Anthony van Diemen, the governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, however, was a man of stubborn purpose, and he refused to discontinue his search until he should have positive knowledge upon this puzzling subject. Six years after this first attempt he appointed a certain Franz Jacobsz Visscher to study the question theoretically from every possible angle and to write him a detailed report. Visscher had crossed the Pacific Ocean a few years after the discovery of Strait Le Maire, and he had visited Japan and China, and was familiar with all the better known parts of the Asiatic seas. He set to work, and he gave the following advice. The ships of the company must take the island of Mauritius as their starting-point. They must follow a southeastern course until they should reach the 54 degree of latitude. If, in the meantime, they had not found any land, they must turn toward the east until they should reach New Guinea, and from there, using this peninsula or island or whatever it was as a starting-point, they should establish its correct relation to the continent of which it was supposed to be a solid part. If it should prove to be an island, then the ships must chart the strait which separated it from the continent, and they must find out whether these did not offer a short route from India to Strait Le Maire and the Atlantic Ocean. Van Diemen studied those plans carefully. He approved of them, and ordered two ships to be made ready for the voyage. They were small ships. There was the _Heemskerk_, with sixty men, and the _Zeehaen_, with only forty. Visscher was engaged to act as pilot and general adviser of the expedition. The command was given to one Abel Tasman. Like most of the great men of the republic, he had made his own career. Born in an insignificant village in the northern part of the republic somewhere in the province of Groningen,--the name of the village was Lutjegat,--he had started life as a sailor, had worked his way up through ability and force of character, and in the early thirties of the seventeenth century he had gone to India. Thereafter he had spent most of his life as captain or mate of different ships of the company. He had been commander of an expedition sent out to discover a new gold-land, which, according to rumor, must be situated somewhere off the coast of Japan, and although he did not find it,--since it did not exist,--he had added many new islands to the map of the company. Since he was a man of very independent character, he was specially fitted to be in command of an expedition which might meet with many unforeseen difficulties.