Willem Schouten

Willem Schouten

Willem Schouten by Mattheus Merian in 1631
Born c. 1567
Hoorn, Holland, Seventeen Provinces
Died 1625
Antongil Bay
Nationality Dutch
Occupation Navigator

Willem Cornelisz Schouten (c. 1567–1625) was a Dutch navigator for the Dutch East India Company. He was the first to sail the Cape Horn route to the Pacific Ocean.

Biography

Route of the 1615–1616 voyage

Willem Cornelisz Schouten was born in c. 1567 in Hoorn, Holland, Seventeen Provinces.

In 1615 Willem Cornelisz Schouten and Jacob le Maire sailed from Texel in the Netherlands, in command of an expedition sponsored by Isaac Le Maire and his Australische Compagnie in equal shares with Schouten. A main purpose of the voyage was to search for Terra Australis, which eluded them. A further objective was to evade the trade restrictions of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) by finding a new route to the Pacific and the Spice Islands. In 1616 Schouten rounded Cape Horn, which he named after the recently lost ship Hoorn and in homage to the sailors lost in the fire that claimed the vessel. It is also the name of the Dutch city of Hoorn, after which the recently lost ship itself was named, the town in which Schouten himself was born. He followed the north coasts of New Ireland and New Guinea and visited adjacent islands, including what became known as the Schouten Islands.

Although he had opened an unknown route for the Dutch (the Spanish had already sailed this route with Magellan almost a century earlier), the VOC claimed infringement of its monopoly of trade to the Spice Islands. Schouten was arrested (and later released) and his ship confiscated in Java. On his return he would sail again for the VOC, and on one of these trips he died off the coast of Madagascar in 1625.

First publications

The ship De Eendraght finds a catamaran in 1618

Schouten described his travels in the Journal, published in a Dutch edition at Amsterdam in 1618 and soon translated into several other languages.

Among historians (A. L. Rowse included) there is no consensus about the authorship of this Journal. Schouten has got the credit for it, and thus the voyage has come down to us under his name. The Dutch, French, German and Latin texts all have nine engraved maps and plates which are not present in the English version, THE RELATION.

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    External links

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