February 26, 1606

Duyfken

Duyfken makes the first recorded European landfall on Australia

Roughly twenty sailors crossed unknown waters in a vessel of about sixty tonnes, and the chart calls where they landed simply 'River with the Forest'.

R. met het Bosch

On the conventionally accepted date in 1606, the VOC yacht Duyfken under Willem Jansz reached the western coast of Cape York Peninsula — the earliest authenticated European landfall on the Australian mainland.

The surviving chart copy marks the initial landing at 'R. met het Bosch', River with the Forest, generally identified with the Pennefather River north of present-day Weipa. The landing began the first recorded European contact with First Nations people on the mainland, on the Country of Wik peoples.

A coast they took for New Guinea

The crew began charting the Cape York coast while treating it as a continuation of 'Nova Guinea'. They did not recognize Australia as a separate continent.

The VOC had sent the ship out late in 1605 to investigate New Guinea and unknown southern and eastern lands for gold, other exploitable resources, and possible trade. About 300 kilometres of coast were charted, and the ship was back at Banda by 15 June 1606.

What the record does not contain

No original log, journal, or 1606 chart survives. The Western Australian Museum uses 26 February and the date is widely commemorated, but other national institutions say only 'late February and early March' or simply 'early 1606'.

The Duyfken chart that survives is a watercolour copy made around 1665–68, and the Pennefather identification is reconstructed from it rather than from a dated log.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Traditional date

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Traditional date. This date is the conventional one, not one fixed by a contemporary record.

What the sources leave uncertain

No original log, journal, or 1606 chart survives. The exact day 26 February is widely commemorated and used by the Western Australian Museum, but other national institutions cautiously say “late February and early March” or simply “early 1606.”
The first-landing river is generally identified as the Pennefather, but the identification is reconstructed from a later chart copy rather than a surviving dated log.
John Saris’s report of nine deaths was second-hand and appears to cover the voyage as a whole. A later 1623 Dutch record documents one Duyfken sailor killed at a river, but the exact distribution, dates, and locations of all deaths remain uncertain.
Sources differ on whether the exploratory departure was from Banten or Banda; the Australian National Maritime Museum explicitly notes this disagreement.