supercargo Jan Stins, upper steersman Pieter Doores of Bil. In the year 1616. Finding nothing of interest, Hartog continued sailing northwards along this previously uncharted coastline of Western Australia, making nautical charts up to about 22° latitude south. He then left the coast and continued on to Batavia, eventually arriving safely in December 1616, some five months after his expected arrival. Dirk Hartog left the employ of the VOC upon his return to Amsterdam in 1618, resuming private trading ventures in the Baltic. Postscript In 1619 Frederik de Houtman, in the VOC ship , and Jacob d'Edel, in another VOC ship , sighted land on the Australian coast near present-day Perth which they called d'Edelsland. After sailing northwards along the coast they made landfall in Eendrachtsland. In his journal, Houtman identified these coasts with Marco Polo's land of Beach, or Locach, as shown on maps of the time such as that of Petrus Plancius and Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. Eighty years later, on 4 February 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh landed on the island and by chance found the Hartog plate, which lay half-buried in sand. He replaced it with a new plate which reproduced Hartog's original inscription and added notes of his own, and took Hartog's original back to Amsterdam, where it is housed in the Rijksmuseum. In 2000 the Hartog plate was temporarily returned to Australia as part of an exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. This led to suggestions that the plate, considered important as the oldest-known written artefact from Australia's European history, should be acquired for an Australian museum, but the Dutch authorities have made it clear that the plate is not for sale. In 1966 and 1985 Hartog was depicted on Australian postage stamps, both depicting his ship. In 2016 the Perth Mint issued a silver coin to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Hartog's Australian landfall. The island in Shark Bay, Western Australia, where he made landfall was named Dirk Hartog Island. In Amsterdam, Canberra and fourteen other Australian towns, streets have been named in his honour. See also Abel Tasman Dieppe maps Theory of the Portuguese discovery of Australia References Further reading Wendy Van Duivenvoorde, “Dutch Seaman Dirk Hartog (1583–1621) and his Ship Eendracht”, The Great Circle, vol. 38, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–31. King, Robert J. "Dirk Hartog's landing on Beach, the Gold-bearing province," Map Matters, (the newsletter