Tom Vandervelt which is the chairman of the Dutch East India Company Historical Society wrote the following to “De Nieu Nederlandse Marcurius” in August 2002:
“Our society is engaged in researching the many shipwreck survivors along the West Australian coast, which is several hundred over a 100 years period. Two mutineers were put ashore by Commander Pelsaert of the Batavia, the ship that wrecked on the Houtman abrolhos in 1629. There is evidence that they survived for a long time, integrating with the local aborigines, introducing a form of agriculture and fishing methods. There is evidence that 16% of the Nhanda people’s language is derived from Dutch words. However Australian history gives no recognition of this 200 years of history.”
In a newly published book by historian Mike Dash about the ship “Batavia” writes briefly about the possible contact between Dutch and Nanda people. The reason for the Dutch sailors to end up in Western Australia was due to some terrible occurrences which ended with the ship sinking off the coast of WA. While some headed off in a lifeboat to seek help, 250 of the survivors ended up on a tiny coral island less than half a mile long. A band of mutineers, whose motives were almost beyond comprehension, then started on a cold-blooded killing spree, leaving less than 80 people alive when the rescue boat arrived three months later.
The story of the ship Batavia is fascinating and hints that at least some of the men cast ashore did survive in the Australian interior have surfaced from time to time during the last 200 years. In the early days of the Swan Colony, Mike Dash writes, reports were received of tribes of light-skinned Aborigines living along the coast. The explorer A. C. Gregory reported meeting, in 1848, a tribe in the Murchison River area “whose charachteristics differed considerably from the average Australian.”
Whether or not the Nanda people did meet and mix with the Dutch sailors are still a controversial question among historians in Western Australia and we might never know the true facts.
