Francisco Pelsaert's 1647 account of the wreck of the Batavia is among the greatest rarities of Australian exploration literature and is widely regarded as the first Australian book. Published in Amsterdam by Jan Jansz, it combines one of the most dramatic narratives of maritime disaster ever printed with the earliest published account of a European landing in Australia and the earliest visual representations of the Australian continent and its surrounding waters. These images add greatly to the significance of the first edition, where the engraved plates appear as large folding illustrations, as opposed to the reduced and compressed versions that illustrate later editions.

Francisco Pelsaert's 1647 account of the wreck of the Batavia is among the greatest rarities of Australian exploration literature and is widely regarded as the first Australian book. Published in Amsterdam by Jan Jansz, it combines one of the most dramatic narratives of maritime disaster ever printed with the earliest published account of a European landing in Australia and the earliest visual representations of the Australian continent and its surrounding waters. These images add greatly to the significance of the first edition, where the engraved plates appear as large folding illustrations, as opposed to the reduced and compressed versions that illustrate later editions.

The celebrated work recounts the disastrous 1629 voyage of the VOC ship Batavia, commanded by the Dutch East India Company officer Francisco Pelsaert (1595–1630). Sailing from the Netherlands towards Java with more than 300 passengers and crew, the vessel struck the reefs of Houtman's Abrolhos off the coast of Western Australia in June 1629. Survivors were dispersed across barren islands near the wreck while Pelsaert undertook an extraordinary open-boat voyage to Batavia (modern Jakarta) to obtain assistance. In doing so, he effectively confirmed the existence of the Australian mainland and charted a substantial section of the Western Australian coastline, from the Abrolhos north towards North-West Cape.

When Pelsaert returned months later aboard the Sardam, he encountered one of the darkest episodes in maritime history. During his absence, a mutinous faction led by the former apothecary Jeronimus Cornelisz had seized control among the stranded survivors. More than one hundred men, women and children were murdered in a campaign of terror across the islands, women were forced into concubinage, and dissenters systematically slaughtered. Some conspirators even planned to seize the rescue ship and turn pirate.

Pelsaert responded with ruthless efficiency. The ringleaders were captured, interrogated, tortured and executed on the islands themselves, several being hanged on makeshift gallows—it is ironic that these instruments of punishment were the first European structures to be erected on Australian soil. Others were returned to Batavia for further punishment, while two mutineers, Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom, were abandoned on the Australian mainland near the Hutt River, becoming the first known Europeans to settle permanently in Australia, albeit under compulsion. The trials and executions constitute the earliest recorded exercises of European judicial authority in Australia.

The engraved plates vividly complement the narrative, depicting the wreck itself, the desperate encampments on the islands, the massacres, armed clashes among survivors, the capture of the mutineers, and the gruesome executions that followed.

The 1647 first edition is of extraordinary rarity and has long been recognised as one of the foundation books of Australian discovery. Its combination of exploration narrative, ethnographic observation, judicial record and visual documentation has ensured its enduring importance, while the dramatic events it records have inspired generations of historians, novelists and artists, with major modern studies by Henriette Drake-Brockman, Hugh Edwards, Mike Dash, Simon Leys and Peter FitzSimons cementing the Batavia story as one of the defining tragedies of early European contact with Australia.

Less well known is that the text is also notable for containing the first published European description of a kangaroo, which Pelsaert likened to a strange cat-like creature with disproportionately long hind legs that moved by hopping.

The engraved illustrations are -

I. The Batavia wrecks and the crew and passengers take to the ship's boats (3 scenes).

II. The first camps ashore and salvaging goods from the wreck; exploring the other islands (2 scenes).

III. The mutiny (full plate).

IV. Rescue and restoration of order, including an image of signal fires being lit and another showing sailors on a cutter firing their muskets (3 scenes).

V. Overcoming resistance on some of the islands, culminating in the imprisonment of the mutineers (4 scenes).

VI. Punishment: six mutineers hanged in Australia and a seventh having his hands cut off, with the torture and hanging of five (six?) more in Batavia (2 scenes).