Willem Janszoon Sights Australia

February 10, 1606

The Dutch captain Willem Janszoon, probing the Gulf of Carpentaria in the yacht Duyfken, put a boat ashore on the Cape York Peninsula and became the first European to touch the continent later called Australia. He mistook it for a bulge of New Guinea and sailed away unimpressed, leaving the vast southern land to wait another century and a half for European settlement.