Biography of dirk harto

After Hartog

Dirk Hartog’s plate remained undisturbed on the island for 81 years after his landing.

In 1697 another VOC captain, Willem de Vlamingh, came ashore and found the marker half buried in sand. Removing the degraded plate, de Vlamingh created a new one, copying Hartog’s inscription then adding the details of his own visit to the island.

De Vlamingh returned to the Netherlands with the Hartog plate, the oldest European artefact recovered from Australian shores. It is now held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

In 1801 a French expedition led by Nicolas Baudin landed on the Island. The de Vlamingh plate was located by the young cartographer, Louis de Freycinet, who bought it back to the corvette Naturaliste. Captain of the Naturaliste, Jacques Hamelin, ordered de Freycinet to return the plate considering it poor form to remove it.

In 1818 de Freycinet returned, this time in charge of his own ship, and took the de Vlamingh plate back to France. The plate was misplaced until the 1940s when it was relocated and, after the Second World War, was gifted to the Australian people by the French government. The plate is now on display in the Maritime Museum in Fremantle, Western Australia.

Many other explorers also spent time in the area around Dirk Hartog Island after its namesake’s visit. In 1699 Englishman William Dampier arrived at the island during his voyage to explore and map the coasts of ‘New Holland’.

Naming the surrounding area Shark Bay because of the large number of sharks spotted, he spent a week in the region mapping the coast and collecting plant specimens.

In 1772 Frenchman Francois de Saint Aloüarn arrived at the island and delegated to a junior officer, Jean Mengaud, the task of claiming the western half of ‘New Holland’ for King Louis XV. Mengaud performed a ceremony, burying two bottles sealed with lead and French coins at Turtle Bay on the island. It wa

Dutch sailor and explorer (1580–1621)

See also: Dirk Hartog Island

Dirk Hartog (Dutch:[ˈdɪr(ə)kˈɦɑrtɔx]; baptised 30 October 1580 – buried 11 October 1621) was a 17th-century Dutch sailor and explorer. Dirk Hartog's expedition was the second European group to land in Australia and the first to leave behind an artifact to record his visit, the Hartog Plate. His name is sometimes alternatively spelled Dirck Hartog or Dierick Hartochsz. Ernest Giles referred to him as Theodoric Hartog. The Western Australian island Dirk Hartog Island is named after Hartog.

Life

Born into a seafaring family, he received his first ship's command at the age of 30 and spent several years engaged in successful trading ventures in the Baltic and Mediterranean seas.

In 1616, Hartog gained employment with the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, commonly abbreviated to VOC), and was appointed master of the Eendracht (meaning "Concord" or "Unity"), in a fleet voyaging from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies.

Hartog set sail in January 1616 in the company of several other VOC ships, but became separated from them in a storm, and arrived independently at the Cape of Good Hope (later to become the site of Cape Town, South Africa). Hartog then set off across the Indian Ocean for Batavia (present-day Jakarta), utilising (or perhaps blown off course by) the strong westerly winds known as the "Roaring Forties" which had been noted earlier by the Dutch navigator Hendrik Brouwer as enabling a quicker route to Java.

On 25 October 1616, at approximately 26° latitude south, Hartog and crew came unexpectedly upon "various islands, which were, however, found uninhabited."He made landfall at an island off the coast of Shark Bay, Western Australia, which is now called Dirk Hartog Island after him. His was the second recorded European expedition to land on the Australian continent, ha