Zuytdorp

Zuytdorp, also Zuiddorp (meaning "South Village", after Zuiddorpe, an extant village in the south of Zeeland in the Netherlands, near the Belgian border) was an 18th-century trading ship of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, commonly abbreviated VOC).

On 1 August 1711, Zuytdorp was dispatched from the Netherlands to the trading port of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) bearing a load of freshly minted silver coins. Many trading ships travelled the Brouwer Route, using the strong Roaring Forties winds to carry them across the Indian Ocean to within sight of the west coast of Australia (then called New Holland), whence they would turn north towards Batavia.

Zuytdorp did not arrive at its destination and was never heard from again. No search was undertaken, presumably because the VOC did not know whether or where the ship wrecked or if it was taken by pirates. Previous expensive attempts were made to search for other missing ships, but these failed even when an approximate wreck location was known.

In the mid-20th century, Zuytdorp's wreck site was identified on a remote part of the Western Australian coast between Kalbarri and Shark Bay, approximately 40 km north of the Murchison River. This section of coastline, subsequently named the Zuytdorp Cliffs, was the preserve of Indigenous inhabitants and had been one of the last wildernesses until sheep stations were established there in the late 19th century. It has been speculated that survivors of the wreck may have traded with or intermarried with local Aboriginal communities between Kalbarri and Shark Bay.

There was news of an unidentified shipwreck on the shore in 1834 when Aboriginal people told a farmer near Perth about a wreck – the colonists presumed it was a recent wreck and sent rescue parties who failed to find the wreck or any survivors. In 1927, wreckage was seen by an Indigenous-European family group (including Ada and Ernest Drage, Tom and Lurleen Pepper, Charlie Mallard) on a clifftop near the border of Murchison house and Tamala Stations. Bertie and Pearl Drage, Jack Brand and Mrs Brand and two Aboriginal workers including a man named Nyarda are also understood to have been involved. Tamala Station head stockman Tom Pepper reported the find to the authorities, with their first visit to the site occurring in 1941. In 1954 Pepper gave Phillip Playford directions to the wreckage. Playford identified the relics as from ''Zuytdorp’’.

The first dives and salvage attempts
The first dive in May 1964 and the sighting of a massive silver deposit in 1967 resulted in successful salvage attempts by teams led by Tom Brady of Geraldton, and Perth-based Alan Robinson who utilised the services of Clive Daw (who had visited the site by land on other occasions) in order to facilitate his work.

The Western Australian Museum's work
Harry Bingham and his chief diver Geoff Kimpton were successful in recovering silver and other materials in 1971, as was a team led by Jeremy Green in 1976 and on other occasions. Salvage work ceased in 1981 due to the perceived dangers of working the site. Thereafter a watch-keeper was appointed to guard the site.

The site, one of the few restricted zones under the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976 and Underwater Cultural Heritage Act 2018, required a permit to visit and was under regular surveillance. A permit is still required.

When work recommenced in 1986 led by M. (Mack) McCarthy (with the museum's chief diver Geoff Kimpton) it was found that the silver deposit had all but disappeared.

Soon after the program entered its multi-disciplinary phase, becoming the first of the WA Museum’s VOC studies to embrace the practice. Geologist-historian Phillip Playford joined the team, as did pre-historians Sandra Bowdler, Kate Morse, terrestrial historical archaeologists including Fiona Weaver and Tom Pepper Jr., (representing station and Indigenous interests), surveyors, the Department of Land Administration, and artists. Oral histories were recorded with station identities, including relatives of the Pepper, Drage, Blood, Mallard and other Indigenous families involved with the wreck. Foremost in this new phase was the attention paid to the possibilities of European-Indigenous interaction and the movement of survivors away from the wreck.

Phillip Playford's book, Carpet of Silver: The Wreck of the Zuytdorp was produced as part of the museum's research. The book won the West Australian Premier’s Book Awards when it was first published in 1996.

The museums in both Fremantle and at Geraldton presented exhibitions on the wreck, a website, and reports. An exhibition was also produced for the Kalbarri heritage centre. Due to the logistical difficulties and the advent of Health and Safety legislation, the Zuytdorp in-water program ceased in 2002, though work on land and in the laboratory remains active.

Historian Bill Bunbury reviewed the wreck and consequences in the chapter A Lost Ship – Lost People: The Zuytdorp Story in the book Caught in Time: Talking Australia History.

Dutch–Aboriginal intermarriage theory. Rock inscriptions
In 1988, an American woman who had married into the Mallard family contacted Phillip Playford and described how her husband had died some years before from a disease called variegate porphyria. Playford found that the disease was genetically linked and initially confined to Afrikaners and that all cases of the disease in South Africa were traceable to Gerrit Jansz and Ariaantjie Jacobs, who had married in Cape of Good Hope in 1688.

Zuytdorp arrived at the Cape in March 1712, where it took on more than 100 new crew. One of the Jansz' sons could have boarded the ship at this time and thus become the carrier of the disease into the Australian Aboriginal population. In 2002 a DNA investigation into the hypothesis that a variegate porphyria mutation was introduced into the Aboriginal population by shipwrecked sailors was undertaken at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre in Nedlands, Western Australia, and the Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The research concluded the mutations were not inherited from shipwrecked sailors.

The presence of similar European genetic maladies in the Aboriginal population (such as Ellis–Van Creveld syndrome) as from VOC shipwreck survivors is also doubtful. Dutch–Indigenous links via the VOC wrecks are rendered less certain because of the importation of hundreds of divers for use in the Western Australian pearling field in the mid-to-late 19th century. Incorrectly called Malays, these indentured labourers came from the islands north of Australia, many via the port of Batavia. One vessel, the SS Xantho for example, brought 140 Malay boys aged 12–14 for use in the pearling field. They boarded at Batavia where diseases (including genetic diseases) had been introduced by VOC personnel into the local population since 1600. In addition, many Malay pearlers remained on the coast and some intermarried with Aboriginal people at Shark Bay. Therefore, it is equally possible that genetic links between Aboriginal Australians and the Dutch can be traced to those sources. The Macassans, who frequented northern Australian shores for centuries and who mixed with the coastal Aborigines and even took some of them back to Macassar, are another possible source.

The possibility Aboriginal groups joined survivors from Zuytdorp or mutineers from Batavia inspired the Walga Rock ship painting was another popular belief. This theory has been challenged as new evidence points to the image being a steamship, possibly Xantho.

There was also renewed interest in the authenticity of rock inscriptions, predominantly one reading "Zuytdorp 1711" that was once visible on a rock-face adjacent to the reef platform at the site. Post-dating Phillip Playford's first visits in 1954/5, when photographs of the same area show no inscription, the inscription is considered a modern artefact. Details appear on Museum's reports series and Zuytdorp website.

Commemorative plaque
In June 2012, the Shire of Northampton unveiled a commemorative plaque in Kalbarri commemorating the 300th anniversary of Zuytdorp's wreck. The plaque also mentions two other Dutch East India Company ships that were wrecked in the area: Batavia and Zeewijk.

Recent Developments and renewed research
Ernie Dingo visited the site to learn more about the estranged father Tom Pepper Jr and his grandparents Tom Snr and Lurlie Pepper. This investigation appeared in a 2018 edition of Who Do You Think You Are.

Though being reprinted in 1998 and in 2006 Playford’s book 'Carpet of Silver’ (1996) remained unaltered. The last of the Western Australian Museum’s works was an internal report produced in 2009, leaving a decades-old vacuum in what was publicly-known about the wreck and its aftermath.

After retiring from the WA Museum in 2019 McCarthy sought to fill that gap, resulting in ‘The Zuytdorp Research Compendium', an unpublished electronic report that is primarily designed to assist stakeholders in accessing all that is now known about the subject.

Presented in April 2024 to the Department of Maritime Heritage at the WA Museum as an electronic internal report (No. 348) this c. 500 page (in hard copy) work contains McCarthy’s research and links to all other known sources and archives including those of the VOC, early explorers, salvage divers, Aboriginal families, scientists, linguists and other researchers and enthusiasts.