Episode Details

Abel Tasman gave his name to a sea, an island state, a national park, a glacier, and a bridge, yet his employer judged his career a failure. Born around 1603 in the landlocked Dutch village of Lutjegast, he was an uneducated working class seaman who learned navigation on the job, joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and moved to Batavia, modern Jakarta, in 1633. In August 1642 the Council of the Indies, pushed by Governor General Anthony van Diemen, sent him with pilot Franchoijs Visscher and two ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen, to find the Provinces of Beach, a phantom land of gold born from a mapping error in editions of Marco Polo. After a month in the Roaring Forties he sighted Tasmania on November 24, 1642, named it Van Diemen's Land, and on December 3 his ship's carpenter swam ashore to plant a flag.

Storms drove him east, and on December 13, 1642 his crew became the first Europeans to sight New Zealand. In Golden Bay, Maori in waka blew a shell horn, a putatara, likely warning strangers away from tapu kumara fields at mid growing season. The Dutch answered with a trumpet. The next day a waka rammed a Dutch boat and four sailors were clubbed to death with patu, Tasman fired canister shot, and he named the place Murderers Bay. His 1644 voyage missed the Torres Strait, and the VOC decided a more persistent explorer should lead future expeditions. He died in October 1659, and no authenticated portrait of him exists: a painting the National Library of Australia acquired from collector Rex Nan Kivell in 1948 turned out to depict strangers.

• A 1637 skirmish over timber in the Maluku Islands killed two of his men and likely shaped his extreme caution.
• He mistook Cook Strait for a bight and believed New Zealand might connect to Staten Land off South America.
• His will left 25 guilders to the poor of his home village.
• The VOC kept his journal hidden, and it was not formally published until 1898.
• The 1644 Tasman map, or Bonaparte map, preserved his charts until James Cook put that knowledge to use a century later.