VOC „Duyfken“ – the William Janson galleon (Holland)

William Janson (Willem Janszoon, b. 1570 - d. 1630) - Dutch traveler and discoverer, the first European to reach the shores of Australia. 1605 November 18 left Bantam on the ship "Duyfken" (Dove) to the western shores of New Guinea and after crossing the Arafura Sea, sailed to the Gulf of Carpentaria. During the trip, he explored and marked on the map 320 km of the Australian coastline, he also entered the Torres Strait, which he did a month before the Portuguese. Having supported the lands, New Guinea returned to the Netherlands. The galleon "Duyfken" was built in 1595 in the Republic of the United Provinces (as Holland was previously called) as a fast, lightly armed small ship for the transportation of valuable cargo. In the same year, together with three other ships, he set sail for the first trip to Indonesia, where he was supposed to break Portugal's dominance in the region. The Dutch were a total fiasco on this trip. In 1601 an escadre of five ships again sailed to the Far East for the same purpose, but off Bantam Island they encountered a Portuguese escadre, consisting of 8 galleons and 22 galleys. And it was only in 1602, that the Portuguese dominance was broken and the spice trade in Europe became easier and the spices themselves started to become cheaper. In 1603 as a "West India Company" ship "Duyfken" under the command of William Janson, he again set out to the east, where he participated in clashes with the Portuguese from Madagascar to New Guinea. In 1608, during repairs in Tenerife, it sat on a reef and was severely damaged, as a result of which it was declared beyond repair and dismantled.

A fairly complex model of a medium-sized sailship, that can be perfectly assembled by a modeler of average experience. We are not talking about experienced people - for them this model is like peeling sunflowers.