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Aborigines in terms which today we find unacceptable—‘gins’, ‘blacks’, ‘savages’, ‘niggers’, not to mention the strange but surprisingly popular ‘children of nature’—the use of such expressions is not always intended to diminish. I have left the judgment of these instances to the reader. Where necessary, I have modernised punctuation and spelling, silently corrected a handful of obvious errors, inserted the occasional explanatory date, and sometimes added a word or two of clarification in a footnote, marked by a dagger (†). The explorers’ own footnotes are indicted by an asterisk (*). Otherwise, their writings are presented as they were first printed, with any omissions of text indicated by an ellipsis (…).

W ILLEM J ANSZ
    Uncultivated, Savage, Cruel, 1606

    Sometime during the first half of 1606, the Dutch ship Duyffken , under the command of Willem Jansz, made landfall on the western side of Cape York, then known as Nova Guinea. Jansz had entered a great and hitherto unknown gulf—the Gulf of Carpentaria. No eyewitness account of the voyage survives, which is a great pity, for Jansz seems to have been an interesting man. Born a foundling, he became an admiral who, from a pecularity of his speech, was known to his friends as ‘I say, I say’.
    This, the first authenticated visit to Australia by a European, foreshadowed later visits in being marred by bloodshed. The brief account given here is drawn from expedition instructions given to Abel Tasman by the Dutch East India Company in January 1644.
    Both by word of mouth and through the perusal of journals, charts and other writings, it is in the main well known to you how the successive governors of India…have, in order to the aggrandisement, enlargement and improvement of the Dutch East India Company’s standing and trade in the east, divers times diligently endeavoured to make timely discovery of the vast country of Nova Guinea and of other unknown eastern and southern regions; to wit, that four several voyages have up to now with scant success been made for this desired discovery…
    The first was undertaken in the year 1606 with the yacht Duyffken … on which voyage…the unknown south and west coasts of Nova Guinea were discovered over a length of 220 miles from 5 to 13degrees southern latitude, it being only ascertained that vast regions were for the greater part uncultivated, and certain parts inhabited by savage, cruel, black barbarians who slew some of our sailors, so that no information was obtained touching the exact situation of the country and regarding the commodities obtainable and in demand there; our men having, by want of provisions and other necessaries, been compelled to return and give up the discovery they had begun, only registering in their chart the name of Cape Keer-weer, the extreme point of the discovered land…

J AN C ARSTENSZ
    Coal-Black and Stark Naked, 1623

    In 1623 another Dutch mariner Jan Carstensz, sailing in the yacht Pera , entered the Gulf of Carpentaria, pushing further south than Jansz. After passing the verdant Spice Islands and glimpsing the eternal snows of New Guinea’s highest mountains, he was gravely disappointed by the arid country of western Cape York. Worse, the ‘coal-black and stark naked’ inhabitants were implacable, repulsing Carstensz’s attempts to go ‘landinward’ in order to complete his explorations. The crew of the Pera kidnapped an Aboriginal man, whose fate, like that of so many others, is not recorded. The theme of kidnapping was to become a recurring tragedy of Australian exploration.
    We join Carstensz on a deserted and forbidding part of the coast.
    May—On the 3rd…I went ashore myself with ten musketeers, and we advanced a long way into the wood without seeing any human beings. The land here is low-lying and without hills as before, in latitude 15° 20’. It