and near the Murchison River, four hundred miles farther north. 



The oldest and most interesting find was the wreck of the 

 Zujtdorp, which belonged to the Dutch East India Company. The 

 first suspicion of a wreck was reported by a bushman, Tom Pepper. 

 He found broken glass, scraps of copper, and silver coins dated 

 1670, 1690, and 171 1 on a part of the coast where few white men 

 had been before. 



The Zujtdorp left WielJngen on August i, 171 1, bound for 

 Batavia. After eight hellish months she arrived off the Cape of 

 Good Hope with 174 men left alive of her original crew of 286. 

 On March 27, 171 2, she set sail from Table Bay and was never seen 

 again. It was an ill-fated voyage, even by the standards of the 

 eighteenth century. Sometime in 171 2 she must have been thrown 

 up against the towering red cliffs of Australia, where a few survivors 

 struggled ashore onto the barren rocks. 



In 195 8 an expedition — the second, in fact — was organized, but 

 again the lethal pounding of the surf made diving impossible. 

 However, they found the camp of the survivors on the cliff top, 

 and scattered around it were many coins, keys, the bases of square 

 glass bottles, and a twenty-five-foot length of a broken mast. The 

 fact that no cooking pots, knives, or muskets were found leads 

 Edwards to suppose- that the Dutchmen had eventually succeeded 

 in building themselves a boat and had sailed away to their death, 

 taking all their utensils with them. 



The Zujtdorp is supposed to have been carrying a treasure of one 

 hundred thousand guilders, but the wreck itself has yet to be found. 

 Although the local people swear that the sea is sometimes calm for 

 days at a time, this seems to be so rare that the Zujtdorp' s treasure 

 will probably remain safe from divers forever. For the most part, 

 wrecks found in the New World are of less historical interest than 

 those found in the Mediterranean, simply because the ships that 

 went to the bottom around the Americas and Australia are well 

 documented and their cargoes can tell us little that we do not 

 already know. 



Dutch painting (top) stiows sailors of tiie 

 same period as the wrecl< of the Zuytdorp. 

 The ship went down off the west coast of 

 Australia, forty miles south of Sharl< 

 Bay (above). A coin (top right) found on 

 the coast is dated 1711, about a year 

 before the wreck. 



169 



