by Mike Dash
*58“Fortune.”
*59She was named after a village in Zeeland.
*60Edwards’s team had thought him less than 20 and speculated that the body might have been that of Andries de Vries.
*61Pelsaert’s journals cannot solve the mystery; a total of 108 deaths are mentioned in its pages, but the commandeur does not include Abraham Hendricx or the dead Defender, Dircxsz, among the casualties and is never precise about the number of sick people killed by Andries de Vries on 13 July.
Notes
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
ALE Authorisatieboecken (Authorisation Books), in GAL
ARA Algemeen RijksArchief (General State Archive), The Hague
CLE Certificaatboeken (Certificate Books), in GAL
DB Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Voyage to Disaster
G Philippe Godard, The First and Last Voyage of the Batavia
GAA Gemeente Archief (Municipal Archive), Amsterdam
GAD Gemeente Archief, Dordrecht
GAH Gemeente Archief, Haarlem
GAL Gemeente Archief, Leeuwarden
HTI Hypotheekboecken Tietjerksteradeel (Tietjerksteradeel mortage books), inRAF
JFP Journal of Francisco Pelsaert, 4 June–5 December 1629, in ARA; printededitions in DB and R
LGB “Copy of an original letter, by Gijsbert Bastiaensz . . . .” in OV,printed editions in DB and R
NKD Notulen van de Kerkeraad van Dordrecht (Records of the Church Council ofDordrecht)
ONAD Oud-Notarieel Archief (Old Solicitors’ Archive), Dordrecht
ONAH Oud-Notarieel Archief, Haarlem
OV Ongeluckige Voyagie, Van ’t Schip Batavia . . . (1647); printededition in G
R V. D. Roeper (ed.), De Schipbreuk van de Batavia, 1629
r Recto
RAF RijksArchief in Friesland (Provincial Archive of Frisia)
TR Transportregisters (Registers of transfers of interest), in GAD
v Verso
General
THE WRECK OF THE Batavia was one of the more sensational events of the seventeenth century, and it attracted considerable contemporary interest. A number of pamphlets on the subject were published, some when news of the disaster first reached the United Provinces, and others two decades later when there was a surge of interest in travel literature in the Netherlands. The most popular of these pamphlets were published in several editions and must have achieved a relatively wide circulation. Consequently, the events of the mutiny remained fairly well known, in the United Provinces at least, for 30 or 40 years afterward.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, the Batavia’s story was gradually forgotten, and references to the mutiny become progressively scarcer. Interest did not revive until the late nineteenth century, when the Abrolhos became a center of the guano trade and excavations on the islands began to turn up artifacts that were thought to have come from the ship (but which, it eventually emerged, in fact came from later, less well known wrecks); and after that, publications on the subject began to appear in Australia as well as the Netherlands. The rediscovery of the wreck of the Batavia in 1963, which coincided with the publication of one of the key historical works on the subject, significantly increased interest in the subject, though even in the last 40 years the Batavia story has remained little known outside the two countries most closely connected with it. In the last quarter of a century the wreck site has been thoroughly excavated, adding substantially to our knowledge of the ship. Several accounts of the Batavia’s story have been published in Dutch and German over the last 10 years, but none in English, and this is the first book to make use of freshly discovered information from provincial archives across the Netherlands.
Eyewitness Accounts
The accounts of the Batavia disaster that have come down to us are unusually detailed for such a relatively early period. Moreover, the evidence that does survive covers the ship’s story from several different perspectives. We have accounts, however fragmentary, written by people who sailed to the Indies in the ship’s longboat, by a VOC merchant who was hunted down by the mutineers but escaped, and by another man who survived Batavia’s Graveyard. Most important, we have the confessions of the mutineers themselves, written down during or just after their interrogations.
We are fortunate this is the case. The Dutch archives covering the country’s Golden Age are still voluminous, but the material they contain largely concerns the doings of the moneyed classes, and records of those who owned no property and had little money—those, in other words, who made up the great majority of the Batavia’s passengers and crew—are largely nonexistent. Nor were there newspapers to record sensational events or reporters to take an interest in the experiences of the Batavia’s survivors. Taken together, Francisco Pelsaert’s detailed summaries of the evidence he heard on Batavia’s Graveyard make up one of the most complete accounts of a single mutiny that survives in any language, for it was comparatively rare for a large group of mutineers to be captured and tried together.
Pelsaert’s version of events is contained within the commandeur’s MS journal of the Batavia’s maiden voyage, which has been preserved among the VOC papers now in the Algemeen RijksArchief in The Hague. The journal has been bound up among the volumes of correspondence received annually from the Indies and now occupies folios 232r–317r of the volume known as ARA VOC 1098. An earlier volume of Pelsaert’s, which concerned the outward voyage of the Batavia from Amsterdam to the Abrolhos, was thrown overboard by the mutineers and lost when the commandeur’s cabin was ransacked after the wreck. The surviving account covers the period from the wreck on 4 June 1629 to Pelsaert’s final return to the East Indies in December of the same year.
The journals vary considerably from page to page in content and tone. In places they are little more than a traditional ship’s log; elsewhere they become a personal account of the author’s experiences in the aftermath of the mutiny. The bulk of the manuscript, however, consists of lengthy summaries of Pelsaert’s interrogation of the Batavia mutineers, followed by what appear to be more or less verbatim transcripts of the verdicts handed down to the guilty men.
The journals have been assembled in roughly chronological order. However, it is evident from the arrangement of the documents that they were not written contemporaneously. Each of the major mutineers is dealt with separately, the account of his interrogation in the third week of September being immediately followed by the verdict passed on him on the 28th of the month, after which the account moves back to the interrogation of the next man, and so on. At one point in this compilation [ARA VOC 1098, fol. 278v], the writer has crammed in some additional testimony concerning the mutineer Mattys Beer, made on the day of his execution, in a blank he had previously left at the bottom of one of the pages. This may indicate that the journals were written up in their current form between the passing of the sentences on 28 September and the hanging of the principal mutineers on 2 October. On the other hand, the sheer bulk of the testimony is such that it is perhaps more likely that all the accounts were taken down in rough during the interrogations, and then copied into journals later, while salvage operations were proceeding or even during the survivors’ voyage to the Indies, which occupied the period from mid-November to 5 December. In that case it may be that the compiler simply mislaid Beer’s final confession when he was writing up his account of the mutineer’s examination and was forced to interpolate this evidence when it eventually emerged from the pile of papers on his desk.
It would, anyway, be unwise to treat Pelsaert’s journals as a spontaneous, contemporary account of the Batavia mutiny. A good deal of care must have gone into their compilation, and they were unquestionably edited in the course of the work. Thus the summaries of the various interrogations are just that—summaries, put into the third person—and not word-for-word transcripts of what each prisoner actually said.
Owing to the quirks of the Dutch legal system, which placed overwhelming significance on confessions, there is virtually no room
in the journals for evidence from ordinary passengers who witnessed the extraordinary events that took place on the Abrolhos; in particular, it is noteworthy—though unsurprising—that none of the Batavia’s women were heard. It is, furthermore, entirely possible that other material—perhaps a good deal of material—has been omitted altogether, either because it seemed irrelevant or because it cast some of the protagonists in an unfavorable light. Finally, it is important to remember that the journals were compiled to be read by the directors of the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC. It was these gentlemen who would determine the future career—if any—of Pelsaert and the other officers of the Batavia. It would be naive to suppose that they were not written with this thought very much in mind.
Some idea of the degree of editing that may have occurred during the writing-up emerges from a study of the journal’s authorship. The commandeur’s report is not in Pelsaert’s own cramped and unconfident hand, which is known from a single surviving letter in the VOC archives [ARA VOC 1098, fol. 583r–4r], and throughout much of it Pelsaert himself is referred to in the third person. It would appear, therefore, that the Batavia journals were actually written by one of the commandeur’s clerks, almost certainly Salomon Deschamps, who was himself one of the unwilling mutineers. This contention is supported by the fact that the handwriting in the journal matches that in the VOC’s copy of Pelsaert’s remonstrantie on Mogul India, which Deschamps is known to have compiled. It is therefore noteworthy that although the lists of Cornelisz’s followers, copied into the journal, are given—as was the custom—in descending order of rank, the name of the relatively high-ranking Deschamps always appears at the bottom of the lists. From this it would appear that the hapless clerk was doing what he could to distance himself from the mutineers [R 42–7]. It is, thus, not strictly accurate to refer to Pelsaert’s journal as “his,” though for the sake of simplicity I have often done so.
The only other account of the mutiny that still exists in manuscript form comes to us at third hand in the form of a collection of anecdotes concerning Dutch journeys to the Indies, preserved among the municipal archives of Harderwijk, a small port in Gelderland. This MS [Gemeente Archief Harderwijk, Oud Archief 2052, fol. 30–7] contains some details of events on the Abrolhos—such as the story of Wybrecht Claasen’s swim to the wreck for water, and the anecdote of Cornelisz being imprisoned in a limestone pit and forced to pluck birds—that do not appear in any other sources. It seems likely that the anonymous compiler had them from a member of the Batavia’s crew. From internal evidence, it would appear that these anecdotes were written down in about 1645 [R 22–8, 57].
Four further eyewitness accounts were printed and preserved in various contemporary and near-contemporary pamphlets. The most important of these was produced, anonymously, by Isaac Commelin, an Amsterdam bookseller whose Origin and Progress of the United Netherlands Chartered East-India Company, published in 1645, helped to start the Dutch vogue for accounts of voyages to foreign lands.
Commelin (1598–1676) followed up this success with Ongeluckige Voyagie, Van ’t Schip Batavia (The Unlucky Voyage of the Batavia), a densely packed pamphlet, illuminated with copper-plate engravings, that included not only the details of Cornelisz’s mutiny but also accounts of two other voyages. The book was first published by the Amsterdam printer Jan Jansz in 1647 and was closely based on Pelsaert’s unpublished journals, rearranged and transposed where necessary to the third person from the first. It includes one short interpolation [OV (1647) pp. 59–60], in the form of a purported statement by Wiebbe Hayes that does not appear among the VOC archives. This rather puzzling piece of evidence is discussed in the notes to chapter 8; suffice it to say here that it seems more likely than not that it is authentic.
How Jansz obtained sight of Pelsaert’s manuscript, which should have been filed among the papers of the Amsterdam chamber, remains something of a mystery; but the pamphleteer is known to have had close contacts with several of the VOC’s directors, and Commelin’s earlier publications had already featured accounts based on official sources, which he must have purchased, clandestinely or otherwise, from employees of the Company. In any event, The Unlucky Voyage was a considerable success and was republished several times over the next two decades, keeping the Batavia’s name before the Dutch public. Commelin’s work was also swiftly pirated by other publishers, as was common at the time; in 1648 Joost Hartgers of Amsterdam brought out his own edition of the text, supplementing Pelsaert’s text with a lengthy letter by Gijsbert Bastiaensz that described events on Batavia’s Graveyard from the predikant’s perspective. The original MS of the letter is now lost, but it appears, from internal evidence, to be authentic. Two years later Lucas de Vries of Utrecht published a third variant, including in his edition a list of the rewards given to the Batavia’s loyalists. (C. R. Boxer’s “Isaac Commelin’s ‘Begin ende voortgangh’ ” in Dutch Merchants and Mariners in Asia 1602–1795, pp. 2–3, 5, and DB 4–5, 78–9, contain further information about Commelin, Jansz, and the various editions of The Unlucky Voyage.)
The other three surviving accounts have the advantage that they appeared shortly after news of the Batavia mutiny first reached the Netherlands, but they are considerably shorter. The first, a typical “news song” of the period, was published as Droevighe Tijdinghe van de Aldergrouwelykste Moordery, Geschiet door Eenighe Matrosen op ’t Schip Batavia [“Sad tidings of the most horrible murder done by some sailors of the ship Batavia”], an anonymous pamphlet containing a short explanatory preface and a song of 16 verses. The news song contains no information not available from other sources, but the information in it is so detailed that it is reasonable to suppose that the publisher had his information direct from a Batavia survivor [R 227–30]. The other two accounts appear in the anonymous pamphlet Leyds Veer-Schuyts Praetjen, Tuschen een Koopman ende Borger van Leyden, Varende van Haarlem nae Leyden [“Conversation on a canal-boat between a merchant and a citizen of Leyden, travelling from Haarlem to Leyden”]. One is an anonymous letter dated December 1629, written by someone who accompanied Pelsaert to Java in the Batavia’s longboat and returned with him to the Abrolhos. This letter includes the statement that Cornelisz was a Frisian, a fact that is nowhere mentioned in Pelsaert’s journals but that appears, from the research undertaken for this book, to be correct. It has been suggested that Claes Gerritsz, the Batavia’s upper-steersman, was the author; this is quite probable, but there is no evidence [R 49, 61]. The second letter, dated 11 December 1629, is the work of someone who was originally on Seals’ Island and later escaped to join Wiebbe Hayes. It, too, is anonymous, but it is fairly certainly the work of the assistant Cornelis Jansz [R 48].
Other Contemporary Sources
Background information on the main characters in the Batavia’s story has been drawn from the contemporary records of the Dutch Republic. All cities kept registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, and on the whole these still exist in either town or provincial archives. Where they do, it is usually possible to discover basic biographical information about local citizens, though in some cases—the baptismal records, which are Reformed Church documents and thus take no account of the birth of Catholics, Mennonites, and members of other religious minorities, are a case in point—the records can appear misleading.
Archives full of solicitors’ papers also survive for many cities, and these often offer rich pickings for historians. Contemporary Dutchmen were so obsessed with upholding their personal honor (for reasons that are discussed later) that almost anyone with any property or money occasionally resorted to solicitors to make a record of some controversial incident for possible use in a future legal action. The legal records therefore provide odd snapshots of the lives of people whose personal histories would otherwise have been completely lost. The incidents they record are, by definition, hardly representative of their subjects’ ordinary existence, but they were important nonetheless, and if the records’ contents can be somewhat sensational, it is also often possible to deduce a good de
al from casual asides.
Books
The first noteworthy book on the Batavia was Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s Voyage to Disaster, published in Australia in 1963. Though it is chaotically organized, lacks any significant narrative, and is also poorly indexed, it does print a tremendous amount of original material, including—critically—the first full translation of Pelsaert’s journals into English. Drake-Brockman also conducted a good deal of research into contemporary Dutch archives—a laborious business for someone living in Western Australia years before the introduction of the Internet and e-mail. It is impossible not to admire Drake-Brockman’s results, and if the author discovered little about Cornelisz himself, she had great success in fleshing out the histories of Ariaen Jacobsz, Creesje Jans, and other major characters in the story. Forty years after its first publication, Voyage to Disaster remains an essential source book for all those interested in the Batavia.
More recently, a Haarlem scholar, Vibeke Roeper, reedited Pelsaert’s journals for publication in the Netherlands by the Linschoten Society. Her scholarly edition, De Schipbreuk van de Batavia, usefully prints a number of documents from the VOC archives that escaped Drake-Brockman and her collaborators.
Hugh Edwards, who helped to discover the Batavia’s wreck site, wrote the first narrative history of the whole incident. His Islands of Angry Ghosts is particularly valuable for its firsthand accounts of the early excavation of the wreck and the grave pits on Beacon Island. More recently Philippe Godard has gone over much of the same ground in a privately published volume, The First and Last Voyage of the Batavia. It adds little that is new, but very usefully prints hundreds of color photographs of the islands, the artifacts, and the documents in the case.
A Note on Citation
A large proportion of the existing primary source material on the Batavia has been published over the years—the first official documents by H. T. Colenbrander and W. Ph. Coolhaas, JP Coen: Bescheiden Omtrent Zijn Bedrijf in Indiï (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 7 vols., 1920–52), and the journals themselves, with extensive supporting material including Coolhaas’s sources, by Roeper and Drake-Brockman. Most readers will find it easier to obtain one of these books than to visit archives in the Netherlands and so, in referring to the primary sources, I have also added references to the printed editions as appropriate. These appear in the notes as [R], for Roeper, and [DB], for Drake-Brockman, followed by the relevant page numbers. Drake-Brockman has been my main source simply because my mother tongue is English; as it is by 30 years the older of the two works, it seems worth noting that Marit van Huystee, a Dutch linguist working for the Western Australian Maritime Museum, gives it as her opinion that its translations, by E. D. Drok, are excellent in almost every respect.
