The Zuytdorp struck the coast somewhere along a 150-km stretch of sheer limestone cliffs between Kalbarri and Shark Bay, roughly 40 km north of the Murchison River. This was among the most remote coastline in Australia -- the territory of Aboriginal peoples and, until sheep stations arrived in the late 19th century, one of the last uncolonized stretches of the continent's west. In 1834, Aboriginal people told a farmer near Perth about wreckage on the shore. Colonists assumed it was a recent wreck and sent parties who found nothing. Nearly a century later, in 1927, an Indigenous-European family group including Tom and Lurleen Pepper, Ada and Ernest Drage, and Charlie Mallard discovered wreckage atop the cliffs near the border of Murchison House and Tamala Stations. Tom Pepper, head stockman at Tamala, reported the find to authorities, but the first official visit did not occur until 1941.

In 1954, Pepper directed geologist-historian Phillip Playford to the site, and Playford identified the relics as belonging to the Zuytdorp. The first dive came a decade later, in May 1964. By 1967, divers had sighted a massive deposit of silver on the seabed. Salvage teams led by Tom Brady of Geraldton and Alan Robinson of Perth recovered coins and artifacts through the late 1960s. The Western Australian Museum took over in 1971, with Harry Bingham and chief diver Geoff Kimpton recovering additional silver and materials. Jeremy Green led further expeditions in 1976, but on each visit he found evidence of looting. A watch-keeper was posted in a caravan near the wreck site, but the caravan was eventually burned. Museum work ceased in 1981 after a series of near-accidents at the remote bush airstrip. When operations resumed in 1986 under Michael McCarthy, the silver had all but vanished.

The most provocative chapter in the Zuytdorp story concerns what may have happened to survivors. In 1988, an American woman who had married into the Mallard family contacted Playford to report that her husband had died of variegate porphyria, a genetic condition historically concentrated among Afrikaners and traceable to a single couple, Gerrit Jansz and Ariaantjie Jacobs, who married at the Cape of Good Hope in 1688. The Zuytdorp had stopped at the Cape in March 1712, taking on more than 100 new crew -- potentially including a carrier. The theory that shipwrecked sailors introduced the mutation into the Aboriginal population generated headlines, but a 2002 DNA study at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre and Stellenbosch University concluded the mutations were not inherited from the Zuytdorp's crew. Alternative explanations include indentured laborers from the 19th-century pearling industry and centuries of Macassan contact along Australia's northern coast.

The Zuytdorp wreck site remains one of the few restricted zones under Australia's Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976 and Underwater Cultural Heritage Act 2018. A permit is required to visit, and surveillance continues. Playford's 1996 book, Carpet of Silver: The Wreck of the Zuytdorp, won the Western Australian Premier's Book Award and remains the definitive account. Museums in Fremantle and Geraldton have displayed recovered coins and artifacts, and a commemorative plaque was unveiled in Kalbarri in June 2012 to mark the wreck's 300th anniversary. After retiring from the Museum in 2019, McCarthy compiled a roughly 500-page compendium of all known research on the ship, presented to the Department of Maritime Heritage in April 2024. The cliffs that bear the Zuytdorp's name still guard whatever the looters left behind.