My parents, who had stinted themselves to provide my education, placed
me when I was eighteen years old in a merchant's office at Amsterdam,
where I became acquainted with Dirk Hartog, a famous navigator, who, a
year later, invited me to become his secretary and engraver of charts
on board the ship "Endraght", being then commissioned for a voyage of
discovery to the South, and having obtained a reluctant consent from my
master, De Decker, the merchant, to Hartog's proposal I gladly
abandoned the office desk for the sea.
The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 had given rise
to a theory that a vast continent known as Terra Australis existed in
the South, and Portuguese and Spanish ships had made report from time
to time of this southern land. It was to confirm or dispel this belief
that the voyage of Dirk Hartog was made.
For many months after leaving Amsterdam we sailed south, touching at
some islands to obtain vegetable food and replenish our water-casks.
Worn out with hardship, our crew more than once showed signs of mutiny.
Sometimes for weeks together we lay becalmed in the tropics, when the
air hung like a pall of vapour from the sky, and the pitch boiled and
blistered in the seams of the deck-planks.
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