François Thijssen

He was the captain of the ship 't Gulden Zeepaerdt (The Golden Seahorse) when sailing from Cape of Good Hope to Batavia.

On this voyage, he ended up too far to the south and on 26 January 1627 he came upon the coast of Australia, near Cape Leeuwin, the south-westernmost tip of the continent.

Later, this ship perished near Pulicat in southeast India on 13 October 1638, though it is unclear if François Thijssen was its captain at the time.

In his 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift placed Lilliput and Blefuscu near the unimaginably remote Nuyts Archipelago, a hundred years after their discovery.

South Australia was not visited again by Europeans for 165 years, when in 1792 the French explorer Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux searched there for his lost compatriot La Pérouse.