[1] On 1 August 1711,[2] Zuytdorp was dispatched from the Netherlands to the trading port of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) bearing a load of freshly minted silver coins.

[3] Many trading ships travelled the Brouwer Route, using the strong Roaring Forties winds to carry them across the Indian Ocean to within sight of the west coast of Australia (then called New Holland), whence they would turn north towards Batavia.

In the mid-20th century, Zuytdorp's wreck site was identified on a remote part of the Western Australian coast between Kalbarri and Shark Bay, approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of the Murchison River.

This section of coastline, subsequently named the Zuytdorp Cliffs, was the preserve of Aboriginal people and had been one of the last uncolonised areas until sheep stations were established there in the late 19th century.

In 1927, wreckage was seen by an Indigenous-European family group (including Ada and Ernest Drage, Tom and Lurleen Pepper, Charlie Mallard) on a clifftop near the border of Murchison house and Tamala Stations.

The first dive in May 1964 and the sighting of a massive silver deposit in 1967 resulted in successful salvage attempts by teams led by Tom Brady of Geraldton, and Perth-based Alan Robinson who utilised the services of Clive Daw (who had visited the site by land on other occasions) in order to facilitate his work.

Geologist-historian Phillip Playford joined the team, as did pre-historians Sandra Bowdler, Kate Morse, terrestrial historical archaeologists including Fiona Weaver and Tom Pepper Jr., (representing station and Indigenous interests), surveyors, the Department of Land Administration, and artists.

Oral histories were recorded with station identities, including relatives of the Pepper, Drage, Blood, Mallard and other Indigenous families involved with the wreck.

Due to the logistical difficulties and the advent of Health and Safety legislation, the Zuytdorp in-water program ceased in 2002, though work on land and in the laboratory remains active.

[6] In 1988, an American woman who had married into the Mallard family contacted Phillip Playford and described how her husband had died some years before from a disease called variegate porphyria.

In 2002 a DNA investigation into the hypothesis that a variegate porphyria mutation was introduced into the Aboriginal population by shipwrecked sailors was undertaken at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre in Nedlands, Western Australia, and the Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

[8] The possibility Aboriginal groups joined survivors from Zuytdorp or mutineers from Batavia inspired the Walga Rock ship painting was another popular belief.