Willem Cornelisz Schouten (Suteni) & Jacob Le Maire (Lemea) ^Featured

Tonga celebrated last week the 4th centuries of the remarkable visit of Willem Cornelisz Schouten & Jacob Le Maire, the first Westerners to discover Tonga in the seventeenth century. The explorers are known in Tonga as Suteni (Schouten) and Lemea (Le Maire) who discovered the two islands of Niua to the northern end of the archipelago in 1616.

Jacob Le Maire was a Dutch mariner who circumnavigated the earth in 1615 and 1616. The strait between Tierra del Fuego and Isla de los Estados was named the Le Maire Strait in his honor, though not without controversy.

Jacob Le Maire was one of 22 children of Maria Walraven of Antwerp and Isaac Le Maire (1558–1624) of Tournai, which part of present day Belgium. Jacob is thought to have been the oldest son, born perhaps the same year. Isaac was very successful in Amsterdam, and became one of the founders of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC). However, in 1605 Isaac Le Maire was forced to leave the company after a dispute and for the next decade tried to break the company's monopoly on the trade to the East Indies.

By 1615 Isaac had established a new company (the Australian Company) with the goal to find a new route to the Pacific and the Spice Islands, thereby evading the restrictions of the VOC. He contributed to the outfitting of two ships, the Eendracht and Hoorn, and put his son Jacob Le Maire in charge of trading during the expedition. The experienced ship master Willem Schouten was captain of the Eendracht and a participant of the enterprise in equal shares with Isaac Le Maire.

Willem Cornelisz Schouten (1567 – 1625) was a Dutch navigator for the Dutch East India Company. He was the first to sail the Cape Horn route to the Pacific Ocean. On 14 June 1615 Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten sailed from Texel in the United Provinces. On 29 January 1616 they rounded Cape Horn, which they named for the Hoorn, which was lost in a fire.

The Dutch city of Hoorn was also the birthplace of Schouten. After failing to moor at the Juan Fernández Islands in early March, the ships crossed the Pacific in a fairly straight line, visiting several of the Tuamotus. Between 21 and 24 April 1616 they were the first Westerners to visit the (Northern) Tonga islands: "Cocos Island" (Tafahi), "Traitors Island" (Niuatoputapu), and "Island of Good Hope" (Niuafo'ou).

On 28 April they discovered the Hoorn Islands (Futuna and Alofi), where they were very well received and stayed until 12 May. They then followed the north coasts of New Ireland and New Guinea and visited adjacent islands, including, on 24 July, what became known as the Schouten Islands.

Excerpts from Wikipedia