The Makassar came only to collect trepang, never setting up permanent camps with crops, apart from dropped tamarind seeds that sprouted. The Makassan voyages dated from at least 1720, although there are reports of visits perhaps 300 years prior to that, and extended from the Kimberleys in the west, to the east of Gulf of Carpentaria. The Makassans had extensive contact with the indigenous tribes of the Northern Territory, trading cloth, knives, alcohol, and tobacco for the right to fish in Territory waters and use aboriginal labour. The first recorded sighting of the Northern Territory coastline was by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon aboard the ship in 1606. Abel Tasman and numerous French navigators also charted the coast, naming many prominent features. Captain Phillip Parker King also made surveys of the coast. Following the European settlement of Australian in 1788, four unsuccessful attempts were made to settle coastal areas of the Northern Territory prior to the establishment of Darwin. On 30 September 1824 British Captain James Gordon Bremer established Fort Dundas on Melville Island as a part of the Colony of New South Wales. Fort Dundas was the first settlement in Northern Australia, however poor relations with the Tiwi, cyclones and other difficulties of tropical living, led to the Fort being abandoned in 1828. A second settlement was established on the Cobourg Peninsula at Raffles Bay on 18 June 1827. Fort Wellington was founded by Captain James Stirling, however it was also abandoned in 1829. The British made a third attempt in 1838, establishing Fort Victoria at Port Essington on 27 October 1838. Bremer was in command of the new settlement, in July 1839 and her crew visited the settlement. Bremer left the settlement in 1839 and following his departure conditions in the settlement deteriorated. Explorer Ludwig Leichhardt travelled from Moreton Bay, overland to Port Essington. An unsuccessful migration scheme was tried, and the first Catholic priest Father Angelo Confalonieri in the area arrived in 1846, however the settlement disbanded on 1 December 1849. European explorers made their last great, often arduous and sometimes tragic expeditions into the interior of Australia during the second half of the 19th century – some with the official sponsorship of the colonial authorities and others commissioned by private investors. By 1850, large areas of the inland were still unknown to Europeans. Trailblazers like Edmund Kennedy and the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, had met tragic ends attempting to fill in the gaps during the 1840s, but explorers remained ambitious to discover new lands for agriculture or answer scientific inquiries.