perhaps trading for bird of paradise feathers, then to the wild southern coast of Irian Jaya near the treacherous False Cape. Remarkably, Duyfken's skipper, Willem Janszoon, took her right into the mouths of the Digul and Odammun rivers, about which the Admiralty Sailing Directions contains the most dire warnings of torrential tidal streams and even a tidal bore.

Extreme caution should be exercised in approaching the coast in the vicinity of Digul river ...  At or near spring tides, with the first rise after low water, a bore or flood wave travels up Odammun river. The wave which appears as breakers may be dangerous for small vessels.

 

Duyfken then skirted the low-lying and swampy coast, beating off shore against the westerly monsoon to prudently get clear of False Cape.  Again the Admiralty Sailing Directions state the danger:

False Cape (Kaap Valsche) ... is dangerous to approach ... it is possible to run aground before sighting land.

 

Modern charts note discoloured water in the shallows well off False Cape and this is also indicated on the Duyfken chart. Yet another caution in the Admiralty Sailing Directions attests to Janszoon’s prudent navigation:

Bad weather is usually experienced off False Cape. With any sea, as there ... frequently [is] during the north-west monsoon, it is advisable to keep well away from the coast ...

The chart shows Duyfken standing southwest into the Arafura Sea, perhaps unwilling to run eastwards before the wind until a monsoon storm had passed. She was within a hundred nautical miles of Australia's Cape Wessel when she resumed her exploration to the southeast, and a few days later Duyfken and her crew made their historic landfall on the Cape York Peninsula at the Pennefather river north of Weipa.

 

They explored first to the south visiting Albatross Bay where Weipa is now built (Janszoon noticed the insects rather than an Albatross and called it "Fly Bay"). They continued south to a point which they named Cape Keerweer (Dutch for turnaround) and to which Matthew Flinders restored that name to honour the explorers who had been there two centuries before him.

 

Returning to the north, Janszoon made an accurate chart of the Cape York coast easily reconciled with modern charts and the ship's boat was sent many kilometres up at least one of the rivers. On one of these expeditions a man was killed by spears or projectiles thrown by the Aboriginal people. The exploration of that unknown lee shore in the stormy wet season points to Duyfken being a very manoeuvrable vessel and quite able to tack to windward.

 

Willem Janszoon sailed Duyfken across Torres Strait (some months before Torres sailed there) charting islands until her northward course was blocked by reef on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea. By then the dry season southeast trade winds were returning and Janszoon was able to clear Torres Strait and return to the Irian Jaya coast again giving False Cape a wide berth.

 

Perhaps Janszoon and his super-cargo Rosengijn had been disappointed by the apparent lack of trade opportunities and gold on the Cape York Peninsula, and perhaps their provisions were running out. They visited a village called Tiuri not far north of False Cape and it was probably there that nine men were killed, nearly half of Duyfken's crew. The final voyage back to Banda must have been a nightmare for the exhausted and dispirited crew, but they would have had some idea of the significance of their discoveries. Nova Guinea was believed to be joined to the great Unknown Southern Continent, Terra Australis Incognita — their's was the first charting of the Southland and the beginning of the historical progression from Australis Incognita to the modern nation of Australia.

 

The Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation Inc. was set up in Fremantle, Western Australia, to build a replica of Australia's first ship, and to consolidate the expertise developed by the Endeavour replica construction.

 

Construction started with the laying of the keel by Crown Prince Willem Alexander of the Netherlands on January 12th 1997. Now, a year later (Feb 98) the basic hull has been formed from massive oak timbers and the project is on schedule for launching on Australia Day weekend 1999.

 

Duyfken is from an age when ship's plans were developed in shipwright's heads, not on paper, so no original plans exist. The design has been reconstructed from ship building contracts discovered in Dutch archives by Robert Parthesius, the evidence of shipwreck archaeology, mathematical analysis of contemporary artists renditions of ships (sometimes called "morphometric analysis of iconography") and by evidence from log books of the original ship's performance. Some replica ship projects have not paid much attention to performance and the result is replicas which would be very unsuitable for voyages of discovery. The Duyfken Foundation has, from the outset, had the goal of building a replica that could emulate the performance of the original. We have been very fortunate in obtaining currently unpublished data about a late sixteenth century Dutch shipwreck which shows surprisingly sharp lines below the waterline and hollow deadrise in the midsection. There are a number of contemporary ship models which are far from accurately scaled; interestingly they all show the same sharp bows and hollow deadrise but without the solid evidence of archaeology the evidence of the models has been ignored and rejected.

 

Having reconstructed the design on paper and using the naval architectural CAD program Maxsurf (kindly loaned to the Foundation by Formation Design) the result is tested by building the ship in the same way as the original. Dutch shipwrights constructed the lower hull of the ship in a unique way. While most European shipwrights had switched to a frame-first mode of construction by the sixteenth century the Dutch continued with a more archaic system building the underwater body plank-first although they had changed from clinker to carvel planking. Massive oak planks are bent to shape over open fires, the lower hull is assembled by fitting the planks together with temporary cleats, the shipwrights working by eye. This allowed Dutch shipwrights to build whatever shape hull they thought best suited to various trades and changing taxes and levies. Frame first construction relied on rather crude geometry to draught the shapes of the frames and constrained shipbuilders to relatively inefficient "kettle-bottomed" shapes. The Dutch shipwrights gave Dutch merchant shipping a huge advantage. When the small Dutch nation first came into existence in the late sixteenth century it operated approximately eight times as much shipping as England.

 

This ancient art of shipwrightery has been relearned by the Duyfken Foundation's shipwrights under the leadership of master shipwright Bill Leonard. So the ship as-built is subtly different from the ship as-designed through academic research. It is the creation of the shipwrights' eye, the way oak planks take a bend when heated over a fire and the process of plank-first construction. The design as-built should be more authentic and the curves of the hull are easy natural curves which should give good sailing characteristics.

 

Once the lower hull had been shaped as a plank shell, grown oak timbers were used to form the frames. Now the framing is continued up to build the upper hull by the more familiar frame-first process and construction is speeding ahead.

 

Duyfken is being reconstructed as a ship of 20m length between stem and sternpost, about 24m between beakhead and taffrail. She has 5.6m moulded beam and 2.4m depth in the hold. The floors are 200mm moulding and siding, room and space is 400mm. The bilge futtocks have the same scantlings as the floors but the top futtocks taper down to 150 x 150mm in the topsides. Hull planking is 60mm thick.

 

All the oak for Duyfken's construction is imported from Latvia in the Baltic where the Dutch were sourcing a great deal of timber four hundred years ago. Finding the grown shapes for the frames and major timbers such as the stem has been difficult for the suppliers. The shape of the stem was not designed on paper until the timber had been found and the shape determined from the natural curve of the log.

 

No aspect of the design is fixed until it is built. Our designs had included a second deck in the waist. It was believed that guns were nearly always positioned below decks so that they were safe from boarders in Duyfken's time. An armed jacht seemed to imply a two deck ship. There were problems with the gun deck being rather close to the waterline and height between decks being very limited. Later in the sevententh century some ships did have gun decks dangerously close to the waterline but the iconography suggested that in Duyfken's time greater freeboard was the norm, yet combining that with a second deck would produce a clumsily high sided vessel if applied to a ship as small as Duyfken.

 

There are three tiny sketches showing Duyfken in the Gelderlandt log book, one of which hints at guns on deck. Then a fine oil painting was discovered in the collection of the Swedish National Maritime Museum which seemed to show a small jacht, like Duyfken, with a single-deck and guns mounted out on the open deck. A few other examples emerged and we began again to debate the possibility of a single-deck arrangement. Discussion papers were written and circulated internationally and long discussions held. A couple of months ago we made the decision to change to a single-deck in the waist, completely changing the general arrangement. We are now very glad that we have done that because only last week Robert Parthesius sent us three newly discovered shipbuilder's contracts for small armed ships dated 1594, and all three ships are single decked!

 

Unlike Endeavour, Duyfken is not being built to survey for commercial use. When she sails it will be with volunteer crew like a modern racing yacht. Rigging will be hemp and sails will be flax canvas but communications and safety gear will be state of the art.