Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  The commandeur did not announce this date in passing sentence, and Jeronimus continued to dream up ways to buy himself more time. His next ploy was to request a stay of execution, “because he desired to be baptized and so that he could meanwhile have time to bewail his sins and think them over so that at last he might die in peace and in repentance.” This, he cynically calculated, might buy him several weeks of life; but though Pelsaert was pious enough to agree to a brief postponement, he was not prepared to allow the under-merchant more than an extra 48 hours to confront his demons. At dusk on 28 September the executions of the seven prisoners were moved back to Monday, 1 October, but once again the date itself was not revealed to the condemned men.

  Jeronimus Cornelisz, who had kept the people of Batavia’s Graveyard in fear of sudden death for two long months, found he could not stomach the agony of wondering how long he had left to live. The apothecary begged Gijsbert Bastiaensz to reveal the date of his execution, and when the preacher could not or would not tell him, he became quite agitated. In the end “the predikant put him at ease for that day [28 September], and he behaved himself as if he had some solace, and was more courageous,” but next morning this veneer swiftly fell away and again Jeronimus pleaded to be told how many days he had, saying that he could not otherwise properly prepare himself for death.

  This time, Pelsaert told him. “Tut—nothing more?” Cornelisz muttered in disgust. “Can one show repentance of life in so few days? I thought I should be allowed eight or fourteen days.” Then his self-possession left him and he altogether lost his temper, raging:

  “I see well [you] want my blood and my life, but God will not suffer that I shall die a shameful death. I know for certain, and you will all see it, that God will perform unto me this night a miracle, so that I shall not be hanged.”

  And that, the commandeur noted with concern, “was his tune all day.”

  Whether or not Jeronimus really believed, at this point, that his God would intervene to save him is an interesting question; it would not have been out of character for him to have entertained such thoughts. But Pelsaert plainly guessed that the apothecary’s boasts meant that he intended to commit suicide. He issued special orders to the guards, demanding extra vigilance and warning them not to allow anyone to smuggle the prisoner anything that he could use in such an attempt.

  Security was, however, still a problem in the Abrolhos. Although the mutineers were kept safely away from the other survivors, they were not in any modern sense in prison on Seals’ Island. There were no thick-walled cells to lock them in; their quarters were merely tents, and it was impossible to prevent so many men from mixing with their guards. In these circumstances, and especially when Pelsaert was still unaware of the real extent of the mutineers’ support, it was unusually difficult to ensure that the prisoners were kept isolated. Jeronimus had already been able to write two letters to his friends back in the Netherlands, full of tall tales of the conspiracies against him and outraged assurances of his innocence; these he had smuggled to Jacob Jansz Hollert, the Batavia’s under-steersman, in the hope that he would send them home. As it happened, Hollert had given the letters to Pelsaert instead, and they had been opened by the Broad Council and found to be “contrary to the truth, in order to cover up his gruesome misdeeds.” But if it was possible for Cornelisz to pass notes out of his tent, it was also easy enough for him to receive contraband. At some time prior to 29 September the apothecary had obtained some poison, which was perhaps a remnant of the batch that had been mixed to dispose of Mayken Cardoes’s child; and, that night, he took it—either in fulfilment of his own prophecy, or because he had at last despaired of divine intervention.

  The effect was not at all what he had hoped. The poison, Pelsaert wrote, was not strong enough to do its job, for although it “started to work at about one o’clock in the morning, so that he was full of pain and seemed like to die,” it left Jeronimus writhing in hideous agony without actually killing him. “In this great anxiety,” the commandeur noted with just a trace of satisfaction,

  “he asked for some Venetian theriac. At last he began to get some relief . . . but he had to be got out of his prison certainly 20 times during the night, because his so-called miracle was working from below as well as from above.”

  By morning on 30 September, a Sunday, Cornelisz was sufficiently recovered to be called from his tent to hear the preacher’s sermon with the other prisoners. He alone, however, refused to join the party, vowing to have nothing at all to do with the minister. This refusal to seek solace in religion less than a day before the scheduled executions struck the commandeur as remarkable, and it was only now, at the end of the whole story, that Pelsaert finally began to comprehend the true significance of the under-merchant’s heresy. Jeronimus’s strange ideas had cropped up from time to time during his interrogation, particularly in connection with the suppression of Bastiaensz’s preaching on the island, but they had become so bound up with his litany of lies, half-truths, and self-deception that the members of the Broad Council seem to have largely disregarded them, seeing the captain-general’s theology as little more than another of the devices that he used to control his men. The other councillors were bluntly practical men, of strictly orthodox religious views. Confronted with the reality of the murder, rape, and pillage that had gone on in the archipelago they did not feel compelled to explore a merely ideological charge of heresy.

  The commandeur, who had a better education than the rest and at least some imagination, was perhaps the only man in the Abrolhos who—at this late remove—finally understood not only how Cornelisz’s beliefs had helped to mold the shape and nature of the mutiny, but also that these views were in themselves only a part of a larger and more complex personality—a personality he plainly believed was evil. In his journals, Pelsaert recoils almost visibly from this recognition, just as a snail that has been prodded by a twig retreats into its shell. And, like the snail, the commandeur had no more than an incomplete understanding of what it was that had touched him. It was as though he had just seen a truth that had lain masked by the easy denunciations of the official record: “Godless,” “evil-minded,” “innately corrupt.” “See how miraculously God the Lord reveals godlessness before all the people,” the commandeur had written piously of Jeronimus’s refusal to come to church; but what he really meant was that he had caught a glimpse—as it were from the corner of his eye—of someone living far beyond the bounds of conventional morality and godliness.

  Time was now fast running out for all the mutineers. The first day of October dawned so grimly stormy that the planned executions had to be postponed; the seas were so high that it was dangerous to make the generally easy voyage across the deep-water channel to Seals’ Island. But this respite was only temporary; the next day it was calmer, and a group of carpenters went over to begin building the gallows. Seals’ Island is the only place in the vicinity of Batavia’s Graveyard where the soil is deep enough to support such structures; there is a good landing place on the west side of the channel, toward the southern end of the islet, and a ridge just inland with enough sand and guano-encrusted earth on it to sink the posts. The carpenters used spare lumber from the Sardam, and perhaps the Batavia’s driftwood, too, and when they had finished they had put up two or three large scaffolds, with room enough for seven men.

  Once that work was done, the prisoners were summoned. Pelsaert was there to supervise the execution of justice, and Bastiaensz to console the men and save their souls, if that were possible. There, too, was Creesje Jans, who had not talked to Jeronimus since his capture nearly a month earlier. An hour before the executions were due to begin, and in the hearing of some of the Defenders, she at last came close enough to the captain-general to catch his eye. Pelsaert was not present to record this last brief encounter; but Wiebbe Hayes was there, and he listened while Creesje reproached her former captor in the strongest terms. “She bitterly lamented to the said Jerome,” the newly promoted sergeant noted later, “over the
sins he had committed with her against her will, and forcing her thereto. To which Jerome replied: ‘It is true, you are not to blame, for you were in my tent 12 days before I could succeed.’ ”

  Creesje was not the only person on Seals’ Island anxious to confront Cornelisz before he died. The other condemned mutineers, who had once been the captain-general’s creatures, had greatly resented his betrayal of them under interrogation, and they now loudly demanded that Jeronimus be strung up first, “so that their eyes could see that the seducer of men [had] died.” This request reflected their desire for revenge, of course, but also a real fear that if they died first the apothecary might yet talk his way out of punishment. They crowded round the under-merchant as he was dragged toward his execution—Hendricxsz and Van Os, Jonas and Allert Janssen, Fredricx and Beer—and they hooted and hissed at him. They saw him kneel before the hangman so that his hands could be removed (a contemporary print suggests that the amputations were crudely performed, with a hammer and a chisel). And at the very end, they gathered beneath the gallows to watch as he ascended.

  The assembled people on the island saw one last drama played out on the scaffold. “They all shouted at each other,” Pelsaert recalled. “Some evil-doers shouted ‘Revenge!’ at Jeronimus, and Jeronimus shouted at them. At last he challenged them, as well as the council, before God’s Judgement Seat, that he wanted to seek justice there with them, because he had not been able to get it here on Earth.”

  The predikant witnessed the same bizarre exchange. “If ever there has been a Godless Man,” he wrote,

  “in his utmost need, it was he; [for] he had done nothing wrong, according to his statement. Yes, saying even at the end, as he mounted the gallows: ‘Revenge! Revenge!’ So that to the end of his life he was an evil Man.”

  Then Gijsbert Bastiaensz, who had more cause than most to hate Cornelisz, added a last thought. “The justice and vengeance of God has been made manifest in him,” he scrawled, “for he had been a too-atrocious murderer.”

  9

  “To Be Broken on the Wheel”

  “And so he died stubborn.”

  FRANCISCO PELSAERT

  JERONIMUS TOOK QUITE SOME TIME TO DIE.

  A gallows, in the seventeenth century, consisted of little more than two braced uprights, 10 to 15 feet high, joined by a thick horizontal beam from which men were strangled slowly at the end of a short rope. Two hundred years before the invention of the trapdoor and the drop, the only other piece of equipment that an executioner required was a ladder to prop against one of the uprights. The prisoner was driven up the ladder, arms tied, legs free, the noose already around his neck. The hangman tied the other end of the rope securely to the beam and then, with little ceremony, thrust one knee into the small of the condemned man’s back and launched him into space. The fortunate few died quickly of a broken neck, but in most cases the fall was not enough to guarantee an instant death and the man was strangled by the noose instead. This could be a lengthy process, lasting for up to 20 minutes, and most prisoners remained conscious for a good part of the time. The convulsive kicks and struggles of the dying man were reckoned good sport by the crowds who attended the public executions popular in Europe. Those lucky enough to secure a spot close to the scaffold could also witness the unpleasant aftermath of a slow hanging: uncontrolled voiding of bladder and bowels and, in some cases, involuntary erection at the moment of death.

  Attempts were sometimes made to hasten the condemned man’s end; friends might be allowed to tighten the noose by pulling at his legs, while, in France, the executioner was required to swing out onto the crossbeam “and, placing his feet in the loop formed by the bound hands of the patient, by dint of repeated vigorous shocking terminate his sufferings.” It seems unlikely that such interventions were allowed in Jeronimus’s case, but unless tourniquets had been applied, the amputation of his hands would have led to loss of consciousness and death before the noose could do its work. The maximum allowable blood loss for a man of normal weight—around 160 pounds—is roughly two and a half pints. Cornelisz, who had lived on the sparse island diet for the best part of three months, almost certainly weighed a good deal less than that. He would have lost consciousness quite quickly, and died after losing around two pints of blood.

  As was the custom, the predikant accompanied the condemned men to the scaffold in the hope that some, at least, would confess their sins. Jeronimus refused to talk to him and went to his death without the least show of remorse. “He could not reconcile himself to dying,” Pelsaert noted grimly, “or to penitence, neither to pray to God nor to show any face of repentance over his sins . . . . And so he died stubborn.” Cornelis Jansz, who witnessed the execution, was likewise shocked by Cornelisz’s refusal to admit his guilt, even as he stood bleeding by the gallows. Only a confession—and genuine contrition—could even begin to atone for the captain-general’s many sins, and Jeronimus’s resolve, the Defender thought, must have been rooted in his heretical beliefs. “He died,” Jansz wrote, “as he had lived, not believing there exists Devil or Hell, God or Angel—the Torrentian feeling had spread thus far.”

  The other mutineers had less faith and were not so brave. Both Mattys Beer and Andries Jonas found that their courage failed them on their way to the scaffold, and each made a stumbling confession to cleanse their consciences and buy a few moments more of life. Beer admitted to the murder of another four men and a boy, killed one night “in the presence of Jeronimus” with such anonymous efficiency that he did not even know their names. Jonas, whose victims had almost all been women and children, dredged up the memory of one further killing—that of “still another Boy” who had died more or less by chance during one of the periodic massacres on Batavia’s Graveyard. It had been a particularly merciless crime:

  “On a certain night when some other Men were murdered, the Boy, out of fear and because he was ill, came creeping on his hands and feet into their tent, which Jacop Pietersz Cosyn*48 had seen, [and said], ‘Andries, you must help to put the boy out of the way.’ Whereon he had gone outside, dragged the Boy out of the tent, and cut his throat with his knife.”

  The other condemned mutineers—Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, Allert Janssen, and Rutger Fredricx, who had between them bludgeoned, drowned, or stabbed almost 40 of the Batavia survivors—went to their deaths more quietly, though all, in Pelsaert’s view, “died also very Godless and unrepentant.” The one exception was Jan Pelgrom, the half-mad cabin boy, who was only 18 years old and could not reconcile himself to death. On his way to the scaffold he succumbed to hysteria, “weeping and wailing and begging for grace, and that one should put him on an Island and let him live a little longer.” Remarkably, given the boy’s awful record, the commandeur gave way to Pelgrom’s pleas, agreeing to spare him on account of his age. At the foot of the gallows Jan’s death sentence was commuted to marooning “on an island or the continent, according to occasion occurring,” and he was returned to the temporary prison.

  Nothing is said in the Batavia journals as to what happened to the corpses of the other prisoners, but it was usual, in the Netherlands, for the bodies of executed prisoners to remain on view as a warning to others. In Haarlem condemned men from throughout North Holland were hung just outside the city walls and their remains were not cut down until the scaffold was required again. Even then the corpses would be strapped to wooden poles arranged nearby so that they remained on display. In the Abrolhos, therefore, the bodies of Cornelisz and his men were in all likelihood left dangling from the gallows when the execution party rowed back to the Sardam.

  The next day there was a violent gale. By this time it was spring in the archipelago; thousands of mutton birds had returned to the islands to fill the night with their unearthly wailing, and high winds frequently interfered with Pelsaert’s salvage operations. The storm persisted until 4 October; then there was one day of fair weather, during which a brass cannon on the wreck was brought back to Batavia’s Graveyard. After that the weather closed in with
a vengeance, and for two weeks the monsoons prevented much work being done out on the reef. Even after that, the weather was only good enough for salvage “one day in 15 to 20,” in the opinion of the Sardam’s council.

  In the circumstances, Pelsaert’s Dutch and Gujerati divers did well to salvage as much as they did. Working without any protective gear in intensely dangerous waters, and with the ever-present danger of being dashed to pieces against the reef, the six men brought up seven of the Company’s lost money chests, quantities of loose coin, and a good deal of Pelsaert’s silverware, together with some boxes of tinsel. Three more chests were recovered later, but the other two had to be left in the Abrolhos “with heart’s regret.” One was located, sitting on the bottom, but it could not be salvaged because one of the heavy guns had fallen onto it and pinned it to the reef.

  While this salvage work was under way, the commandeur set parties of sailors and Defenders to work on the islands of the archipelago, scouring the ground for anything of value to the VOC. Cornelisz’s stores of purloined jewels and clothing were recovered, together with the remaining rations and some trade goods, but Pelsaert—acutely conscious of what the wreck of the Batavia had already cost the Company—insisted that even the most insignificant detritus be recovered. The men sent to pick over the islands of the archipelago dutifully salvaged every single item they could find, from sea-soiled linens to rusted old barrel hoops and nails.

  It was hardly necessary work, and on 12 October the merchant’s determination to retrieve every piece of VOC property resulted in a pointless accident that cost the lives of five more men. Jacob Jacobsz, the Sardam’s skipper, had been ordered to sail a small boat out to the reef to recover any flotsam that had become stranded there. The main object of the expedition was the recovery of a small barrel of vinegar that had been spotted on the coral on the preceding day, after which the boat was to carry on and search some of the outlying islets in the archipelago for driftwood and other objects from the wreck. Jacobsz took with him not only his quartermaster, Pieter Pietersz, and one of the Sardam’s gunners, but also two men who had been on the Batavia: Ariaan Theuwissen, a gunner, and Cornelis Pieterszoon, the retourschip’s under-trumpeter. The latter was almost certainly the same “Cornelis the fat trumpeter” named in the letter sent by Jeronimus to the Defenders at the end of July, who had survived both that attempt at betrayal and three attacks by the mutineers. The men had orders to return to the Sardam that evening if possible, but to stay out all night if that proved necessary. In the event, they did not come back, and on the afternoon of 13 October Claes Gerritsz, on the jacht, caught a last glimpse of Jacobsz’s yawl well out to sea, about nine miles from the ship. Soon afterward the wind began to rise and banks of rain swept in. The curtain of sea mist quickly swallowed up the boat and hid it from view.