FIRST CONTACT WITH WHITEFULLAS Claiming and naming another people’s country The oldest recorded contact between the New World and the original residents of the Mitchell River Delta happened in the 1600’s. The Dutch visited the region during their early exploration of New Holland (Now known as Australia) 170 years before Captain Cook arrived. Jan Carstenzoon in his vessel the Arnhem visited the Mitchell River in 1623 where he captured two men possibly from near the Mitchell River. They died later on the way back to Batavia. The only remaining traces of their visit were some names given to some places on the Gulf coast.
The Mitchell River was called the Vereneeschde Revier on the 4th of May 1623 by Carstenszoon. The Nassau Revier was named out of respect to Maurice of Nassau. Maurits van Oranje; 14 November 1567 – 23 April 1625) was sovereign Prince of Orange from 1618, on the death of his eldest half brother, Philip William, Prince of Orange, (1554–1618). Maurice was stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands (except in the province of Friesland) from earliest 1585 until his death in 1625. The Staaten River was named Staaten Revier after the Staaten Generaal (The Dutch Parliament). Both rivers kept their original Dutch Names from an earlier visit. Another was the Golf van Carpentier now known as the Gulf of
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Carpentaria named by Carstenszoon in honour of Pieter de Carpentier, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in what is now known as Indonesia.
Present day Cape York was known to the Dutch as Carpentier after the same person. Other places in Australia named by the Dutch were renamed by other European explorers centuries later including the Englishman, Matthew Flinders who sailed around Australia including the Gulf region in 1802-03 and
Frenchman, Nicolas Baudin in his boat, le Geographe.
In 1802 England and France were at war and in a race to discover and claim foreign lands for themselves. Both Flinders and Baudin are recorded as having had respect for indigenous people in their exploration in Australian waters. Flinders lost a crew member at Blue Mud Bay and an Aboriginal man was shot in late January 1802 (Scott, Chapter 18 2004).
