We know that crewmen from at least three Dutch ships – the Batavia (1629), the Vergulde Draek (1655) and the Zuytdorp (1712) – were last seen alive on the coast of Western Australia. Other Dutch ships traversing the area vanished without trace, so there may have been others.

Hints that at least some of these men did survive in the Australian interior have surfaced from time to time during the last 200 years. In the early days of the Swan River colony – the first permanent British settlement in Western Australia, established in 1829 – reports were received of tribes of light-skinned Aborigines living along the coast. These stories resemble those of the ‘white Indians’ often said to have been encountered in the American interior, which are generally written off as travellers’ tales, but in a handful of the Australian cases the evidence is at least intriguing. 

The explorer AC Gregory reported meeting, in 1848, a tribe in the Murchison River area

whose characteristics differed considerably from the average Australian. Their colour was neither black nor copper, but that peculiar yellow which prevails with a mixture of European blood.

Gregory was disappointed to discover no evidence that they possessed technology unknown to other Aborigines.

Thirteen years later the Perth Gazette reported encounters with ‘fair complexioned’ natives with ‘long light coloured hair flowing down their shoulders’. Men of this sort could be met with along the Gascoyne, Murchison and Ashburton rivers, according to a station hand named Edward Cornally; and other nineteenth century writers also suggested that fair hair was commonplace among the Nanda peoples. Daisy Bates, a controversial Australian writer who actually lived for four decades among various Aboriginal tribes in western and southern Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made similar observations of the people of the Gascoyne and Murchison valleys. ‘There is no mistaking the heavy Dutch face, curly fair hair and heavy stocky build,’ she believed. Other supposedly European characteristics, such as blue eyes, great height and a propensity to baldness, have also been attributed to the people of the same tribes.

It is difficult to know what weight to give such purely anecdotal evidence. Gregory’s recollection may not be entirely reliable, as he recorded it only in 1885. Much of other evidence advanced by the local writer Rupert Gerritsen, who has studied the subject for several decades – such as the presence of what appear to be Dutch loan words in Aboriginal languages – has been subject to considerable criticism by specialists.

Unfortunately for the Aborigines of the western coast, the great majority died out soon after the first Europeans arrived with their guns, diseases and modern agricultural practices, and evidence of the sort supplied by Daisy Bates and her contemporaries can never be more than merely anecdotal. It is also true that relations with passing sealers or the earliest settlers, or genetic mutation, could account for the light-skinned individuals found in the areas where the Zuytdorp survivors and the Batavia mutineers came ashore. Only genetic evidence is likely to prove at all conclusive; but since old Aboriginal skeletons are sometimes exposed by wind and water throughout Western Australia, it may eventually be found.

One clue that intermarriage between Dutch and Aboriginals did actually occur may already have emerged. In 1988 Phillip Playford, one of Australia’s leading experts on the Zuytdorp, was approached by a woman whose part-Aboriginal husband apparently suffered from porphyria variegata, a condition that can cause rashes, blisters and sensitive skin. This disease is an inherited one, and can be passed to children of either sex. It is also relatively rare, except among the white population of South Africa, where an estimated 30,000 people carry the gene for the condition.

Geoffrey Dean, a British doctor based in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, became aware of the unusual incidence of porphyria in the region in 1949, and devoted years to researching the family trees of all the sufferers he treated. He claimed to have traced all known cases of the disease to a single Dutch couple, Gerrit Jansz van Deventer and Ariaantje van den Berg, who were married at the Cape in 1688. Van Deventer had settled there in 1685, and his bride was one of eight orphans sent out to provide wives for the early burghers three years later. The couple had eight children, half of whom Dean showed must have carried the gene for porphyria variegata. Dean and Playford have suggested that the disease may have been introduced to Australia by an Afrikaner signed on to the Zuytdorp at the Cape to help make good the extensive losses among the crew that had occurred on the passage from the Netherlands, who survived the wreck and lived long enough to join an Aboriginal community.

Finally, a second condition – Ellis van Creveld syndrome, which results in children being born with short limbs, extra fingers or toes, and heart defects – exists among the Aborigines of Western Australia and has also been tentatively linked to the arrival of shipwrecked Dutchmen. It has been calculated that about one Aborigine in 40 carries the recessive Ellis van Creveld gene – the second-highest incidence of the disease among any community in the world. The highest incidence, tellingly enough, occurs amongst the Amish people of Pennsylvania, a Mennonite sect whose ancestors emigrated from the Netherlands in 1683.

A good deal of work remains to be done if either of these diseases can be traced to the arrival of Dutch mariners on the Western Australian coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It remains entirely possible that either or both were introduced at a much later date, and neither can be regarded as definite evidence for the long-term survival of stranded Dutch sailors. Nevertheless, evidence of interaction between these sailors and the Aborigines continues to emerge occasionally, and it is not impossible that a definite link will be established one day.

Sources

Rupert Gerritsen, And Their Ghosts May Be Heard... (South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994) pp.70-81; Philip Playford Carpet of Silver: the Wreck of the Zuytdorp (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1996) pp. 217-32; Geoffrey Dean, The Porphyrias: a Story of Inheritance and Environment (London: Pitman Medical, 1971) pp.114-30; Jeremy Green, Myra Stanbury and Femme Gaastra (eds), The ANCODS Colloquium: Papers Presented at the Australia-Netherlands Colloquium on Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History (Fremantle: Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 1999) pp.50-1; Paul Doolan, ‘First Europeans in Australia’, History Today June 1999 pp.3-4. 

I am also drawing here on an interview with Dr FWM de Rooij, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 26 June 2000. De Rooij’s work in South Africa has confirmed Dean’s thesis that most South African porphyriacs can trace the source of their disease to their kinship with Ariaantje Adrianesse.