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Abel Tasman Comes to Life for Children

Posted by on 24 November 2014 | 1339 Comments

My Father’s Islands is an engaging fictional story, based on Tasman’s journal of his voyages. It is the 1640s and Claesgen lives in Batavia with her stepmother, waiting weeks, and sometimes months, for her father, Abel Tasman, to come back from his sea voyages.

When he returns, Tasman delights his young daughter with tales of treacherous oceans and relentless wild weather, hazards of unseen coral reefs and endless days of empty ocean, encounters—both friendly and hostile—with indigenous peoples, murder and theft, and the threat of smugglers and pirates. Claesgen’s curiosity about her father’s life takes readers on his voyage on the unchartered seas of the Pacific Ocean, in the search for unknown lands and new sources of riches for the powerful trading company, the Dutch East India Company.

Tasman’s discoveries on his 1642–1643 voyage included Tasmania (which he named Van Diemen’s Land after the Governor of Batavia), New Zealand and many other islands, including the Tonga and Fiji groups. Although he had only primitive navigational instruments, Tasman’s amazingly accurate charts provided the basis on which many later explorers with superior navigational aids relied, including James Cook over 120 years later.

The National Library of Australia’s publication of My Father’s Islands: Abel Tasman’s Heroic Voyages opens up to children aged 8 to 12 a little known part of our history—the remarkable talent and bravery of Dutchman Abel Janszoon Tasman (c. 1603–1659), one of the world’s greatest seamen and navigators, and the major contribution he made to the knowledge of the South Pacific.

My Father’s Islands, written by award-winning author Christobel Mattingley, was inspired by a 1637 painting of the Tasman family by leading Dutch artist Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp (1594–c. 1651), one of the treasures of the National Library of Australia.

Copies of My Father's Islands can be purchased from the National Library of Australia's website, found here.