4. Jan Pelgrom and Wouter Loos: The First European Settlers of Australia
Captain Cook may have claimed Australia for the British when he and his crew became the first Europeans to reach the eastern Australian coast. However, the British were not Australia’s initial European settlers. That distinction fell to a couple of mutineers from the Dutch ship Batavia who in November 1629 were marooned off the coast of Western Australia in reparation for their crimes. The Batavia was on her maiden voyage to the East Indies when she was wrecked off Abrolhos islands on the western Australian coast. While the surviving passengers and crew waited on Beacon Island, the Captain, Francisco Pelsaert took the surviving long boat and 4 of the crew on a 33-day journey to Jakarta in Indonesia to summon help.
However, while Pelsaert was away, some of the remaining crew mutinied. Pelsaert returned in September to find 125 men, women and children dead. He hunted the mutineers down and sent them for trial in Jakarta. There the majority were executed for their crimes. However, Pelsaert spared the lives of two. One was an eighteen-year-old cabin boy, Jan Pelgrom de Bye Van Bemel, who begged for his life. The other was 24-year-old soldier Wouter Loos. Instead of dying, Loos and Pelgrom were sent on a special mission.
That November, the pair were put ashore at the mouth of the Hutt River with a boat and basic provisions and the instructions “to know once, for certain, what happens in the land.”The men were instructed to return to the landing spot in two years time to meet the ship that would pick them up. In the meantime, they were to make contact with the Aborigines and offer gifts of wooden toys, beads, and mirrors so they could “make themselves known to the folk of this land by tokens of friendship.”
In this way, Loos and Pelgrom had become the unwilling first European settlers of Australia. As promised, in 1644, Abel Tasman, (who gave his name to the island of Tasmania) returned for the castaways. However, they were nowhere to be found. They may have been dead or decided against meeting the ship or returning to Europe. However, they certainly seem to have made contact with the Aborigines. For it was rumored that blue-eyed Aborigines were sighted around the Hutt River.