Dirk Hartog leaves an inscribed pewter plate on the West Australian coast, 1616
The oldest surviving physical record of a European landing in Australia
Quick facts
- Location
- Dirk Hartog Island (Cape Inscription), Shark Bay, Western Australia
- Ship
- Eendracht
- Artefact
- inscribed pewter plate, oldest surviving European landing record in Australia
- Plate location today
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
What happened
Dutch East India Company skipper Dirk Hartog, sailing the ship Eendracht toward the East Indies, was blown off course and made landfall at the northern end of what is now Dirk Hartog Island in Shark Bay, Malgana Country, on 25 October 1616. Before departing two days later, Hartog's crew inscribed a record of the visit, the ship, and its officers on a flattened pewter dinner plate and nailed it to a wooden post wedged in a rock cleft. Hartog named the region Eendrachtsland after his ship; eighty-one years later, in 1697, Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh found the plate, its post nearly rotted away, and replaced it with a new plate before taking the original back to the Netherlands.
Why it matters
The Hartog Plate is the oldest surviving physical artefact of European contact with Australia and shows Dutch mariners mapping the west coast more than 150 years before British claims focused on the east. It also demonstrates how incidental these early European landings were: Hartog's arrival was an accident of navigation, not a planned voyage of discovery.
How we know
The original 1616 plate survives and is held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the replacement 1697 plate is held by the Western Australian Museum, and both bear the inscribed Dutch text recording the visits.
Sources
- Western Australian Museum. 1616 Dirk Hartog · Reputable sourcemuseum.wa.gov.au · The domain "museum.wa.gov.au" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Western Australian Museum. 1616 Dirk Hartog · Reputable sourcemuseum.wa.gov.au · The domain "museum.wa.gov.au" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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