Jacob Le Maire

Jacob Le Maire, (* 1585 in Antwerp, † December 1616 at sea) was a Dutch navigator.

Life

His father Isaac Le Maire was a Dutch merchant Walloon descent and co-founder of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). However, this left 1605 the VOC in the dispute and founded the Australian company. Despite the government side Protegierung the VOC he received a license for four voyages of discovery and the hugely profitable trade in the Spice Islands. But he could not easily use an alternative shipping route instead of the claimed by the VOC on its own way around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Straits of Magellan these. Therefore, Isaac Le Maire was looking for a pristine of the rights of VOC passage to the Pacific Ocean to trade with the East Indian spice islands.

He instructed to his son Jacob, and persuaded the merchants of the small town of Hoorn north of Amsterdam, him to finance two ships for an expedition, the Horn and the Eendracht. Le Maire committed for a ship captain Willem Cornelisz Schouten experienced from Hoorn. The command of the second ship entrusted his son Jacob Le Maire.

The two sailors were held on January 29, 1616 in fact, the passage around the southern tip of South America and named this Cape Horn. Jacob Le Maire and Schouten probably also discovered the States Island. According to him, the Le Maire Strait, a strait named. This separates the states Island and Tierra del Fuego.

In the following passage through the Pacific, the Tonga Islands were discovered, among others, in May 1616. The ethnological interested Le Maire put a glossary of Hoorn, Tabar and Solomon Islands, resorted to the later sailors - among others Abel Tasman and James Cook.

When landing on Java in October 1616 but the two captains were arrested by the commanders of the VOC. They did not believe them to have way here on an alternative route. The two were sent back in chains in the Netherlands, the ships confiscated. Jacob Le Maire died on this ride between Batavia and Amsterdam at the age of 31 years.

His father Isaac went to court and reached after three years of full compensation by the VOC that replace not only the ship and cargo together with compound interest, but also had to acknowledge the claim Le Maire's son to have found the way to Cape Horn.

See for details of the trip and Willem Cornelisz Schouten.

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