Dutch Pacific Voyages of Discovery

Dutch voyagers from 1599 through the middle 1700s discovered many of the major island groups in the Pacific, including Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawai`i, New Zealand, Samoa and Tonga. Three of those expeditions went east to west around Cape Horn and were led by independent adventurers who challenged the monopoly of the Dutch East India Company, in hopes of finding an alternate route to lucra...