Into The Unknown
Gerrit de Waal’s life is thrown into confusion when his seafaring father’s ship, the Ridderschap van Holland, mysteriously disappears in the Indian Ocean in 1694. He is eight years old and growing up in cosmopolitan Middelburg, Zeeland, in the Netherlands during the Dutch Golden Age.
At twenty-six, determined to find out what happened to his father, Gerrit signs on aboard the VOC retourschip Zuytdorp as senior carpenter shipwright in 1711. He wants to trace his father’s footsteps and see if he can be found. What if his ship was wrecked off the coast of Eendrachtsland? (Known to us as Western Australia). Gerrit will do anything to see if the crew survived.
In June 1712, he himself survives the shipwreck of the Zuytdorp on the cliffs north of Kalbarri, in Eendrachtsland. Rescued by a Malgana family of First Nations people, he avoids certain death and becomes the first European known to have assimilated into a local Aboriginal clan.