by Mike Dash
The little group set off on a raft from Batavia’s Graveyard, rowing along the deep-water channel until the island had almost vanished in the distance. As soon they were well away from any help, the unsuspecting loyalists were set upon and taken by surprise. Their hands and feet were tightly bound and three of them were tipped overboard to drown. The fourth, a Company cadet called Andries Liebent, begged for his life and he was spared on condition that he pledged his loyalty to the mutineers. No one on Batavia’s Graveyard seems to have thought it odd that Liebent had returned, and the trap was judged to have worked so well that it was used again only two days later, when Hans Radder, a cadet, and the Batavia’s upper-trumpeter, Jacop Groenwald, were drowned. These men were enemies of Mattys Beer, who had maliciously denounced them to Jeronimus as “cacklers.” The pair were trussed up by Zevanck and his friends and held under the water while they drowned. Again, however, Zevanck spared an intended victim. This man was an assistant from Middelburg by the name of Andries de Vries, who was only in his early twenties and begged loudly for mercy. “Having been bound, he was set free and his life was spared for the time being,” the Batavia’s journals note. But De Vries, like Liebent, had to pay a price to save his life: he was sworn to serve Jeronimus and to do as he was told.
Thus far, Cornelisz’s schemes had all succeeded admirably. The under-merchant had quietly recruited at least a score of determined men to do his bidding. He had successfully reduced the numbers on Batavia’s Graveyard, limiting the demand on his supplies and dividing his potential enemies into four separate camps, none of which had any contact with the others. He had silenced dissent by dissolving Frans Jansz’s raad and made his principal lieutenants councillors in its stead. Then he had begun to murder the Batavia survivors—the very people he was sworn to protect. By the end of the first week of July, he had killed eight of them, five covertly and three publicly, as thieves, and there seemed to be no reason why he could not deal with the remainder in the same manner, at least until the ranks of loyalists on the island had been so thinned that it would hardly matter if he revealed himself. As for the 14 men with Pieter Jansz, the 20 who had gone with Hayes, and the 45 whom he had ferried to Seals’ Island, they posed no immediate threat and could safely be ignored.
Hayes’s party was, it seems, the only one to cause Jeronimus concern. The survivors who had gone to Seals’ and Traitors’ Islands were mixed groups of men, women, and children, unlikely to put up much of a fight, but the men on the High Land were all soldiers—tough, self-reliant, and capable of making trouble. It was perhaps for this reason that the under-merchant had sent Wiebbe’s party as far away from Batavia’s Graveyard as he could and left the men without a boat on islands where he knew that they would struggle to survive. As days and then weeks passed without signals from the High Land, Cornelisz may have assumed that his enemies had died of thirst. That would have been to his advantage, but his plans did not depend on it. He was content to leave Hayes where he was for the time being—so long as he did not find any water.
In any normal circumstances, the discovery of wells on the High Land would have come as a huge relief to the survivors of a wreck. Jeronimus’s scheme for the capture of a rescue ship, however, depended on dividing the Batavia’s people into different camps, which he could deal with one by one. If water were found, however, the survivors would expect Cornelisz to gather all four of his parties at the wells, with the inevitable result that the mutineers would once again find themselves in a small minority. This was something that the under-merchant could not allow to happen.
The discovery of several cisterns on the High Land, which occurred on 9 July, thus threw his schemes into utter disarray. The under-merchant watched in disbelief as first one beacon, then a second, then a third, flared into life along the shoreline of Hayes’s islands. These signal fires confirmed that Wiebbe was still alive, 20 days after he and his men first went ashore, and informed the people of Batavia’s Graveyard that the longed-for water had been found. They were also the agreed sign that rafts should be sent to pick up the landing party.
For the first time since he had come ashore, Cornelisz found himself in a quandary. The signals could not be concealed—the beacons were clearly visible from the survivors’ camp—and yet they had to be ignored. Jeronimus had no intention of permitting Hayes and his troops to leave the High Land, but by refusing to send rafts to rescue them, he and his councillors gave the men and women of Batavia’s Graveyard the first clear indication that the councillors of the raad did not have their best interests at heart. Wiebbe, too, would doubtless realize that something was wrong, and it would no longer be easy to surprise him. To make matters worse, the soldiers could now survive indefinitely on their island, while Cornelisz and his men remained dependent on the intermittent rains for their own supplies of water. Hayes’s fires were thus not merely signs but portents—an indication that Jeronimus’s plot was beginning to unravel.
Almost as soon as the signal beacons were lit, indeed, Jeronimus noticed a flurry of activity on Traitors’ Island. He and his followers could see the people there struggling to launch two small, handmade boats from the north side of their coral cay. Pieter Jansz was the first man aboard, and he was followed by his wife and child. Then came a German soldier, Claes Harmanszoon of Magdeburg, whose wife was also with him, and a woman named Claudine Patoys, who took a child with her. The other members of the party were all men: a mixed group of soldiers and sailors, almost all Dutch. They picked up rough paddles carved from driftwood and began to propel their rafts through the shallows, heading north.
Cornelisz knew at once where they were going. He had lured the provost and his men onto their barren islet with the assurance that they could sail on to the High Land when the soldiers there found water. It had been an empty promise, of course, but evidently Jansz had been watching out for signal fires, looking for any opportunity to leave his miserable base, and now he was making for Hayes’s Island. The prospect of reinforcements reaching the soldiers on the High Land infuriated the under-merchant. While Jansz’s rafts were still some way off, he summoned the members of his council for a hasty consultation. Together, they decided to attack.
Traitors’ Island was only half a mile away, and there was little time to waste. Zevanck and Van Huyssen ran to gather their familiar accomplices—Gsbert van Welderen, Jan Hendricxsz, and Lenert van Os—and hurried to the beach where they kept their boats. Two other members of Jeronimus’s gang came with them—they were Lucas Gellisz, a young cadet from The Hague, and Cornelis Pietersz, a common soldier from Utrecht—but this, it seems, was as many as their fastest yawl could carry. The seven men seized oars and steered southwest to intercept the rafts.
Pieter Jansz must have been alarmed to see the mutineers. The provost may well have guessed that Zevanck and his friends intended violence, for the murders of Hans Radder and Jacop Groenwald had taken place within sight of Traitors’ Island, but he soon realized that he could not evade the yawl. His clumsy rafts were so much slower than the neat rowing boat the Batavia’s carpenters had built that Zevanck and his men had little difficulty in catching him.
The rafts were in the middle of a stretch of deep water when the mutineers caught up with them. As the yawl came within hailing distance, Zevanck raised his voice and called out to Jansz, demanding to know where he and his companions were going. Then he ordered the provost to change his course and make for Batavia’s Graveyard instead.
While this was happening, the mutineers’ yawl had swung alongside the provost’s raft, and Gellisz, Pietersz, Hendricxsz, and Van Os swarmed from one to the other, armed and full of menace. Three or four of Jansz’s men attempted to escape by hurling themselves into the sea, where they quickly drowned. The rest offered little resistance, and in less than a minute Zevanck’s men had relieved the provost of his command. Soon both the rafts were heading for the under-merchant’s island.
Jansz must by now have become seriously concerned for the safety of his family, but there was littl
e he could do to protect them. He and his men watched uneasily as Zevanck jumped into the shallows and ran up the beach to where Jeronimus was standing by the entrance to his tent. The two men consulted for a moment, then Zevanck turned and hastened back toward the rafts. “Slaet doodt!” he was shouting. “Kill!”
Lucas Gellisz had got into the water and was holding the rafts steady. Hendricxsz, Pietersz, and Van Os were still on board. Quickly, the three men drew their swords and cut down the provost and his child. Two, perhaps three, of the remaining men were also killed, as was Claudine Patoys’s child, but for once the mutineers had found themselves outnumbered, and four of Jansz’s party threw themselves over the side into water that came up to their waists. Two of them were sailors—friends named Pauwels Barentsz and Bessel Jansz, who both came from the little port of Harderwijk in Gelderland. The other pair were soldiers Claes Harmanszoon and Nicolaas Winckelhaack. These men had apparently not realized that Cornelisz himself had ordered the attack, for they staggered out of the sea loudly imploring the under-merchant for protection. Jeronimus gazed down as the four men sprawled at his feet, soaked and breathless, panicked, desperate. “Give them no quarter,” he declared.
Jan Hendricxsz had come running up the beach behind the men, his sword still in his hand. Now he lunged at Pauwels Barentsz, carving a great wound in his side. Barentsz fell backward onto the sand as Andries Jonas—another of Cornelisz’s followers and, at 40, the oldest of the mutineers—loomed over him and thrust a pike right through his throat, turning the sailor’s screams to blood-flecked gasps and pinning him down while he died. Hendricxsz, meanwhile, slashed at Winckelhaack, killing him immediately, after which he wounded Bessel Jansz. Rutger Fredricx came to join him, “striking the mentioned Bessel with his sword until he was dead”; then the locksmith, alone, slew Harmanszoon as he fled back through the shallows. That left only the three women on the rafts. Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen bundled them into the yawl and sculled out into the channel, where the water was more than 100 feet deep. They then pushed Jansz’s wife, and Harmanszoon’s, and Claudine Patoys into the sea where—weighed down by their wet skirts—they drowned.
The massacre of the provost’s party, which took place in full view of the 130 survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard, brought the under-merchant’s plot into the open for the first time. For three weeks or more, the people of the island had accepted Cornelisz as their leader without question; now they saw him as he really was. Jeronimus may well have tried to justify his actions; it is possible he argued that Pieter Jansz had been a traitor to the Company for fleeing to the High Land in defiance of the orders of the council. But, if so, it did him little good. Even the most trusting of the retourschip’s crew understood that the killings they had witnessed were nothing less than cold-blooded murder—and mutiny against the authority of Jan Company. And although the VOC loyalists still outnumbered the under-merchant’s gang by about four to one, they were powerless to stop them. Cornelisz controlled all the weapons on the island, and only his followers had access to the swords, daggers, and axes in the stores. The island was so small and barren that there was nowhere to hide, and the boats were always guarded. Moreover, by a bitter irony, Jeronimus himself was now the living embodiment of the Gentlemen XVII in the Abrolhos. As the leader of the raad, he claimed the allegiance of all of the survivors. Any attempt to oppose him—even the least dissent—might itself be classed as mutiny against the VOC. Those who had watched as Pieter Jansz was hacked to pieces now understood that such actions would be punished with the utmost severity.
It was, then, hardly a surprise that at least another dozen men declared for Cornelisz over the next few days. Most appear to have joined the under-merchant in the hope of saving their own lives; a few were no doubt attracted by the prospect of better rations and freer access to the boats and stores. The majority of these opportunists were idlers or soldiers from the orlop deck, but at least one was an officer—an assistant from North Holland named Isbrant Isbrantsz. Frans Jansz, too, now that he had seen what Jeronimus was capable of, threw in his lot with the mutineers.
As it transpired, the new recruits played only minor roles in events on the Abrolhos, although they would sometimes be required to join the others in a show of force. Jeronimus, it seems, never really trusted them and frequently demanded some demonstration of their loyalty. For their part, the camp followers feared Cornelisz almost as much as did the other people on the island.
The first mutineer to be tested by the under-merchant was a German soldier named Hans Hardens. He came from Ditmarschen, a province close to Denmark’s border with the Holy Roman Empire. Having taken service with the VOC for a five-year term, Hardens had boarded the Batavia with his wife, Anneken, and his six-year-old daughter, Hilletgie. All three of them had survived the voyage and the wreck and found themselves together on Batavia’s Graveyard.
Hardens, so far as one can tell, had played no part in the conspiracy on board the ship, but he had gravitated towards Cornelisz’s circle in the month after the wreck, apparently in the hope of feeding and protecting his wife and daughter. In time he became one of the more active mutineers, though he was hardly the most violent. Nevertheless, there was something about him that gave Jeronimus pause. The soldier may have been too slow to obey an order, too free with his opinions, or perhaps too friendly with Frans Jansz. He invited Hardens and his wife into his tent and—while they ate and drank together—sent Jan Hendricxsz to strangle their little girl.
Hilletgie Hardens was the first child to be killed on Batavia’s Graveyard, but if her death was intended to test Hans Hardens’s loyalty, Jeronimus must have been satisfied with the result. No matter what his private grief, Hardens knew he had no choice but to stick to his allegiance to the mutineers, especially if he was to have any hope of protecting his wife. Three days after his daughter’s murder, Hardens swore an oath of fealty to his comrades: a solemn vow, a “written unbreakable agreement, the greatest oath that anyone can take, to be faithful in everything.”
The brutal killing of the little girl perhaps affected the Batavia survivors more than any of the other early murders. The other victims had at least been tried by the ship’s council, while Pieter Jansz and his men had arguably been guilty of disobeying Zevanck’s orders. Awful though their deaths had been, there had at least been some sort of explanation for them. Hilletgie’s murder seemed senseless in comparison, for not even Cornelisz argued she had been guilty of a crime. The girl’s death thus marked a significant deterioration of conditions in the archipelago. From then on, none of the retourschip’s passengers and crew could be certain they were safe. Showing loyalty to the under-merchant, obeying orders and working hard were no longer any guarantee of Jeronimus’s favor. He and his followers had begun to murder indiscriminately.
Matters were very different for the under-merchant’s gang, who now felt a sense of liberation. The first days of the mutiny cannot have been easy for David Zevanck and his friends. Their work was difficult and dangerous, and the risk of discovery was very real. By the middle of July, however, the assistant and his friends had gained considerably in confidence, parading openly about the island, fully armed, and taking what they wanted for themselves. “The whole day long it was their catch-call, ‘Who wants to be boxed on the ear?’ ” remembered Gijsbert Bastiaensz.
“So we all of us together expected to be murdered at any moment, and we besought God continuously for merciful relief . . . O cruelty! O atrocity of atrocities! They proved themselves to be nothing more than highwaymen. Murderers who are on the roads often take their belongings from People, but they sometimes leave them their lives; but these have taken both, goods and blood.”
Among their many privileges, Cornelisz’s most trusted men enjoyed better rations than the other Batavia survivors, eating cask meat instead of sea lion and bird, and drinking wines and spirits rather than rainwater. They had better clothes and larger tents, and their access to the boats gave them a freedom of movement that was denied to the
loyalists. Significantly, the mutineers also experienced—for the first time in their lives—complete freedom from the constraints that had previously governed them. In the United Provinces they had generally been men of little significance and few resources, who struggled to make a living and were subject to the rule of law. In the Abrolhos they had status and wielded power over men and women who were their nominal superiors. They felt, moreover, little fear of retribution. Cornelisz’s position in the archipelago appeared to be unchallengeable, and the prospect of arrest and punishment remote.
Jeronimus had perhaps derived some satisfaction from crushing Hardens, for he next turned his attention to Andries de Vries. The young Zeelander was lucky to be alive, having escaped death by drowning at the beginning of the month, but he had yet to demonstrate his loyalty to the men who had spared his life. On 10 July Jeronimus gave De Vries that opportunity. He was told to prove his worthiness by killing on the under-merchant’s orders.
The chosen victims were people in the sick tent. There were 11 of them in all—useless mouths, Cornelisz observed, who were so weakened by scurvy and fever that they would offer no resistance. De Vries crept into their tent by night and cut their throats, one by one, while Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen stood over him to make quite sure he carried out his task. Three days later the assistant was compelled to return and slaughter another four or five men who had taken sick in the interim.
From then on, to fall ill on Batavia’s Graveyard was to receive a death sentence. First Jan Hendricxsz and Allert Janssen slit the throat of Jan Pinten, the island’s only English soldier, while he lay in bed; then a sick cabin boy went the same way. A few days later, De Vries and Janssen conspired to end the life of Hendrick Claasz, a carpenter. These killings also took place by night. The only invalids to be spared were associates of the mutineers: Hans Frederick, who had already helped to kill one man and may have been one of Hendricxsz’s associates, and Olivier van Welderen, who was Gsbert’s elder brother.
