Zuytdorp Cliffs

The VOC Zuytdorp also Zuiddorp was an 18th-century trading ship of the Dutch East India Company . On 1 August 1711 it was dispatched from the Netherlands to the trading port of Batavia bearing a load of freshly minted silver coins. Many trading ships of the time travelled a fast route using the strong Roaring Forties winds to carry them across the Indian Ocean to within sight of the west coast of Australia, whence they would make a turn north towards Batavia. The Zuytdorp never arrived at its destination. No search was undertaken, presumably because the VOC had no idea whether and where the ship had been wrecked or taken by pirates and possibly due to prior expensive but fruitless attempts to search for other missing ships, even when an approximate wreck location was known. As a result Zuytdorp and its entire complement were never heard from again. Their fate was unknown until the mid-20th century when the wreck site was identified on a remote part of the Western Australian coast between Kalbarri and Shark Bay, approximately 40 km north of the Murchison River. This rugged section of coastline was subsequently named the Zuytdorp Cliffs, was the preserve of the Indigenous inhabitants and one of the last great wildernesses until the advent of the sheep stations established there in the late 19th century. Something, perhaps a violent storm, occurred and the Zuytdorp was wrecked on a desolate section of the West Australian coast. Survivors scrambled ashore and camped near the wreck site. With no European settlements anywhere on the coast they built bonfires from the wreckage to signal fellow trading ships that would pass within sight of the coast. But fires seen in the vicinity tended to be dismissed as native fires as appears to have happened in the case of Vergulde Draeck in 1656. It has been speculated that survivors may have traded with or may have intermarried with the local Aboriginal communities between present-day Kalbarri and Shark Bay.It is also possible that intermarriage occurred in the case of a predecessor to the Zuytdorp, the infamous VOC Batavia, wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos islands offshore. After a mutiny, atrocities, massacres and trials, two of the mutineers were marooned on the Australian mainland, near the Murchison River . News of an unidentified shipwreck on the shore surfaced in 1834 when Aborigines told a farmer near the recently colonised Perth about a wreck the colonists presumed it was a recent wreck and sent rescue parties who failed to find the wreck or any survivors. The details provided , tend to point to the Zuytdorp; however. In 1927, wreckage was seen by an Indigenous-European family group on a clifftop near the border of Murchison house and Tamala Stations where they all worked. Tamala Station head stockman, Tom Pepper later reported the find to the authorities, their first expedition to the site occurring in 1941. In 1954 Pepper gave Phillip Playford directions and it was he who subsequently identified the relics as from Zuytdorp.
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