Zuytdorp
Zuytdorp also Zuiddorp was an 18th-century trading ship of the Dutch East India Company.
On 1 August 1711 Zuytdorp was dispatched from the Netherlands to the trading port of Batavia bearing a load of freshly minted silver coins. Many trading ships travelled a "fast route" using the strong Roaring Forties winds to carry them across the Indian Ocean to within sight of the west coast of Australia, whence they would turn north towards Batavia.
Zuytdorp never arrived 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 taken by pirates. Previous expensive, but fruitless, attempts were made to search for other missing ships, even when an approximate wreck location was known. In the mid-20th century, Zuytdorps wreck site was identified on a remote part of the Western Australian coast between Kalbarri and Shark Bay, approximately north of the Murchison River. This rugged section of coastline, subsequently named the Zuytdorp Cliffs, was the preserve of Indigenous inhabitants and one of the last wildernesses until sheep stations were established there in the late 19th century.
Perhaps a violent storm occurred causing Zuytdorp to wreck on a desolate section of the West Australian coast. Survivors scrambled ashore and camped near the wreck site. With no European settlements on the coast the survivors built bonfires from the wreckage to signal passing trading ships. Fires seen in the vicinity tended to be dismissed as "native fires" as in the case of in 1656.
It has been speculated that survivors may have traded with or intermarried with local Aboriginal communities between Kalbarri and Shark Bay.
Intermarriage may have occurred in the case of the infamous, wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos islands. After a mutiny, atrocities, massacres and trials, two of the mutineersJan Pelgrom de Bye and Wouter Looswere marooned on the Australian mainland, near the Murchison River.
News of an unidentified shipwreck on the shore surfaced in 1834 when Aborigines 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 from a clifftop near the border of Murchison house and Tamala Stations. 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 Western Australian Museum's work
Investigations by the Western Australian Museum initially concentrated on recovering the silver deposits. When salvage work ceased in 1981, a watch-keeper was appointed to guard the site. Work recommenced in 1986 led by Dr M. McCarthy. Soon after the program entered a multi-disciplinary phase. Phillip Playford joined the salvage work as did pre-historians including Kate Morse, terrestrial historical archaeologists, including Fiona Weaver, Tom Pepper Jr., 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 awards with reprint editions. Radio personality 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. The Museums in both Fremantle and at Geraldton present 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. There is renewed interest in the authenticity of an inscription 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.Recently 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 appears in a 2018 edition of Who Do You Think You Are.
The site, one of the few restricted zones under the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976, requires a permit to visit and remains under regular surveillance.
Dutch-Aboriginal intermarriage theory
In 1988, an American woman who had married into the Mallard family contacted Dr 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 The Cape 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 of 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 as from VOC shipwreck survivors is also doubtful. Dutch-Indigenous links, via the VOC wrecks are less plausible because of the importation of hundreds of divers for use in the Western Australian pearling industry 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 for example, brought 140 Malay boys aged 12–14 for use in the pearling industry. They boarded at Batavia where 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 Australian Aborigines and the Dutch can be traced to those sources. The possibility Aboriginal groups joined survivors from Zuytdorp or mutineers from Batavia inspired the Walga Rock ship painting was a popular belief. This theory has been challenged as new evidence points to the image being a steamship, possibly Xantho.