Sailing down the west Africa coastline, the Eendracht became separated from the others in a horrible storm and reached the Cape of Good Hope alone around August.

It made use of the prevailing westerly winds at those latitudes known as the "Roaring Forties", a route which had been pioneered a few years earlier by the Dutch navigator Hendrik Brouwer, who had noted it to be a faster way to reach Java.

After approximately two months at sea, on 25 October Hartog and the Eendracht unexpectedly sighted land – "various islands, which were, however, found uninhabited", at a latitude around 26° South.

In the year 1616.This object, now known as the Hartog Plate, measuring 36.5 cm (14.4 in) in diameter, is the oldest known written artifact from Australia's European history.

It lay unmolested in situ for a further eighty years, until it was re-discovered half-buried (the post had rotted away) by a Dutch expedition of three ships under the command of the Flemish captain Willem de Vlamingh in 1697.

De Vlamingh had earlier explored Rottnest Island and the Swan River (later to be the site of the city of Perth), and had been making his way up the western coast of Australia.

Some excerpts of a letter from Supercargo, Cornelis Buysero at Bantam to the Managers of the East India Company at Amsterdam, with comments from author, Jan Heeres in 1899, is of interest to the history of the Eendracht, as follows.

[* Buysero was supercargo at Bantam (DE JONGE, Opkcornst, IV, p. 68,) and was therefore likely to be well informed as to the adventures of the ship, which had sailed from the Netherlands in January 1616, departed from the Cape of Good Hope in the last days of August, and had arrived in India in December of the same year, as appears from what Steven Van der Haghen, Governor of Amboyna, writes May 26, 1617: "That in the month of December 1616, the ship Eendracht entered the narrows between Bima and the land of Endea near Guno Api (Goenoeng Api) in the south of Java" (Sapi Straits).]

On 17 December 1617 she again set sail for the return voyage home, leaving the port of Bantam and bound for Zeeland in the Dutch Republic, with Dirk Hartog again as her master.

She rounded the Cape of Good Hope on 26 November, and reached her destination on 22 March 1620 without recorded incident, a journey of some ten months.

She apparently remained in the East Indies, until 13 May 1622, where on a local trading voyage she is recorded as having been wrecked and lost off the western coast of Ambon Island in the central Moluccas.