Willem Cornelisz Schouten (1625) was a Dutch navigator for the Dutch East India Company. He was the first to sail the Cape Horn route to the Pacific Ocean.
Biography
thumb|left|Route of the 1615–1616 voyage
Willem Cornelisz Schouten was born around 1567 in Hoorn, Holland, Seventeen Provinces.
In April 1601 Willem Schouten was skipper of the Duyfken in the 'Moluccan fleet' of Wolfert Hermansz, and participated in the Battle of Bantam.
On 1 July 1615 Willem Schouten and his younger brother Jan Schouten sailed from Texel in the Netherlands, in an expedition led by Jacob Le Maire and sponsored by Isaac Le Maire and his in equal shares with Schouten. The expedition consisted of two ships: Eendracht and Hoorn. A main purpose of the voyage was to search for . A further objective was to explore a western route to the Pacific Ocean to evade the trade restrictions of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the Spice Islands. In 1616 Schouten rounded Cape Horn, which he named after the recently destroyed ship Hoorn, and the Dutch city of Hoorn, after which the lost ship was named, the town in which Schouten himself was born. Schouten named the strait itself Le Maire Strait. Willem Schouten's younger brother Jan Schouten died on 9 March 1616 after the expedition left Juan Fernández.