its professed object the extension of the Company’s mercantile connections, we need not be in doubt as to this being equally the motive or one of the motives of the expedition on which she was dispatched in 1605-6.  We know, moreover, that New Guinea was then reported “to yield abundance of gold.”  The three principles of colonial policy just mentioned also underlay the voyage undertaken by Jan Carstensz in 1623; for we know that this commander got the instructions drawn up for the ships Haring and Hazewind, but not then carried into effect, since these ships did not sail on their ordained expedition [*].  These principles are found set forth with more amplitude than anywhere else in the instructions drawn up for Tasman and his coadjutors in 1642 and 1644 [**].  The voyages, then planned, were to be undertaken “for the enlargement, increase and improvement of the Dutch East India Company’s standing and commerce in the East.”

[* See below, p. 21, Note 1.]

[** See these instructions in my Life of Tasman, pp. 131 ff. and 147 ff.]

In the instructions for Tasman’s voyage of 1644 the G.-G. and Counc., who drew them up, could still refer to “the express commands of the ’Heeren Maijoores” [*] to “attempt the discovery of Nova Guinea and other unknown Eastern and Southern lands.”  And it is a fact certainly, that in the first half of the seventeenth century the Governors-General who planned these exploratory voyages were in their endeavours supported by the Managers of the E.I.C. in the mother country [**]:  it was especially Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1619-1623 and 1627-1629), Hendrik Broulwer (1632-1636) and Antonio van Diemen (1636-1645), who were most efficiently backed in their efforts for this purpose by their principals at home.  Among these Governors-General Van Diemen holds the foremost place as regards the furtherance of discoveries by Netherlanders in the Far East:  in the Pacific and on, “the mainland coasts of Australia.”  It is, with complete justice, therefore, that a foreign author mentions the name of Van Diemen as “a name which will ever rank among the greatest promotors of maritime discovery".[***]

[* Meaning the Managers of the E.I.C.]

[** See also the instructions for the voyage of 1636, p. 64 infra.]

[*** BURNEY, Chronological History, III, p. 55.  Speaking of Van Diemen, we must not omit to call the reader’s attention to sentiments such as the following:  “Whoever endeavours to discover unknown lands and tribes, had need to be patient and long-suffering, noways quick to fly out, but always bent on ingratiating himself” (p. 65 infra), a piece of advice elsewhere taking the form of a command, e.g. p. 66:  “You will not carry off with you any natives against their will”.  And, sad to say, such injunctions were often imperiously necessary!]