Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  The most extreme case was that of Jan Pelgrom, the cabin boy, whose “gruesome life” is vividly sketched in the ship’s journals. “Mocking at God, cursing and swearing, also conducting himself more like a beast than a human being,” Pelgrom lacked any self-control, “which made him at last a terror to all the people, who feared him more than any of the other principal murderers or evil-doers.” The boy’s sudden elevation—he had been one of the lowliest of the Batavia’s crew, and now found himself among the most powerful—practically unhinged him, and he took to racing around the island “like a man possessed,” spewing out challenges and blasphemies to anyone who would listen. “[He] has daily on the island run,” the journals observe, “calling out, ‘Come now, devils with all the sacraments, where are you? I wish that I now saw a devil. And who wants to be stabbed to death? I can do that very beautifully.’ ”

  In this highly charged and dangerous environment, it is no surprise that the killings on the island did not cease with the murder of the predikant’s family on 21 July. Cornelisz and his blood council still sat in judgment on their dwindling band of subjects, and the captain-general continued to order executions.

  What did change was the nature of the violence. For two weeks, Jeronimus’s men had killed—ostensibly at least—to limit the drain on their supplies. In reality they had also done so to remove potential rivals and ensure that there could be no challenge to their authority, but, whatever the motive, the murders themselves had been cold-blooded and considered. The slaughter of Gijsbert Bastiaensz’s wife and children changed that. The predikant’s family had, it would appear, been marked for death in the usual way; there were eight of them, not including Bastiaensz and Judick, and they must have been consuming a good deal of food and water. But the act of killing had roused David Zevanck and his men, and they had gone on to dispose of the unfortunate Hendrick Denys and Mayken Cardoes without orders from Jeronimus. Denys had been dispatched by Jan Hendricxsz, who was apparently in the throes of some sort of blood lust. Andries Jonas had been ordered to kill Cardoes, probably because he had taken no part in the general massacre and Zevanck wished to ensure that he shared responsibility for what had taken place that night. From this perspective, the murder of the girl can be seen as an attempt by Zevanck to assert control and ensure conformity within Jeronimus’s band. So far as can be ascertained, the deaths of these later victims had not been planned; both killings were atypical, and, when they occurred, one phase of the mutiny ended and another one began.

  From that day on, the captain-general killed to kill. A handful of Jeronimus’s later murders were intended to settle scores or punish dissent, but increasingly they were ordered out of boredom or to defuse tension among the mutineers. There was no real need for further bloodshed; the number of survivors on the island had been satisfactorily reduced, rains continued to fall, and by now enough fish and birds were being caught to provide everyone with food. But life had become so worthless on Batavia’s Graveyard that a dispensation to kill became simply another way for Cornelisz to reward his followers. In the end he and his men were slaughtering for mere entertainment.

  By the last week of July, the captain-general had already begun to set himself apart from the men whose support he had depended on at first. The law that death sentences could be passed only by the council, sitting in solemn judgment, was ended; the gardener Jan Gerritsz and a sailor, Obbe Jansz—drowned by Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Gsbert Van Welderen on 25 July—were the last men to be executed in this way. From then on, Jeronimus ordered further murders merely on his own authority, and in an increasingly casual and arbitrary way.

  On 6 August, for example, Cornelisz found himself dissatisfied with the work done by one of his carpenters:

  “Jan Hendricxsz was called by Jeronimus in the morning when he was standing in the tent of Zevanck, and he gave him a dagger which he carried in his own pocket, with the words, ‘Go and stab Stoffel Stoffelsz, that lazy dog who stands there working as if his back is broken, through the heart.’ Which Jan Hendricxsz did with two stabs so that he was killed immediately.”

  On other occasions, Cornelisz continued to make his men murder as a test of their loyalty. Rogier Decker, a 17-year-old cabin boy, had been the under-merchant’s personal servant on board the Batavia. As such, Decker apparently enjoyed some degree of protection on the island. He was not one of the mutineers—at least he had not signed the oath taken on 16 July—but one day “when he was frying some fish in his tent,” Jeronimus unexpectedly appeared. The cabin boy was taken to the captain-general’s tent, given a beakerful of wine for courage, and handed Cornelisz’s own dagger. Jeronimus then told him to stab another carpenter, Hendrick Jansz, who could be seen nearby. Decker carried out the order without protest, but the boy knew for certain that he himself would have been killed had he refused to do it. No attempt was ever made to explain why the blameless Hendrick Jansz was chosen as Decker’s victim, and perhaps there never was a reason; but now that he was blooded, the servant boy became a full-fledged mutineer, and he signed the oath of 20 August with the others.

  Pelgrom did not have to be told to kill; he begged the captain-general for the opportunity. Even the boy’s companions seem to have found his intense desire to be a murderer strange and perhaps a little wearing, but Cornelisz evidently approved of it. He did nothing to curb Pelgrom’s daily rampages around the island and twice attempted to oblige the boy by finding him a victim. Jeronimus’s first choice was Anneken Hardens, one of the women kept for common service. Perhaps she had failed to give satisfaction or was chosen to help keep her husband, Hans, in line (the mutineers, it will be recalled, had already strangled the couple’s daughter, Hilletgie). In any case, Pelgrom was brought to the under-merchant’s tent one night and told that he could kill her. Andries Liebent and Jan Hendricxsz were to assist him. Jan, it seems, “was very glad, and he went quickly,” but he was also small and weak for his age and in the end Hendricxsz and Gsbert van Welderen had to strangle Anneken, using her own hair ribbon, while Liebent and Pelgrom held her legs.

  The cabin boy would not give up. For two more weeks he pestered Cornelisz continually, until Jeronimus at last gave way. By this time the number of people on the island had been reduced to the point where only a small group of useful artisans remained alive alongside the mutineers themselves. One of their number was Cornelis Aldersz of Yplendam, a boy kept busy mending nets. On 16 August, when almost a week had passed without a murder on the island, Jeronimus decided that they could do without him.

  As soon as he heard that Aldersz was to die, Pelgrom “begged so very much that he be allowed to do it” that Cornelisz agreed. Once again, however, the boy found himself frustrated by his puny body:

  “Jeronimus said to him, ‘Jan, here is my sword, which you have to try on the Net-Maker to see if it is sharp enough to cut off his head.’ Whereupon he was very glad. Zevanck, hearing the same, maintained that he was too light for that. Meanwhile Mattys Beer came, who asked if he might do it, which was granted to him. So he took the sword. Jan would not willingly give it because he wanted to do it himself, but [Beer] tore it out of his hands and took it immediately to Gillis Phillipsen*41 in order to file it sharp. Meanwhile Jan was busy blindfolding the boy in the presence of Jeronimus, who said to [him]: ‘Now, be happy, sit nicely, ’tis but a joke.’ Mattys Beer, who had the sword under his cloak, [then] slew him with one blow, cutting off his head.”

  Cornelisz, Zevanck, and Beer found this incident tremendously amusing. But Pelgrom, who had “daily begged that he should be allowed to kill someone, because he would rather do that than eat or drink,” did not share in their laughter: “When he was not allowed to cut off the head of the foresaid youngster, Jan wept.”

  The decapitation of the net-maker was a mere diversion for the captain-general, a game played to pass the time one afternoon. But other murders that occurred at about the same time had a more serious purpose, for though the mutineers had won undisputed control of their little patch of coral, they cou
ld still not feel entirely secure. Even Jeronimus could not control every aspect of life on Batavia’s Graveyard, and, elsewhere in the archipelago, the soldiers who had been left to die of thirst on the islands to the north were still alive. Cornelisz, like so many dictators, was consumed by the fear that his followers might either cheat or challenge him, or defect to his enemies at the first opportunity.

  The first man to fall foul of the captain-general in this respect was Andries de Vries, the assistant whose life had been spared by the mutineers. Andries had unwisely formed a friendship with Lucretia Jans, who, in the first weeks of July, was still resisting Jeronimus’s efforts at seduction. News of their relationship aggrieved Cornelisz; grimly, he forced De Vries to swear “that if ever in his life he talked to her [again], he would have to die.” On 14 July, the day after he had been forced to slit the throats of the remaining sick, Andries was caught by David Zevanck calling to Creesje “from afar.” Zevanck ran to tell Jeronimus, and the apothecary summoned Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, and Rutger Fredricx to his tent. The men were given a beaker of wine and a sword apiece, and at noon, in front of all the people on the island, they confronted the assistant. Andries guessed why they had come, and tried, uselessly, to save himself. What followed was in effect a public execution: “When De Vries saw that his life was forfeit, he fled into the water. But Lenert Michielsz, following him the quickest, chiefly hacked him to death.”

  A second mutineer only narrowly avoided the same fate. The Batavia’s senior cooper, Jan Willemsz Selyns, was a hanger-on who had played only a minor role in the killings and had perhaps failed to show the necessary enthusiasm for Jeronimus’s schemes. On 5 August, Cornelisz sent Wouter Loos and Hans Jacobsz Heijlweck to dispatch the cooper in his tent; but Loos, who had felt no compunction in hacking Mayken Cardoes to death two weeks earlier, liked Selyns, and instead of killing him he begged the captain-general to spare the artisan’s life. Jeronimus, surprisingly, gave way, and nothing more was heard of the matter; but that afternoon, when the under-merchant ordered the murder of another potential defector, Heijlweck was among the four men chosen for the task, and Wouter Loos was not.

  The new object of Cornelisz’s suspicions was Frans Jansz. The surgeon appears to have retained a good deal of influence in the archipelago—no doubt because of his involvement in the first survivors’ council—and for a while he and David Zevanck had competed for the captain-general’s favor. Zevanck won this contest, becoming Jeronimus’s chief executioner; but the assistant did not forget Jansz and was irritated to find him “in the way” on more than one occasion. The surgeon, meanwhile, retained a certain degree of independence. He was not one of Jeronimus’s band (that is, he did not sign the oath of 16 July); but he took part in some of its operations, and as he was still the most senior member of the Batavia’s crew in the islands, the mutineers could not ignore him altogether. Exactly what Jansz said, and did, in the survivors’ camp after Cornelisz supplanted him was never written down and is now lost. What we do know is that the under-merchant did not trust him and decided to remove him because “he would not dance exactly to their pipes.” The four men chosen to kill him accepted the commission eagerly. They were Lenert van Os, Mattys Beer, Heijlweck, and Lucas Gellisz.

  By now they were well schooled in the art of murder. The surgeon was taken to one side “on the pretext of searching for seals,” and when he was well away from any source of help, his executioners fell on him together. Their attack was unusually violent, indeed excessively so, and suggests a certain personal antipathy: “Lenert Michielsz first stabbed him with a pike right through his body; after that, Hans Jacobsz [Heijlweck] smote his head with a Morning star, so that he fell down, and Mattys Beer has cleft it quickly with a sword.” Each of these blows would have been fatal on its own, but Lucas Gellisz wanted to make certain, and he “stabbed Mr Frans in his body with a pike,” finishing him off. “Which Gruesomeness,” it was subsequently observed, “he could just as well have omitted, because the man was already so hacked and stabbed.” The four men watched the surgeon die, then went to tell Cornelisz that Jansz would not, after all, be running off to Wiebbe Hayes.

  As it turned out, Jeronimus had every reason to fear Hayes and the soldiers he had abandoned six weeks earlier. The captain-general’s scouts—like Pelsaert and the sailors in the longboat before them—had spent very little time on the two large islands to the north of Batavia’s Graveyard. They had gone ashore for perhaps an hour or two, found each in turn as rocky and barren as the rest of the archipelago, and seen no evidence of pools or wells. But the scouts had made a serious mistake in reporting to Jeronimus that the High Land could never support life. Both cays were, in fact, far richer in resources than the islands controlled by the mutineers.

  The smaller of the two land masses, which lay farthest to the north, was two miles from end to end and about a mile and a half across. At its center stood the only hill in the entire archipelago, a modest hummock rising 50 feet above the sea; in consequence it was called the High Island. Its neighbor, just under a mile away to the southwest, was larger still—more than three miles long and not far short of two miles wide. Hayes and his troops established their base there, and in time it became known as “Wiebbe Hayes’s Island.” The two isles were connected by the mile-wide muddy causeway that Wiebbe had used to cross from one to the other.

  Had Pelsaert and the skipper had the sense to explore the archipelago with any thoroughness, they would surely have transferred the survivors of the wreck to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, which offered far more in the way of natural resources than Batavia’s Graveyard and could have supported the whole company for months. Like the smaller islets in the archipelago, it was surrounded by rich fishing grounds and alive with nesting birds, but to the soldiers’ surprise, it also turned out to be full of new and unknown hopping animals, which they called “cats”—“creatures of miraculous form, as big as a hare.” These were tammars, a species of wallaby indigenous to the Abrolhos, and as the soldiers soon discovered, they were easily caught and delicious cooked.

  Most significant of all, the island turned out to have wells. They were not easily located, and both Pelsaert and Jeronimus’s scouts might be forgiven for having failed to uncover them, but in the end Hayes’s men discovered them by searching under the limestone slabs that lay scattered on the ground throughout the island. They appear to have found at least two good wells, one near the coast and the other toward the middle of the island, and possibly more; one cistern had 10 feet of water in it and an entrance large enough for a man to climb down into it. Between them they contained so much fresh water that it would hardly have been necessary to ration it.

  Life on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island was thus far easier than it was on Batavia’s Graveyard. “The Lord our God fed us so richly that we could have lived there with ten thousand men for a hundred years,” wrote Cornelis Jansz, who had reached Hayes from Seals’ Island, with the pardonable exaggeration of a man who had survived the desert islands of the south to find himself living in a land of plenty. “Birds like doves we could catch, five hundred in a day, and each bird had an egg, as large as a hen’s egg.” They hunted wallabies, slaughtering “two, three, four, five, six or even more for each person,” and found fishing spots where they could haul in “40 fish as large as cod” in only an hour.

  Wiebbe Hayes must have wondered why all contact with Batavia’s Graveyard had ceased as soon as he and his men were put ashore on the High Island, and become still more perplexed when the signal fires he lit to announce the discovery of water went unanswered. Lacking boats, he and his men could hardly investigate, however, and they may have remained ignorant of events elsewhere in the archipelago until the second week of July, when the first parties of refugees staggered ashore with horrifying tales of murder and massacre to the south. Over the next few days, at least five different groups made the difficult passage across more than four miles of open water, sitting on little homemade rafts or swimming behind planks of wood. The new arrival
s included the eight men who somehow escaped the general massacres on Seals’ Island, and nearly 20 who contrived to slip away from Batavia’s Graveyard itself in groups of four and five. Between them, these men more than doubled the strength of Hayes’s force and kept him and his soldiers well informed concerning Cornelisz’s activities.

  The news that Jeronimus’s men had gone to Seals’ Island and massacred all the people that they found there was particularly disturbing. It must have been obvious that the mutineers would eventually turn their gaze on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, and that when they did the unarmed loyalists would find themselves at a fatal disadvantage. It was imperative that they organize themselves, construct makeshift defenses, and improvise some weapons.

  Wiebbe Hayes proved equal to the challenge. The soldiers’ leader is a shadow figure in the Batavia journals, remaining out of sight on his own island while the main action develops to the south. Nevertheless he must have been an able and inspiring leader. He and his men had already survived for three weeks on the High Island and its neighbor, and they eventually found the water that Pelsaert’s experienced sailors had missed. Although a private soldier, Wiebbe not only led the original expedition to the islands, but then integrated the various groups of refugees who found their way to him, so that by the middle of July he was in command of a mixed party of almost 50 people. His forces included not only VOC assistants but also company cadets who were nominally his superiors; yet there is no suggestion that any of them ever questioned his fitness to command them. This confidence was justified, for Hayes now directed the construction of makeshift weapons and defenses that gave his men at least a chance against the mutineers.