Zuytdorp

The VOC "Zuytdorp" (meaning 'South village') was a trading ship of the Dutch East India Company in the 1700s. On 1 August 1711 [http://www.voc.iinet.net.au/zuytdorp.html] it was dispatched from the Netherlands to the trading port of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) bearing a load of freshly minted silver coins.

Many trading ships of the time had started to use a "fast route" to Indonesia, which used the strong Roaring Forties winds to carry them across the Indian Ocean to within sight of the west coast of Australia whence they would make a left turn and head north towards Indonesia.

The "Zuytdorp" never arrived at its destination. No search was undertaken, presumably due to prior expensive but fruitless attempts to search for other missing ships. The crew were never heard from again. Their fate was unknown until the 20th century when the wreck site was discovered on a remote part of the Western Australian coast between Kalbarri and Shark Bay, approximately 40 km north of the Murchison River. This rugged section of coastline was subsequently named the Zuytdorp Cliffs.

Theory of intermarriage between survivors and indigenous population

Something, perhaps a violent storm, occurred and the "Zuytdorp" was wrecked on a desolate section of the Western Australian coast. Survivors scrambled ashore and camped near the wreck site. At this stage, Australia had no colonies to which to turn for help, so they built bonfires from the wreckage to signal to fellow trading ships that would pass within sight of the coast. But fires seen in the vicinity tended to be dismissed as "native fires".

It has been speculated that survivors may have traded with or may have intermarried with the local aboriginal community between present-day Kalbarri and Shark Bay. cite web
url=http://parliament.wa.gov.au/Parliament/commit.nsf/(Report+Lookup+by+Com+ID)/FB48F049FAD871ED48256602000663A5/$file/fnl-rpt.pdf
work=Western Australian Legislative Assembly
date=1994-08-17
accessdate=2008-02-21
title=Select Committee on Ancient Shipwrecks] In 1988, an American woman who had married a Shark Bay aboriginal contacted Dr Phillip Playford and described how her husband had died some years before from a disease called variegate porphyria. Dr Playford found that the disease wasgenetically linked and largely confined to Afrikaners and that all cases of the disease in South Africa were traceable back to Gerrit Jansz and Ariaantjie Jacobs, who had married in The Cape in 1688. The Zuytdorp had arrived at the Cape in March 1712 where it took on more than 100 new crew. It was thought that one of the Jansz' sons could have boarded the ship at this time and thus become the carrier of the disease into the Australian Aboriginal population. In 2002, a DNA investigation into the hypothesis of a variegate porphyria mutation having been introduced into the aboriginal population by shipwrecked sailors was undertaken at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre in Nedlands, Western Australia and the Stellenbosch University in South Africa. [cite web|url=http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1445-5994.2002.00274.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=imj|title= Variegate porphyria in Western Australian Aboriginal patients| work=Internal Medicine Journal|date=Volume 32 Issue 9-10 Page 445-450, September 2002|accessdate=2008-02-21] The conclusion was that the mutations were not inherited from shipwrecked sailors.

An infamous predecessor of the "Zuytdorp", the VOC "Batavia" was wrecked not far away on the Houtman Abrolhos islands and after the following mutiny, atrocities, massacres and trials, two of the mutineers had been marooned on the Australian mainland, not far South from the later wreck of the "Zuytdorp" (for details about these two mutineers see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castaway#Jan_Pelgrom_and_Wouter_Loos )

Archaeology

There is also some debate over the first person to discover the wreck in modern times. Early exploration of the wreck has appeared to have been characterised by looting and treasure hunting.

According to the 1994 Select Committee on Ancient Shipwrecks:
* Primary Discoverer: Tom Pepper, a stockman working at Murchison House Station who claimed to have discovered the wreck in April, 1927
* Second Primary Discoverer: Phillip Playford, a geologist working at Tamala Station who identified the wreck between 1954 and 1957
* Secondary Discoverers: Ada Drage, Max Cramer, Graham Cramer, Tom Brady

An award ceremony was held in Geraldton on 22 February 1996 to acknowledge the discovery.

In 1834, Aborigines told a farmer near the recently colonised Perth about a wreck some distance to the North. Details strongly point to the "Zuytdorp", however the colonists presumed it was a recent wreck and sent rescue parties who failed to find the wreck or any survivors.

Numerous excavations since 1941 have been conducted on the site. Primary discoveries included the remains of the actual wreck, just offshore, containing the "carpet of silver" (coins) the site was famous for, but later stolen under mysterious circumstances. The Western Australian Maritime Museum has been instrumental in organising research expeditions to the site.

Phillip Playford has written a comprehensive book about the "Zuytdorp" called "Carpet Of Silver: The Wreck Of The Zuytdorp" , and this in turn was followed by Bill Bunbury reviewing the whole issues of the wreck and consequences in his chapter called "A Lost Ship-Lost People - The Zuytdorp story" in 'Caught in Time - Talking Australia History".

References

* Playford, Phillip: "Carpet Of Silver: The Wreck Of The Zuytdorp" 1996, University Of Western Australia Press ISBN 1-875560-85-8
* Bunbury, Bill: "Caught in Time - Talking Australian History" 2006, Fremantle Arts Centre Press ISBN 1-921064-84-6
* Gerritsen, R: "And their Ghosts May Be Heard" 1994, Fremantle Arts Centre Press ISBN 1-86368-063-2

External links

* [http://www.voc.iinet.net.au/zuytdorp.html Australian VOC Historical Society : Zuytdorp]
* [http://www.museum.wa.gov.au/collections/maritime/march/shipwrecks/Zuytdorp/Zuytdorp.html Western Australia Maritime Museum : Zuytdorp]

ee also

* List of shipwrecks
* Maritime archaeology
* VOC ship Amsterdam