Dutch captain Dirk Hartog, commanding the VOC ship Eendracht on a voyage from Cape Town to Batavia, reached the northwestern tip of an unknown island on 25 October 1616. He was the first confirmed European to see Western Australia. Before departing two days later, Hartog inscribed a pewter plate with the date, the ship's name, and the senior officers: upper merchant Gilles Mibais of Liege, upper steersman Pieter Doekes from Bil, undermerchant Jan Stein, and himself, captain from Amsterdam. He nailed the plate to a post and left it standing upright in a fissure on the cliff top of what is now Cape Inscription. Then the Eendracht sailed for Bantam, and Hartog continued northeast along the coast, naming the mainland Eendrachtsland -- 'Land of Concord' -- after his ship.

Eighty-one years of salt wind and sun had nearly destroyed the post when Dutch sea captain Willem de Vlamingh reached the island in February 1697. He found Hartog's plate, its inscription still legible, and made a fateful decision: he took the original, replacing it with a new plate of his own. De Vlamingh's replacement carried the full text of Hartog's inscription alongside the details of his own expedition -- three ships, the Geelvink, Nyptangh, and the galliot Weseltje, with their officers and pilots listed in careful Dutch. The new post was cut from a cypress pine trunk taken from Rottnest Island. Hartog's original plate traveled home to the Netherlands, where it eventually entered the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. It has been there since, the quiet centerpiece of Dutch-Australian maritime history.

In 1801, French captain Emmanuel Hamelin, second-in-command of the Baudin expedition, found de Vlamingh's plate half-buried in sand, its post rotted to a stump. Hamelin re-erected it and added an inscription of his own, along with a small Dutch flag -- a rare gesture of cross-national respect. The headland was named Cape Inscription for the accumulating plaques. Seventeen years later, Louis de Freycinet, who had served as an officer under Hamelin, sent a shore party to take de Vlamingh's plate to France. It reached Paris and was presented to the Academie Francaise. Then it disappeared. For more than a century the plate sat unrecognized on a bottom shelf in a small storeroom, mixed in with old copper engraving plates. No one looked twice until 1940, when it was identified during an inventory.

In 1947, France returned the de Vlamingh plate to Australia in recognition of Australian losses defending France in two world wars. It is now displayed at the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle, reunited -- conceptually, at least -- with the coastline where it stood for over a century. Back at Cape Inscription, the Commonwealth government had already marked Hartog's landing with a brass plaque in 1938. In February 1997, Western Australian Premier Richard Court unveiled a bronze plaque to mark the tricentennial of de Vlamingh's visit. The lighthouse at Cape Inscription still stands sentinel over the spot where a sailor once hammered a message into his dinner plate and left it for the wind, never imagining it would become the oldest European relic on the continent.