by Mike Dash
In the meantime, the commandeur continued his interrogation of the prisoners. Pelsaert was legally bound, under Dutch law, to administer justice as quickly as possible, and to that end he assembled the Sardam’s council and then enlarged it with two men from the Batavia in order to form a Broad Council, which alone had the power to try criminal cases. The members of the Sardam’s raad were the commandeur himself, the jacht’s skipper, Jacob Jacobsz Houtenman,*46 Sijmon Yopzoon, the high boatswain, and Jan Willemsz Visch, who was probably the Sardam’s provost. The Batavia’s representatives were Claes Gerritsz, the upper-steersman, and his deputy, Jacob Jansz Hollert; on at least one occasion Gijsbert Bastiaensz was drafted onto the council, too, to take the place of someone unavoidably detained. Rather more remarkably, the clerk tasked with recording the proceedings was none other than Salomon Deschamps, who was both a mutineer and a murderer. Nor did Deschamps merely write up the interrogations and the sentences as they were made; he himself signed many of the council’s resolutions and thus helped to pass judgment on his former comrades. It is possible that Pelsaert remained unaware of the assistant’s guilt until late on in the proceedings—certainly the clerk would have glossed over his involvement in the killings, but it is hard to believe that the mutineers themselves were so discreet. Perhaps the commandeur had an unreasoning trust in his old colleague; more probably, however, Deschamps was the best scribe available, and the appointment was simply a matter of necessity.
Once the proceedings were under way, the prisoners were kept together on Seals’ Island, where they were less likely to cause trouble than on board the Sardam, and the interrogations took place largely on Batavia’s Graveyard itself. The commandeur dealt with the mutineers one by one—asking questions, noting answers, and often calling witnesses to confirm the truth of what he had been told. Most of Jeronimus’s men were examined several times, over several days, so that the information they provided could be used to question others. It would appear, from the summaries prepared by Salomon Deschamps, that statements were also taken from some of the survivors from the island, as well as the Defenders, but very little of this evidence found its way into the record. Practically all of the surviving accounts come from the mouths of mutineers.
The proceedings on the island were conducted in accordance with Dutch law, but they were not trials in the modern sense and the mutineers did not have lawyers, nor any right to call witnesses in their own defense. Pelsaert’s chief difficulty lay in securing reliable testimony from the accused, for the statutes of the United Provinces were quite specific on the question of what constituted evidence: a man could only be condemned to death on the basis of his own freely given confession. Since few men would openly admit to capital crimes, however, the Broad Council did have the right to resort to torture when a prisoner refused to answer questions or there was good reason to doubt the veracity of his evidence. As we have seen, confessions extracted under torture were not in themselves admissible as evidence of guilt, and any statements given in this way had to be put to the prisoner again, to be confirmed “of freewill,” within a day of being made. Some men recanted all that they had said when this was done. But since the denial of evidence given under duress led only to further interrogation, it was not unusual for testimony obtained in the torture chamber to be confirmed later in the day by men who would say anything to avoid further pain and suffering.
Jeronimus himself was the first man to be bound for torture. The under-merchant had indignantly denied his guilt when he had been brought before Pelsaert on the Sardam, but his testimony had been so undermined by the freewill confession of Jan Hendricxsz that the commandeur had little compunction in examining him more closely as soon as the Broad Council had been assembled on Batavia’s Graveyard, “in order,” as he said, “to learn from him the straight truth, as he tries to exonerate himself with flowery talk, shoving dirt onto persons who are dead and cannot answer for themselves.”
Had Cornelisz been imprisoned in the Netherlands, he would probably have been stretched on the rack, just as Torrentius the painter had been a little less than two years earlier. But racks were cumbersome and expensive pieces of equipment, and throughout the Dutch dominions in the East the preferred method of interrogation was the water torture, which was almost equally effective and far easier to apply. Water torture required neither specialized equipment nor expert torturers; at its most basic, all that was needed was a funnel, which was forced into the prisoner’s mouth. Where time and resources permitted, however, it was more usual for the man in question to be stripped to the waist and strapped, spread-eagled, into an upright frame—a door frame was sometimes used. An outsized canvas collar, which extended from his neck up to his eyes or a little higher, was then slipped over his head and fastened under his chin in such a way that liquids poured into it had nowhere to escape. The torturer then climbed a ladder by the frame, carrying a large jug, and the interrogation began.
Water was poured slowly over the prisoner’s head, trickling down into the collar until it formed a pool around his chin. Failure to answer questions satisfactorily led to more liquid being added, until the man’s mouth and finally his nostrils were submerged. From then on, he had to drink in order to breathe; but each time he reduced the level of the water the torturer would add more from the jug, so that the interrogation proceeded with the prisoner alternately gulping down the water and gasping for breath.
If the man persisted in his denials, and the torture became protracted, the sheer quantities of water that he consumed would bloat him hideously, “forcing all his inward partes [and] coming out of his nose, eares and eyes,” as a contemporary English writer observed, and “at length taking his breath away and bringing him to a swoone or fainting.” When this happened, the prisoner would be cut down and forced to vomit so that the torment could begin again. After three or four applications of the torture, the man’s body would be “swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead,” and he would generally be ready to confess to anything that he was asked to.
Few men endured the water torture for this long, and Cornelisz was not one of them. It took some days, and several applications of the torment, but gradually the under-merchant was driven to confess not only to his plot to seize the rescue jacht, but also to the part that he had played in planning mutiny on the Batavia herself. Yet still he wriggled like a worm on a hook. Where there was little chance of misleading anyone, Jeronimus confessed freely to his crimes. He knew that Pelsaert had found copies of the oaths the mutineers had sworn to him, and he made no effort to deny that they existed. But where he could—where no other evidence existed—Cornelisz continued to blame Ariaen Jacobsz or David Zevanck for decisions that had actually been his own. Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, and Allert Janssen were brought in to confront him, at which he belatedly confessed to ordering the murders of three dozen people; but at no point did the apothecary admit to any involvement in the deaths of men killed by Zevanck, Van Huyssen, or Gsbert van Welderen. Then, on 28 September, when his interrogation was finally concluded, he suddenly recanted everything—“saying they [the witnesses] are lying, also that all he has confessed he has confessed because he has been threatened with torture; also that he knew nothing of the seizing of the ship Batavia”—and Pelsaert found himself confronted with the possibility that he would have to start the whole procedure once again.
“Therefore,” noted the commandeur,
“on account of his unsteady and variable confessions, practising crooked means—though by all people accused in his own presence in order to prove the same to be lies—have again and for the last time threatened him with torture and asked why he mocked us, because he has confessed and told everything freely several times.”
Cornelisz replied with a further lie: he had wished, he said, to delay matters sufficiently to be taken to Batavia “in order to speak again to his wife”—although he knew, as Pelsaert perhaps did not, that she wa
s still in the Dutch Republic. Then, when the commandeur read out his statements and confessions “before all the people on the Island,” Jeronimus complained that a small detail was still incorrect: “Something was in it of which Assendelft,*47 Jan Hendricxsz and others accused him wrongly.” It was yet another delaying tactic; the law compelled Pelsaert to recall both witnesses to double-check their stories, which in turn meant a respite of perhaps an hour while the men were brought over from Seals’ Island.
At last, when the men concerned had been fetched and reconfirmed their testimony, the exasperated commandeur confronted Cornelisz directly, demanding to know why he “mocked the Council through his intolerable desperation, saying one time that they spoke the truth, another time that they all lied.” From Pelsaert’s voice, or manner, the under-merchant finally understood that he was now beaten. Further evasion, he could see, would only result in vigorous torture; and so a truth of sorts emerged. “Confesses at last,” noted Deschamps at this point in his summary, in his best Italian hand, “that he did it to lengthen his life.”
Rather than endure any further torment, Jeronimus now agreed of free will that all his testimony was true, and late in the afternoon of 28 September he signed his statements and confessions. “He well knows that all he has done is evil enough,” Pelsaert observed in conclusion, “and he desires no grace.”
Cornelisz’s fellow mutineers were more easily entrapped. A few, such as Jan Hendricxsz, largely spared themselves the agonies of the water torture by confessing freely to their sins. Others, including Rutger Fredricx and Mattys Beer, tried to conceal at least some of their crimes, in the hope of lessening their punishment. They were put to the torture in an attempt to get at the truth. Andries Jonas suffered more than most for his blind insistence that he had remained outside the predikant’s tent on the night the family were murdered; the commandeur suspected that Jonas was concealing his role in the affair, and the soldier was half-drowned twice before his persistent denials were believed. But none of the captain-general’s gang escaped without enduring at least a little pain. Even Hendricxsz was tortured once, when he tried to pretend that he knew nothing of his leader’s plan to seize the jacht.
Jeronimus, meanwhile—once he had been forced into confession—betrayed his fellow mutineers without compunction. He had never cared remotely about how other people felt, and now he saw no reason to risk further torture simply to help his men who had sworn loyalty to him. When Rutger Fredricx begged his captain-general to confirm that he, Fredricx, had been given a direct order to kill Andries de Vries, Cornelisz obliged—but added maliciously “that he certainly believes that Rutger has done more than he has confessed, because he was always very willing to offer his services if anyone had to be put out of the way.” Next, the under-merchant gave a lengthy statement implicating Lenert van Os in eight murders, the first massacre on Seals’ Island, and the slaughter of the predikant’s family, naming in addition Jan Hendricxsz as the killer of Stoffel Stoffelsz and Mattys Beer as the murderer of Cornelis Aldersz. Then he mentioned Lucas Gellisz as Lenert van Os’s accomplice in the killing of Passchier van den Ende and Jacob Hendricxen Drayer, and named Rogier Decker as the murderer of Hendrick Jansz. Perhaps Pelsaert would have got to the truth anyway; but Jeronimus’s willingness to recall places, names, and dates must certainly have aided the investigation, and it quickly broke down the remaining bonds of loyalty among the mutineers. Before long each man was blaming his companions, and the whole truth about the mutiny emerged.
Seven of the mutineers were examined in this first round of interrogations. They were the worst of the murderers—Jan Hendricxsz, Andries Jonas, Mattys Beer, Lenert van Os, Allert Janssen, Rutger Fredricx, and Jan Pelgrom—and only Andries Jonas, at the end of his interrogation, blurted out, apparently spontaneously, “that he has been very willing in murdering, and does not know how he wandered so far from God.” The other six gave neither reasons for their crimes nor the least show of remorse.
It would have made little difference if they had. The Broad Council’s verdicts, when they were delivered on 28 September, were very nearly as severe as Pelsaert could make them, and the commandeur seems to have made no allowance whatsoever for the men who had cooperated more or less freely with his investigation. Each case had been judged strictly on its merits.
All of the retourschip’s survivors, and the Sardam’s crew, were assembled on Batavia’s Graveyard to witness the sentencing. The surviving members of Cornelisz’s gang were present too. It was nearly evening by the time Pelsaert was ready to proceed and the leading mutineers shuffled forward to hear the verdicts on their cases.
The captain-general was the first man to be called. “Because Jeronimus Cornelisz of Haarlem, aged about 30 years, apothecary, and later under-merchant of the ship Batavia, has misbehaved himself so gruesomely,” Pelsaert intoned,
“and has gone beyond himself, yea, has even been denuded of all humanity and has been changed as to a tiger . . . and because even under Moors and Turks such unheard of, abominable misdeeds would not have happened, we, the undersigned persons of the Council . . . in order to turn us from the wrath of God and to cleanse the name of Christianity of such an unheard of villain, have sentenced the foresaid Jeronimus Cornelisz that he shall be taken to a place prepared to execute justice, and there first cut off both his hands, and after that punish him on a gallows with a cord until death follows—with confiscation of all his goods, Moneys, Gold, Silver, monthly wages, and all that he may have to claim here in India against the VOC, our Lord Masters.”
It was the maximum penalty available under Dutch law. And so the commandeur continued: Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, Allert Janssen, and Mattys Beer were sentenced to have their right hands removed before they were hanged; the other three mutineers—Jan Pelgrom, Andries Jonas, and Rutger Fredricx—received a slightly lesser punishment. Presumably because their crimes had been less extensive, these men were to go to their deaths unmutilated, but in each case they, like all the others, suffered the confiscation of their goods and died knowing that Jan Company, not their families, would inherit whatever meager worldly possessions they left behind.
Pelsaert had not yet finished. In the course of his investigation, the commandeur had also formed opinions of the remainder of the mutineers. Nine of them, he now announced, were to be taken to Java for interrogation—“or to punish them on the way, according to time and occasion.” They were Wouter Loos, Stone-Cutter Pietersz, Hans Jacob Heijlweck, Daniel Cornelissen, Andries Liebent, Hans Fredérick, Cornelis Janssen, Rogier Decker, and Jan Willemsz Selyns—by no means all of them minor figures in the tragedy. Nineteen other men, who had signed Jeronimus’s oaths and had been held on suspicion of active involvement in the mutiny, were freed “until later decision, unless something detrimental arises.” Most of them had done little more than pledge allegiance to Cornelisz—their numbers included relative nonentities such as the steward, Reyndert Hendricxsz, Gillis Phillipsen, the soldier who had sharpened the sword used to decapitate the net-maker Cornelis Aldersz, and the doubly bereaved Hans Hardens. Bastiaensz the predikant was also cleared, at least provisionally. But several of these men had been closer to Jeronimus than Pelsaert yet appreciated. Among those who were now released was Olivier van Welderen, who was more than capable of causing further trouble.
At least the commandeur could rely on Wiebbe Hayes. The Defenders’ leader, who was still a private soldier, was now promoted to the rank of sergeant at a salary of 18 guilders per month—twice his former wage. He was thus placed in charge of all the surviving soldiers, who had been without a commanding officer since the Sardam’s arrival in the archipelago, a move that no doubt helped to reinforce their sometimes doubtful loyalty to the Company. Hayes’s principal lieutenants on his island, the cadets Otto Smit and Allert Jansz, were both made corporals at a salary of 15 guilders. These promotions were the only ones that Pelsaert offered to the 48 loyalists who had helped preserve the VOC’s interests in the Abrolhos.
The command
eur had other matters on his mind. His chief priority was now to salvage what he could from the wreck site, but he also had to keep his men supplied with food and water and ensure that Cornelisz and the mutineers were kept securely under guard. The salvage work was proving difficult—fierce winds and high seas had kept Pelsaert’s divers from the wreck on seven of the eight days that he spent on the interrogations—and by the end of September the only goods recovered were two money chests and a box of tinsel. Though the same weather conditions at least kept the mutineers safely imprisoned on Seals’ Island, the members of the Broad Council were also uncomfortably aware that these cases full of silver coins, which had already helped to spark one mutiny, might yet cause trouble on the voyage back to Java.
It was the last consideration that caused the commandeur to wonder if it would be wise to transport Cornelisz and his men all the way back to the Indies to be executed. There were more than enough mutineers about to cause trouble on a ship the Sardam’s size, and now that the most brutal of them were under sentence of death they had very little to lose by plotting further violence. The thought of traversing nearly 2,000 miles with Cornelisz alive and waiting for a chance to exploit the least sign of dissent was not a pleasant one, and Pelsaert rapidly concluded that “it would not be without danger for the ship and the goods to set off to sea with so many corrupt and half-corrupted men.” The latter, he reasoned, “could easily become wholly corrupted by the richness of the salvaged wealth,” and he and his men could still go the way of the skipper of the Meeuwtje. The safer option was to carry out the hangings in the Abrolhos, and it was soon decided that it would be safest if the ringleaders were dispatched next day, 29 September. To reduce the risk of moving groups of desperate men about the archipelago, the place of execution was to be Seals’ Island.
