Dirk Hartog Island is an island off the Gascoyne coast of Western Australia, within the Shark Bay World Heritage Area. It is about 80 kilometres long and between 3 and 15 kilometres wide and is Western Australia's largest and westernmost island. It covers an area of 620 square kilometres and is approximately 850 kilometres north of Perth.
Duyfken, also in the form Duifje or spelled Duifken or Duijfken, was a small ship built in the Dutch Republic. She was a fast, lightly armed ship probably intended for shallow water, small valuable cargoes, bringing messages, sending provisions, or privateering. The tonnage of Duyfken has been given as 25–30 lasten.
HMAS Encounter was a second-class protected cruiser of the Challenger class operated by the Royal Navy (RN) and Royal Australian Navy (RAN). She was built by HM Dockyard Devonport and completed at the end of 1905.
Makassar people from the region of Sulawesi in Indonesia began visiting the coast of Northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 18th century, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land. They were men who collected and processed trepang, a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary value generally and for its supposed medicinal properties in Chinese markets. The term Makassan is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia.
The theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia claims that early Portuguese navigators were the first Europeans to sight Australia between 1521 and 1524, well before the arrival of Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 on board the Duyfken who is generally considered to be the first European discoverer. While lacking generally accepted evidence, this theory is based on the following:
The Royal Perth Yacht Club (RPYC) is a yacht club in Perth, Western Australia. It is the third oldest yacht club in Australia after the Royal Yacht Club of Victoria and the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron. It is based at the Crawley Marina on Pelican Point and at the Fremantle Annexe in Challenger Harbour.
Over 1400 ships have been wrecked on the coast of Western Australia. This relatively large number of shipwrecks is due to a number of factors, including:
Tryall was a British East India Company-owned East Indiaman launched in 1621. She was under the command of John Brooke when she was wrecked on the Tryal Rocks off the north-west coast of Western Australia in 1622. Her crew were the first Englishmen to sight or land on Australia. The wreck is Australia's oldest known shipwreck.
Pearling in Western Australia includes the harvesting and farming of both pearls and pearl shells along the north-western coast of Western Australia.
The Lantaka also known as rentaka was a type of bronze portable cannon or swivel gun, sometimes mounted on merchant vessels and warships in Maritime Southeast Asia. It was commonly equipped by native seafaring vessels from the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia. Lela and rentaka are known by the Malays as meriam kecil, the difference is that rentaka is smaller in length and bore than a lela. and Lantakas are often called Kanyon in Filipino.
SS Koombana was a passenger steamship that was built in Scotland in 1908 for the Adelaide Steamship Company, for coastal liner services between Fremantle and the northwest coast of Western Australia. She sank in a tropical cyclone somewhere off Port Hedland in 1912, with the loss of all 150 people aboard. Her loss was one of Australia's worst weather-related maritime disasters in the twentieth century.
The Carron is a river in central Scotland, rising in the Campsie Fells and flowing along Strathcarron into the Firth of Forth. It has given its name to several locations in Stirlingshire, as well as a type of cannon, a line of bathtubs, two warships, and an island in the Southern Hemisphere.
Beyond Capricorn: How Portuguese adventurers secretly discovered and mapped Australia and New Zealand 250 years before Captain Cook is a 2007 book by journalist Peter Trickett on the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia. Although its thesis is similar to that advanced by Kenneth McIntyre in 1977, Lawrence Fitzgerald in 1984 and others, the publisher and some news reports presented it as being a new theory on the discovery of Australia.
HMS Roebuck was a fifth-rate warship in the Royal Navy which, under the command of William Dampier, carried the first British scientific expedition to Australia in 1699. It sank in early 1701. The wreck of the ship has since been located by a team from the Western Australian Maritime Museum at a site on the coast of Ascension Island where it foundered more than 300 years ago.
The Archipelago of the Recherche, known locally as the Bay of Isles, is a group of 105 islands, and over 1200 "obstacles to shipping", off the south coast of Western Australia. The islands stretch 230 km (140 mi) from east to west and to 50 km (31 mi) off-shore encompassing an area of approximately 4,000 square kilometres (1,544 sq mi). The western group is near Esperance and the eastern group at Israelite Bay. They are located in coastal waters, part of which is designated the Recherche Archipelago Nature Reserve.
Louis Francois Marie Aleno de Saint Aloüarn was a French Navy officer and explorer who claimed French Western Australia.
The Australian Netherlands Committee on Old Dutch Shipwrecks (ANCODS) is an organization tasked with maintaining and allocating artefacts from 17th and 18th century Dutch shipwrecks off the coast of Western Australia. It was founded in 1972 by the Agreement between Australia and the Netherlands Concerning Old Dutch Shipwrecks.
The Society for Underwater Historical Research (SUHR) was an amateur maritime archaeology organisation operating in South Australia (SA). It was formed in 1974 by recreational scuba divers and other persons to pursue an interest in maritime archaeology and maritime history. The SUHR was renamed as the South Australian Archaeology Society in March 2012 as part of a plan to expand its activities beyond maritime archaeology to include other archaeological disciplines.
The HMS Investigator Anchors are the two anchors that jettisoned from HMS Investigator on the morning of Saturday, 21 May 1803, by her commander, Matthew Flinders, in order to avoid running aground on Middle Island in the Archipelago of the Recherche on the south coast of New Holland. In 1973, the anchors were located and recovered by members of the Underwater Explorers Club of South Australia (UEC). The recovered anchors became the subject of an ownership dispute between various governments, particularly those of South Australia and Western Australia due to their historic significance as artefacts of a major voyage of European exploration. The dispute was resolved with the ownership of the anchors going to the Australian Government who subsequently gifted one of the anchors to the South Australian Government. The pair of artefacts is also known as Flinders' Anchors.
Cetbang were cannons produced and used by the Majapahit Empire (1293–1527) and other kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago. There are 2 main types of cetbang: the eastern-style cetbang which looks like a Chinese cannon and is loaded from the front, and the western-style cetbang which is shaped like a Turkish and Portuguese cannon, loaded from the back.
