Sailing under commission from the Dutch East India Company, Abel Janszoon Tasman sighted the rugged coastline of an island he named Van Diemen's Land, after the governor-general who sponsored his voyage. It was later renamed Tasmania in his honor. The landfall extended European knowledge of the Southern Hemisphere's geography and opened, eventually, the path to Dutch and later British engagement with Australia and its surrounding waters.
Tasman's two ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen, had been sent from Batavia (modern Jakarta) to search for a supposed southern continent and new trade routes. After a rough passage across the Indian Ocean, lookouts spotted mountainous land on November 24, which Tasman initially assumed might connect to a larger unknown continent.
He never went ashore himself on this leg, sending a party by boat instead, and it would be another 150 years before Europeans returned to chart the island in detail. Tasman's own name for the coastline was quietly dropped by later Dutch cartographers, but Matthew Flinders and other British explorers eventually renamed it Tasmania in the explorer's honor, cementing his place in the region's history despite his relatively brief, cautious visit.