Pieter Nuyts or Nuijts (1598 – 11 December 1655) was a Dutch explorer, diplomat and politician. He was part of a landmark expedition of the Dutch East India Company in 1626–27 which mapped the southern coast of Australia. He became the Dutch ambassador to Japan in 1627, and he was appointed governor of Formosa in the same year. Later he became a controversial figure because of his disastrous handling of official duties, coupled with rumours about private indiscretions. He was disgraced, fined and imprisoned, before being made a scapegoat to ease strained Dutch relations with the Japanese. He returned to the Dutch Republic in 1637, where he became the mayor of Hulster Ambacht and of Hulst. He is chiefly remembered today in the place names of various points along the southern Australian coast, named for him after his voyage of 1626–27. During the early 20th century, he was vilified in Japanese school textbooks in Taiwan as an example of a "typical arrogant western bully". Early life Pieter Nuyts was born in 1598 in the town of Middelburg in Zeeland, Dutch Republic to Laurens Nuyts, a merchant, and his wife Elisabeth Walraents, wealthy Protestant immigrants from Antwerp. After studying at the University of Leiden and gaining a doctorate in philosophy, he returned to Middelburg to work in his father's trading company. In 1613, Pieter Nuyts, who was staying in Leiden with the famous Orientalist Erpenius, is known to have met with the Moroccan envoy in the Low Countries Al-Hajari. Al-Hajari wrote for him an entry in Pieter's Album Amicorum stating: In 1620, Pieter married Cornelia Jacot, also a child of Antwerp émigrés, who was to bear four of his children—Laurens (born around 1622), Pieter (1624) and the twins Anna Cornelia and Elisabeth (1626). In 1626 he entered service with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and was seen as one of their rising stars. Australian expedition On 11 May 1626 the VOC ship 't Gulden Zeepaert (The Golden Seahorse) departed from Amsterdam with Nuyts and his eldest son Laurens aboard. Deviating from the standard route to the VOC's East Asian Batavia headquarters, the ship continued east and mapped around 1,500 km of the southern coast of Australia from Albany, Western Australia to Ceduna, South Australia. The captain of the ship, François Thijssen, named the region ′t Landt van Pieter Nuyts (Pieter Nuyts' Land) after Nuyts, who was the highest-ranking official on