They rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the end of June 1604 and spent the next two months harassing the Portuguese off Africa's east coast. Then they crossed to do the same in Indian waters and finally reached their primary destination at the end of December.
Fleet commander Steven van der Hagen then set about establishing a permanent VOC foothold in the Indies. He had established a trading post on Amboina on his previous visit to the Indies. In the meantime, the Portuguese had evicted the traders he had left there, so his first move was to take Fort Van Verre back. Capturing a Portuguese vessel carrying gunpowder and ammunition to the island made the task relatively straightforward.
Van der Hagen moved on to Ternate and Tidore, displaced the Portuguese from the clove islands, and headed back to Bantam in Java to finish loading spices for the return journey. When he left at the end of October, he left the Duyfken and the Delft with the newly appointed VOC governor of Amboyna, Frederik de Houtman. In simple terms, Duyfken was there to carry out the scouting and reconnaissance work, while Delft provided a weightier presence.
After a quick run to Bantam to secure provisions and ship's stores, Duyfken's first reconnaissance mission involved 'the iland called Nova ginnea, which, as it is said. affordeth great store of gold'. (fn)
(fn: Saris, in Purchas, His Pilgrimmes'.)
In the second of Five Voyages, the Duyfken and her skipper Willem Janszoon almost crossed paths with the first.
By that stage, Luis Váez de Torres was Manila-bound after a Spanish expedition seeking a similar will-o'-the-wisp.
Janszoon's mission delivered the first known European landfall on the Australian continent, but not much else. The Duyfken was back in Amboina at the end of April 1606. While Janszoon's journal has since disappeared, the chart of his voyage has survived, as have the basic details of an expedition that delivered nothing of note.
In the meantime, the VOC's representatives had plenty to keep them busy. They were running a commercial operation, with profits to pursue and competitors to keep at bay. Over the next decade, those concerns ensured left little room for rumours and legends.
The most important requirement was a headquarters that would become the Dutch equivalent of the Portuguese stronghold in Goa. There were several possibilities, including Malacca, Bantam and Johore, but any of those would have required substantial military resources.
Instead, Jan Pieterszoon Coen opted for Jacatra, a little-used vassal of the Sultan of Bantam. Taking it required a minimal commitment of men and military resources. From there, Coen set about establishing an absolute monopoly over the archipelago's spice trade.
He despatched Jan Carstensz "to make a nearer friendship with the inhabitants of the island[s] Key, Aroum and Temmber [Tanimbar] and better to discover Nova Guinea and the south lands."
In the third of Five Voyages, Carstensz tracked further along Cape York Peninsula's western coast without finding anything of commercial significance.
One suspects local informants advised the Dutch here was a large gulf and a passage through to another ocean over that way.
If that was so, Coen and his successors seem to have assumed that what we now know is Torres Strait was the gulf; the passage must lie further south.
In the meantime, they had a monopoly to consolidate and commercial rivals to eliminate. So, through the 1620s and 30s, the inhabitants of the Moluccas were brutally crushed and reduced to complete subjection. Despite a formal alliance signed in London in 1619, they pushed the English out of the spice trade altogether. Iberian interests were gradually evicted from the Indonesian archipelago. The Philippines proved to be too tough a nut to crack, but in 1644 Portuguese Malacca fell after several earlier attempts.
By that stage, encounters with the Western Australian coast had established that Marco Polo's Islands of Gold, if they existed, must lie somewhere to the east of this new Southland. Official documents increasingly referred to "the unknown East and South lands" (fn)
(fn: e.g. the resolution of the Governor-General and Councillors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), 1 August 1642, cited Andrew Sharp, The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman, p. 20.)
At the same time, locating the Islands of Gold, if they existed, would have practical benefits. Although the European powers consistently portrayed themselves as the dominant forces in trade with China and Japan, they had a significant balance of payments problem.
Since Chinese demand for European goods was almost non-existent, the Europeans had to pay for their purchases with gold or silver. For the Spanish, this requirement did not pose a significant problem. The Manila galleons carried silver from mines in Mexico and Peru across the Pacific and returned laden with oriental merchandise.
Everyone else needed to bring their precious metals from much further afield. A new local source of gold or silver would prove to be a godsend.
Coen's successor as Governor-General in the Indies, Anthony van Diemen (fn), had form in this department. He had already sent expeditions into the northern Pacific to locate a rumoured El Dorado. (fn)
(fn: Van Diemen
(fn: A two-ship expedition under Matthijs Quast set out to locate the "Gold and Silver Islands" believed to lie east of Japan in June 1639. Maarten Gerritsz Vries explored the coasts of Korea and "Tartaria". Both returned with nothing noteworthy to report.
Earlier, Gerrit Thomasz Pool and Pieter Pieterzoon headed towards Cape York to carry on from Carstensz' efforts. They only got as far as New Guinea. Another encounter with unfriendly locals left the commander dead, and the ships turned back.
Now, in conjunction with his resident cartographer and pilot Frans Visscher (fn), van Diemen prepared to tackle the big question of the great unknown southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita.
(fn: Visscher
Visscher's initial proposal for the expedition was ambitious. It would start from Europe, proceed into the South Atlantic, and work around the globe fifty degrees south of the Equator. That was the more or less the latitude of his homeland in the northern hemisphere. (fn)
(fn: Paris lies at 48.8566° N. The French explorer Kerguelen noted islands towards the Antarctic had a similar latitude and could, therefore, enjoy a similar climate.)
If the expedition drew a blank on the first part of the voyage, they could turn north, rest and refresh at Mauritius, then head south again. When they eventually found the continent, the expedition could comfortably coast it, complete a high-latitude circumnavigation and eventually end up in the Indies.
However, the Heeren XVII (fn) was not having a bar of that.
(fn: The VOC's board of directors
For a start, their charter did not extend to the South Atlantic. They were not going to give their commercial rivals a leg up. So the expedition could start from the Indies, proceed via Mauritius and confine their investigations to the waters west of Cape Horn.
So there we have Abel Janszoon Tasman's expedition of 1642-3, which encountered Tasmania ("Van Diemen's Land") and New Zealand ("Stadts Land").
When Tasman turned north to make his way back to Batavia, he might encounter the eastern opening of the strait Jansz and Carstensz had been seeking.
Since Tasman failed to find the passage, van Diemen sent him out again on a second voyage that saw him chart Australia's coastline from the Birds Head to Northwest Cape.
At that point, with no passage to the Pacific, the Heeren XVII refused to allocate any more resources to such exploratory foolishness, and Dutch exploration effectively closed down.
Expeditions went out searching for survivors and the cargo if an outward-bound ship went missing, but that was that.
Meanwhile, the armchair geographers continued to hypothesise, and an English admiral became involved in the quest for Terra Australis Incognita.