Abel Janszoon Tasman was a Dutch seafarer and explorer best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644, in the service of the VOC (Dutch East India Company). His was the first European expedition to reach the islands of Van Diemen's Land (now T...

Witte Corneliszoon de With was a famous Dutch naval officer of the 17th century. On his first sea voyage to the Dutch East Indies on 21 January 1616 when he was sixteen, as a cabin boy on Captain Geen Huygen Schapenham's ship the Gouden...

Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp was an officer and later admiral in the Dutch navy. Born in Den Briel, Tromp sailed the seas from the age of nine, and joined the Dutch navy as a lieutenant in 1621. His first distinction was being Piet Hein's fla...

Robert Blake was one of the most important military commanders of the Commonwealth of England and one of the most famous English admirals of the 17th century, whose successes have "never been excelled, not even by Nelson" according to one b...

Jan Pieterszoon Coen was an officer of Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the early seventeenth century, holding two terms as its Governor-General in the Dutch East Indies. He was long considered a national hero in the Netherlands, for provi...

Dirk Hartog was a 17th-century Dutch sailor and explorer. Dirk Hartog's expedition was the second European group to land in Australia and the first to leave behind an artifact to record his visit,the Hartog plate. His name is sometimes alte...

Captain John Smith was an English adventurer and soldier, and one of the founders of the Jamestown, Virginia, settlement. Smith also led expeditions exploring Chesapeake Bay and the New England coast. Smith was one of 105 settlers who sa...

Piet Pieterszoon Hein (Heyn) was a Dutch naval officer and folk hero during the Eighty Years' War between the Netherlands and Spain. Hein was born in Delfshaven (now part of Rotterdam), the son of a captain, and he became a sailor while he...

Edward Cecil, 1st Viscount Wimbledon, was an English military and naval commander and a politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1601 and 1624. Cecil served with the English forces in the Netherlands between 1596...

Frederick de Houtman was a Dutch explorer, navigator, and colonial governor who sailed along the coastal regions of western Australia on the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies from 1595 until 1597, during which time he made observati...

Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, commonly known as Reis Mourad the Younger, was a Dutch pirate in Morocco who converted to Islam after being captured by a Moorish state in 1618. He began serving as a pirate, one of the most famous of the 17th-cent...

Jacob van Heemskerk was a Dutch explorer and later admiral commanding the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Gibraltar. Van Heemskerk's early fame arose from an attempts to discover an Arctic passage from Europe to China. Two vessels sailed from...

Willem Cornelisz Schouten was a Dutch navigator for the Dutch East India Company. He was the first to sail the Cape Horn route to the Pacific Ocean. In 1615 Willem Cornelisz Schouten and his younger brother Jan Schouten sailed from Texel...

Samuel de Champlain was a French Explorer. He made several expeditions to North America before founding Quebec in 1608 with 32 colonists, most of whom did not survive the first winter. He joined with the northern Indian tribes to defeat Iro...

Cornelis de Houtman, was a Dutch explorer who discovered a new sea route from Europe to Indonesia and managed to begin the Dutch spice trade. At the time, the Portuguese Empire held a monopoly on the spice trade, and the voyage was a symbol...