ABSTRACT
Being probably the first plenary speaker at the ISAP symposium from The Netherlands, I would like to share with you some of my earliest and truthfully “Dutch” perspectives on the world. When I was a young boy I was repeatedly told that, although The Netherlands is only a small country, our impact on the world and how it was explored and developed in the past hundreds of years, has been significant. In the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century, also known as the “Dutch Golden Age,” famous Dutch explorers like Abel Tasman and Willem Barentsz, respectively, discovered Tasmania and explored the Arctic. The now great city of New York was ours! These journeys still form a major part of our Dutch identity, our culture and literature, and in my childhood I devoured the incredibly exciting books about the journeys of our great-great-… ancestors.
