VOYAGE FOR THE DISCOVERY OF TASMAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 181, 11 December 1942, Page 10

VOYAGE FOR THE

DISCOVERY OF TASMAN

(Written for "The Listener" by

J. C.

BEAGLEHOLE

into our New Zealand tradition. We all know that he discovered New Zealand; some of us know that he discovered it on December 13, 1642; some that he called it Staten Land, after their High Mightinessés the States-General of the United Netherlands. We know the natnes of his ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen; we know about the unfortunate afftay in Golden Bay; we know one or two of the names he gave to parts of that coastline he really no more than glimpsed -the Steeples, Cape Maria van Diemen, the Three Kings. We know that he wasn’t really looking for New Zealand, afd hardly appreciated the manifold virtues of our delectable land; for he had not the production of Cantetbury lamb or Waikato butter in mind, atid when Three Kings slipped into the darkness he had lost four tien and had gained neither fresh water nor fresh provisions in return. He could but solace his feelings and fend off the reproaches of his masters with the general verdict that it seemed a very good sort of land. Not many commanders, after a sight of Golden Bay and the shores of Cook Strait, would have said less than that, After all, they were not paid to discover deserts. What Do We Know? We know indeed a few things about Tasman, but only a few. He was born in 1603 and died about 1659; he served the Dutch East Indies Company in a variety of miscellaneous employments connected with the sea; he was married twice, and got drunk at least once; he made a will. But what do those things tell us about the man? "The best seaman of them all rbefore Jatnes Cook," wrote Conrad of hit, and Conrad knew a bit about the sea and about sailors. Is that a true judgment? We don’t even know that sutely enough to be dogmatic. Our Dutchman suffers from the obscurity comfthon to most figures of the seventeenth century, not absolutely of the first rank, who did not leave a diary or a mass of intimate correspondence which has escaped the chances of cons suming time. Apart from the Journal ef the voyage of 1642-43, on which our country was. sighted» and coasted, we have no single written’ word of Tasrmanhis will is obviously a lawyer’s docu-ment-no anécdote which throws light on his unbuttoned personality, no portrait. (Thé picture so often reprodticed has obviously no connexion with Tasman at all, even if it did find a place of honour on a centennial stamp). But reading painfully between the lines of his Journal, and of the reports made TASMAN has entered

about his voyages-his name crops up often enough in the records of the East Indies Company-and scrutifising with équal pains, as Dutch scholars have done, the few bits of cattography he has left behind him; using our imagination carefully under control, moreover, we can begin to think a little bit of life, a few human characteristics, into that uns known figure. His "Pilot-Major" Tasman, then, was no scientific thinker, no great geographer. If there was a man of that sort connected with his voyage, it was his "pilot-major," Franchoys Jacobszoon Visscher, a famous cartographer afid. hydrographer of the time in East Indian seas, and the Compatiy’s expert on the coasts of Japan. We have a few bits of Visschet’s writing: he was an accurate chart-maker, but he could also think in bold sweeps. He may be described as the scieritific leader of the 1642 voyage. But Tasman was no fool. He was expert in dead réckoning. He was, when he got neat énough to land, a good observer. He was carefu! of his men, good enough as an organiser, no braggart. He could act with decision in moments of extreme danger — as amongst the reefs and shoals of Fiji; but he tended to be cautious, even over cautious, normally -as he was off the coast of New Guinea. He had not Cook’s passion for clearing up every vestige of the unknown, he was content too often to accept a predecessor’s results atid ins corpotate those on his map; he was if clined, like many another skipper, to explain his actions of particular times by appealing to a consensus of opinion among his officers, to genéral agreement among everybody who might be concerned. Of course, the peculiar Dutch institution of the ship’s council put a premium on this sort of reasoning, but the age-old note is unmistakably there. No Nonsense About Him But we can’t all be discovered for the first time by men in the highest flights (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) of greatness; and after all, we have, too, in our tradition the diverse figures of Kupe and Cook. We have no need to be ashamed of Tasman who in his thirty-ninth year added our west coast to the world map. He may stand in our history for what his century and the next were used to call the "tarpaulin"the solid, practical sailor, smelling probably of oilskin and sweat, with no nonsense about him; good enough as a leader to command a fleet of eight or nine ships against the Spaniard, but not great enough to create a legend; good enough as an explorer to be sent out as "skipper-commander" of two important expeditions, though not to be numbered among the very select band who made maritime discovery a branch of human genius. He did not have the sort of sixth sense that seemed to belong to Cook, But among the skippers of the seventeenth century, he was a man of firstrate professional competence, he did his job well; as the "old man" he probably earned the respect of his crews, as he certainly did of his "owners" and if, after a bout of celebration one night in the Babuyan isles, he nearly hanged a sailor with his own hands, he does not seem to have been guilty of any of the meaner sins. About that, indeed, we can’t positively say. Let us think of him, anyhow, as a good solid person-of the sea, marine, as other good solid persons are of the earth, earthy, tough; well-salted; a good foundation for the European history of this land. And let us think, too, of Frans Jacobszoon the pilot-major, and the other skippers and the mates and the ordinary sailors of those two ships. Great voyages don’t take place without the work and endurance of common men; and New Zealand, this country of the "comimon man", should remember them, amid the spray and the dirty weather, three hundred years ago. ft me!