WHO WROTE THE MARGINAL ANNOTATIONS IN THE HUYDECOPER TASMAN JOURNAL?

The so-called Huydecoper journal at the State Library of New South Wales was acquired in 1927 and is among the important documents in the library's collection of early discovery of Australia. It is a contemporary copy of Abel Tasman's journal of the Heemskerck, his flagship during the 1642-43 circumnavigation of Australia. The journal has marginal annotations written in a style different from the main text. With nine other bundles of documents in the Dutch National Archive in The Hague, it came originally from a collection known as the Sweers Collection, all marked "CS".1 Some literature says that this is Cornelis Sweers' initials, a tradition that dates to a theory by P. A. Leupe in 1872. The present article demonstrates why there can be no connection between the letters CS and a Cornelis Sweers, and that the person who made the marginal annotations in the Huydecoper journal and in the rest of Collectie Sweers can be identified as Salomon Sweers' son-in-law, Jacobus de Fremery. It also looks at the earliest known map with the name Gulf of Carpentaria, and some questions tied to Tasman's nomenclature on New Hanover in the Bismarck archipelago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]