Vianen's troubles began with timing. She had arrived at Batavia on October 8, 1627, after a seven-month voyage from Texel via the Cape of Good Hope. On January 6, 1628, she joined a homebound fleet of seven ships under the command of Pieter de Carpentier, the outgoing Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. But just as the fleet prepared to sail, a valuable cargo arrived from China. Vianen was held back to take it aboard. The loading was rushed, and the ship had to return to port almost immediately -- her cargo was so badly balanced that 5,000 ingots of copper had to be added as ballast before she could safely put to sea. By the time Vianen departed Batavia again on January 20, the rest of the fleet was long gone, and the monsoon season had set in. The Sunda Strait, the usual route west, was now impassable. Captain Gerrit Frederikszoon de Witt was ordered to take the longer route south through the Strait of Balamboan instead.

Strong headwinds pushed Vianen far south of her intended course. Somewhere in the vicinity of Barrow Island, off the northwest coast of Australia, the ship ran aground. The situation was serious but not fatal. To lighten the vessel, the crew threw overboard eight to ten lasts of pepper and a quantity of copper -- a significant financial loss, but one the ship could survive. As the crew recorded, they got off the reef "through God's mercy" without further damage. It was a close call on a coast that had already claimed Dutch ships; the Batavia, belonging to the same company, would wreck catastrophically on the Abrolhos Islands the following year. Vianen's grounding was gentler, but it placed her crew on a stretch of coastline that few Europeans had seen and none had charted in detail.

Rather than flee immediately, Captain de Witt turned the misadventure into an opportunity. Sailing north along the coast after refloating, he charted the northwest Australian shoreline as far as the present-day location of Port Hedland. This stretch of coast would appear on subsequent Dutch maps as "G.F. de Wits Landt" -- de Witt's Land -- one of the earliest named European designations for any part of Western Australia. Near present-day Roebourne, the crew sighted Indigenous Australians on shore. This encounter is believed to be the first recorded European sighting of Aboriginal people in Western Australia, predating the more famous landings and surveys that would follow in later decades. De Witt's chart added another piece to the slowly assembling European picture of a continent whose true size and shape would not be understood for another century and a half.

After charting the coast, Vianen turned northwest and eventually reached the Cape of Good Hope on May 24, 1628 -- a full four months after her hasty departure from Batavia. She left the Cape on June 1 and arrived at Goeree in the Dutch province of Zeeland on November 8, completing a homeward voyage of nearly ten months. The pepper and copper that survived the grounding made the journey commercially worthwhile, if not as profitable as the company had hoped. Vianen had been battered by monsoons, run aground on a foreign continent, and delayed by months, but she had come home. Her captain had mapped unknown coastline, her crew had seen people no European in Western Australia had recorded seeing before, and the VOC had another data point in its growing understanding of the sea routes east of the Cape.

Vianen's second voyage would be her last. She departed Texel on May 7, 1629, bound again for Batavia. The outward leg proceeded without incident -- Cape of Good Hope on August 27, a layover until September 12. But on November 14, 1629, in the Sunda Strait she had been unable to transit on her first voyage, Vianen was wrecked and sunk. The details of her sinking are sparse; the records note the loss without elaboration. She lies somewhere in the strait's treacherous waters, one of hundreds of ships the VOC lost during two centuries of trade between Amsterdam and the East Indies. What distinguishes Vianen from most of them is what happened during that unplanned detour to the Australian coast -- a grounding that could have been a footnote became a first contact, a new chart, and a name on a map that outlasted the ship herself.