Willem Schouten

Willem Cornelisz Schouten (c. 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.

Biography

Willem Cornelisz Schouten was born in c. 1567 in Hoorn, Holland, Seventeen Provinces.

In 1615 Willem Cornelisz Schouten and Jacob le Maire sailed from Texel in the Netherlands, in command of an expedition sponsored by Isaac Le Maire and his Australische Compagnie in equal shares with Schouten. A main purpose of the voyage was to search for Terra Australis, which eluded them. A further objective was to evade the trade restrictions of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) by finding a new route to the Pacific and the Spice Islands. In 1616 Schouten rounded Cape Horn, which he named after the recently destroyed ship Hoorn, and the Dutch city of Hoorn, after which the lost ship was named, the town in which Schouten himself was born. He followed the north coasts of New Ireland and New Guinea and visited adjacent islands, including what became known as the Schouten Islands.