Frederick de Houtman

De Houtman was born in Gouda. De Houtman assisted fellow Dutch navigator Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser with astronomical observations during the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies from 1595 until 1597.[1] De Houtman also sailed on the second expedition from 1598 until 1600, led by his brother, Cornelis de Houtman, who was killed. Frederick was imprisoned by the Sultan of Aceh, Alauddin Riayat Syah, in northern Sumatra.

He used his two years of captivity—from September 1599 until December 1601—to study the local Malay language and to make astronomical observations. These observations supplemented those made by Keyser on the first expedition. The constellations formed from their observations were first published in 1597 or 1598 on a globe by Petrus Plancius, and later globes incorporated adjustments based on De Houtman's later observations.[2]

Credit for these constellations is generally assigned jointly to Keyser, De Houtman, and Plancius, though some of the underlying stars were known beforehand.[1] The constellations are also widely associated with Johann Bayer, who included them in his celestial atlas, Uranometria, in 1603. After De Houtman's return to Europe, De Houtman published his stellar observations in an appendix to his dictionary and grammar of the Malayan and Malagasy languages.[3]

In 1619 De Houtman sailed in the Dutch East India Company ship Dordrecht, along with Jacob Dedel in the Amsterdam.[4] They sighted the Australian coast near present-day Perth, which they called Dedelsland. After sailing northwards along the coast he encountered and only narrowly avoided a group of shoals, subsequently called the Houtman Abrolhos.

De Houtman then made landfall in the region known as Eendrachtsland, which the explorer Dirk Hartog had encountered earlier. In his journal, De Houtman identified these coasts as Locach, mentioned by Marco Polo to have been a country far south of China and indicated as such on maps by cartographers Plancius and Linschoten.[5][6]