Explorers
First contacts | Explorers | Buffalo hunting | Missionaries | Miners | Pastoralists
The Chinese, Malays and Portuguese all claim to have been the first non-Aboriginal explorers of Australia's north coast. The first surviving written account comes, however, from the Dutch. In 1623 Jan Carstenzoon made his way west across the Gulf of Carpentaria to discover Arnhem's or Speult's Island (believed to be Groote Eylandt). One of the two vessels under his command was the Arnhem.
Abel Tasman was the next documented explorer to visit this part of the coast on his voyage from Cape York to Shark Bay in 1644. He mapped the eastern opening of Van Diemen's Gulf and was the first person to record European contact with the Aboriginal people of the region.
The first English navigator to enter the Gulf of Carpentaria was Phillip Parker King. Between 1818 and 1822 he made a number of coastal voyages, during which he explored and named the three Alligator Rivers after the large numbers of crocodiles, which he mistook for alligators.
Ludwig Leichhardt was the first land-based European explorer to visit the Kakadu region in 1845. He followed a creek down from the Arnhem Land escarpment, then went down the South Alligator before crossing to the East Alligator and proceeding north. On 26 November 1845 he recorded the return to camp by one of his party, accompanied by a 'whole tribe of natives'. They were armed with small goose spears, and with flat wommalas; but, although they were extremely noisy, they did not show the slightest hostile intention. One of them had a shawl and neckerchief of English manufacture; and another carried an iron tomahawk, which he said he got from north-west by north.