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Willem Janszoon (; ) was a Dutch Republic navigator and colonial governor. He served in the Dutch East Indies in the periods 1603–1611 and 1612–1616, including as governor of Fort Henricus on the island of Solor. During his voyage of 1605–1606, Janszoon and his crew became the first Europeans known to have seen and landed on the coast of Australia.
His name is sometimes abbreviated to Willem Jansz, as was customary at his time, but "always pronounced in full and generally still is in the Netherlands where this bit of common knowledge is taught at school." However, the abbreviation Jansz is not the same as the now more predominant unabbreviated but identical Jansz that is a petrified form of Janszoon.
Janszoon sailed from the Netherlands for the East Indies for the third time on 18 December 1603, as captain of (or , meaning ), one of twelve ships of the great fleet of Steven van der Hagen. When the other ships left Java, Janszoon was sent to search for other outlets of trade, particularly in "the great land of New Guinea and other East and Southlands".
The ship's log and diary of Janszoon are lost, but what remains is his chart of the voyage. From this we know the journey included passages from Bantam to the Banda Islands, then to the Kai Islands, Aru Islands, and then eventually to the coast of western New Guinea, the location of what is today's region of Palau Yos Sudarso.
After that, Janszoon crossed the eastern end of the Arafura Sea into the Gulf of Carpentaria, without being aware of the existence of Torres Strait. was actually in Torres Strait in February 1606, a few months before Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through it. On 26 February 1606, Janszoon made landfall at the Pennefather River on the western shore of Cape York in Queensland, near what is now the town of Weipa. This is the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent. Janszoon proceeded to chart some of the coastline, which he thought was a southerly extension of New Guinea.
Janszoon decided to return at a place he named Kaap Keerweer (, the name persists as Cape Keerweer), south of Albatross Bay. On his return north he explored the mouth of the Batavia River, what is today called the Ducie River, and although not having been named by Janszoon, it can be identified on his charts.
Information pieced together from Jan Carstenszoon's journal from 1623, which alludes to contemporary knowledge of Janszoon's 1606 voyage, suggests that the crew went ashore several times to seek information about the land, its peoples and opportunities to trade. Cartenszoon noted a conflict between the Aboriginal people and crew of the Duyfken:
In addition, upon the return of an Indian captain from Banda who relayed the story of "the Flemmings Pinasse" second-hand to John Saris, nine crew were killed in total over the voyage,
Carstenszoon's 1623 account further adds that the Aboriginal people seemed acquainted with muskets, presuming they had felt their fatal effects earlier in 1606. It seems clear that Duyfken's crew engaged in conflict with Aboriginal people, making the first European landfall a violent one. However, the specific details and timings of the other eight deaths are not clear, having possibly occurred earlier in New Guinea and Australia. Historian Miriam Estensen reconstructs the events to suggest that the other eight deaths occurred first at Yos Sudarso Island in New Guinea, and that by the time of this final conflict at Ducie River approximately half the crew remained, precipitating the decision to return. However, more recent interpretations by the Dutch Australian Cultural Centre that draw on both the Dutch archived material and stories from Aboriginal elders, suggest that prior conflict at Cape Keerweer lead to three crew deaths, substantiating the reason to turn back at this location. The remaining five deaths are thought to have occurred on the return leg as part of a landing at Yos Sudarso Island in New Guinea, where a clash over water and firewood occurred with local people. This is the opposite timeline to that described by Estensen, who places eight crew deaths on the island during the first visit. The situation is further obscured by Australian Aboriginal oral traditions, with some accounting for all nine deaths at Cape Keerweer.
Having lost men through open hostility and absent of rewards or even evidence for the riches that motivated the journey, Janszoon returned to Banda by June of 1606.
He called the land he had discovered Nieu Zelant, or Nieu Zeelandt, after the Dutch province of Zeeland, but the name was not adopted, and was later used by Dutch cartographers for New Zealand.
In 1607, Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge sent Janszoon to Ambon Island and Banda Islands. In 1611, Janszoon returned to the Netherlands, believing that the south coast of New Guinea was joined to the land along which he had sailed, and Dutch maps reproduced that error for many years.
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