Batavia Epub

by Pete Fitzsimons

  For all of those new to life on the high seas, their education starts early. The first and most important rule, of course, is to always expect the unexpected . . .

  At two o’clock on the afternoon of their first day at sea, the Batavia, with her fleet close in behind, is heading sou’ by sou’-west on course for the Kanaal, the Dutch coast still on her port quarter and a strongish breeze blowing from aft. The first clue Pelsaert has that they might be in for a spot of trouble comes when he is on the poop deck trying to get some fresh air to counter his rising nausea. Here, he sees Skipper Jacobsz gazing worriedly westwards at the thick black clouds that have suddenly appeared.

  Whereas the instructions to the sailors were previously so obvious that the first mate could do them on his own, now Jacobsz takes over the entire operation and barks orders nineteen to the dozen: ‘Bear a hand, heave ’round! Boots, boots, get those men on deck, everybody up, sailors all, may lightning strike you, come up, you cursed dogs.’

  While those sailors who are within earshot jump to it at these commands, most receive them via the bosun, Jan Evertsz, who relays them to the dozens all around the ship, who once again go shinnying up and down the masts and across the spars to reset the sails. And, to ensure that even those in the farthest reaches of the ship’s rigging can follow these instructions, the chief trumpeter, a man by the name of Claas Jansz, and another man known to the crew as Cornelis de Dikke Trompetter, Cornelis the Fat Trumpeter, hover close to Evertsz and listen carefully.

  Following the nautical fashion of the day, for every command coming from the captain, Claas and Cornelis the Fat Trumpeter have a brief signal, which they instantly blare out, pointing their trumpets to all three masts so that all will hear. No sooner has the order ‘Alle hens aan dek!’, all hands on deck, come than Claas and Cornelis emit a toot toot toot-de-toot-toot toot, resounding from one end of the ship to the other and down the hatches, as the 40 sailors who are on watch dance to their tune.

  When the captain shouts, ‘Heave to, heave to, I say! Take down the top and the mainsails, you schobbejakken, bastards!’ they spot the relevant command, to haul in the mainsail, and a toooooot-toot-toot, de toot-de-toot-toota does the trick. And so it goes. All put together, each sailor is an integral part of a system that is as comprehensive as it is cohesive.

  True, Jacobsz is not kind in his commands to those sailors who are nearby – ‘You there, you slothouten, piece of wood, get that cable-rope or I will give you a beating so you will shit your soul’ – but no one takes particular offence, because that is just the Dutch-mariner way of speaking.

  In a similar fashion, Jan Evertsz, he with the heavily scarred and weathered visage of one who has spent equal amounts of time at sea and in tavern brawls, is rough in his manner but still respected by the sailors, who follow his orders without question. He has risen to the position of high bosun because of his ability to organise his sailors quickly in complex operations, and being rough is simply part of the way things are done.

  ‘Come,’ Jacobsz continues to cry, ‘move like one man, and to the health of all zwartinnen, black women, in the East Indies, and all Dutch girls. Come, move like one man!’

  And move like one man they do. As if by magic, the sails suddenly diminish to just a quarter of what they were, which is as well, for only minutes after that the skies darken and the light swell develops into battering waves. Now the Batavia and her fleet are in the middle of a murderous maelstrom that old salts would later say was one of the worst experienced in that part of the world. (Pelsaert will have to take their word for it. Having retired to his cabin well before the worst of the storm hits, he spends most of its duration lying on his bunk groaning.) If the Batavia is somewhat steadier in the storm than the other ships, less prone to being bounced around by the waves and winds, this is due to both her size and the amount of heavy cargo she is carrying, as well as the expertise of Skipper Ariaen Jacobsz.

  In such a ship, and under such captaincy, for many hours it seems probable that the Batavia will be able to weather the ferocity of even this storm without bad damage. This continues to be the case right up until the hour before the storm blows itself out, when, with one last mighty effort, a fiercely focused gale from the west suddenly propels the Batavia onto the Walcheren Banks, the sandbars just off the Dutch Republic’s Walcheren Island, which guards the approaches to the port of Antwerp.

  With the ship stuck in the sand, the Batavia’s heavy load, which has been an asset to their safety, now becomes a major liability. The wind howls and the ocean roars – nearly, but not quite, as loudly as Jacobsz as he continues to yell orders to his sailors and imprecations to the nautical gods in equal measure. And, in the end, it is a close-run thing. A lesser captain would likely have foundered, but in a crisis like this Jacobsz is as good as it gets, and this time he also has fortune on his side. For what aids the skipper and his sailors greatly is that the Batavia has hit the banks near low tide, and when the high tide comes in the added buoyancy lifts them off.

  Alas, other ships in the convoy are not so lucky, nor so expertly skippered or crewed, and the Gravenhage is badly damaged. Once the storm has abated, that ship is only just able to limp into the Dutch port of Vlissingen, to be repaired in the VOC shipyard in nearby Middelburg, where she will remain for many months.

  November 1628, Atlantic Ocean

  With the Batavia at its head, the fleet again sails on, continuing down through the North Sea, then the Kanaal, before heading south down the coast of France, then Portugal, and then down the coast of Africa, which appears to be nearly as green as their water.

  After the initial excitement of the departure and the early storm, the sense of adventure starts to dissipate now that the long journey proper has begun. A voyage of some 15,000 miles awaits, no less than two-thirds of the world’s circumference, at an average speed of just five knots – not a whole lot faster than walking pace.

  Lucretia, like all those new to sailing on a retourschip, is learning how it all works. While Skipper Jacobsz sleeps in the grandest room on the ship, the Great Cabin, Pelsaert’s quarters lie between the Great Cabin and the Steering Galley, and her own quarters are just above them, high in the aft of the ship, and right there is the first lesson. Broadly, the elite members of the ship’s company can be found in this very area, while the lower classes are well fore of the mainmast, and the lowest of the low – a misbehaving sailor, perhaps, being punished for breaching regulations – can be found in the foremost and lowest compartment of all: ‘the hole’, a small cell in the for’ard part of one of the lower decks that is too small to either stand or lie in.

  Also near to Lucretia’s cabin is the Predikant, the esteemed preacher Gijsbert Bastiaensz, with his wife, Maria Schepens, and their family of seven children. Their ages range from their oldest son, Bastiaen, who is 24, through their oldest daughter, Judick, 21, Pieter, 19, Willemyntgien, 14, Johannes, 13, Agnete, 11, and their youngest son, Roelant, who is just eight – and with so many of them they are packed into the cabin as tightly as a school of herring coming up the Zuyder Zee.

  And, though so fine a lady as Lucretia would never venture there, whole different worlds of the Batavia lie well beneath her feet. One deck down from the Great Cabin is the gun deck, where, all among the many guns, reside those whose job it is to maintain and fire the cannons and sail the ship. They sleep on their small mattresses of canvas filled with horsehair on the oaken deck beside their sea chests containing their belongings, or on hammocks above the same. All up, there are no fewer than 180 of them, crammed into a tiny space stretching from the galley to the bows. Never are the common sailors allowed to move from their position for’ard of the mainmast to aft of it, where the constabel, master-gunner, and his under-officers hold sway.

  The constabel is ultimately responsible for all of the weaponry on board – the muskets and cannons – and all of the gunpowder, which is to be found in the armoury. If ever there is a battle, it will be his men who will fill the kardzoen, the paper sacks, w
ith that gunpowder, to be delivered to each cannon as it is needed, and it is he who is ultimately responsible for the security of that armoury. Hence, the particular insistence that none of the common sailors venture aft, to get even remotely close to that armoury. If they breach that strict regulation, a lashing is a bare beginning to the punishment they can expect. It is equally verboden, forbidden, to wander to any other part of the ship, and even up to one of the top decks if it is not their watch, without being escorted by a petty officer.

  At least the sailors can get some fresh air and light when the gun ports are open, but those ports have to be firmly closed at the first sign of foul weather. They must void their bowels through one of two latrines – small holes in planks cantilevered over the bow of the ship, entirely public in nature and exposed to the elements. An optional extra is to haul up a line that trails in the seawater below and, through assiduous application of its frayed end, roughly clean one’s nether region before tossing it back in the sea. As desperately uncomfortable as this process of allemanseindje, literally ‘all men’s end’, may be, there is no alternative.

  The gun deck has the only open fire on the entire ship, which is to be found in the galley, right near the middle, where the mainmast finds its way through to rest on the keel far below. This galley, filled with shining copper cauldrons, is heavily lined with firebricks to stop a stray spark escaping and setting fire to the whole wooden vessel. It is here that nigh on a thousand meals a day are cooked.

  Just opposite the galley is a small room where the daily amount of food required – brought up every morning from the storerooms in the hold – is put to be prepared. A little along from that room is the surgeon’s room, and though it is not necessarily a reflection of the VOC’s view that the food produced by the galley is likely to make the ship’s company sick, it is still a propitious proximity.

  The role of the sailors is of course to raise and lower the sails at the skipper’s command, set them to the wind, swab the decks, repair the sails and the lines, and do those myriad things necessary to keep the ship moving around the clock through all weathers and climes.

  As to the sailors who are also gunners, theirs is primarily a defensive role, to repel any attacks from those hostile Portuguese or Spanish ships they might encounter. The gunners may even, if the occasion warrants, be required to fire upon the Javanese, who have reportedly been troublesome of late, around the citadel of Batavia.

  The various craftsmen necessary to maintain the ship share cabins that are scattered all over her, often below the gun deck. They are the carpenters, constantly checking, repairing and replacing the Batavia’s multitude of wooden fittings, from deck board to stump atop the mainmast, from the truck at the taffrail to the head of the prow, not to mention all the stays and the yardarms, the halyards and braces; the caulkers, to pack the seams of the hull with pitch mixed with oakum (unpicked rope) or moss, to ensure that it remains absolutely watertight; the sailmakers, to constantly repair the set of the ship’s sails not currently in use, together with their attendant lines, which are always wet and always rotting; the cooks and their helpers, to turn the ever more rancid stores into three hopefully palatable meals a day; and the Commandeur’s secretary, bookkeepers and clerks, who will formalise Pelsaert’s many deliberations and ideally be always at his right shoulder in the waking hours.

  And finally, way down in the depths of the ship, on the orlop deck, which runs with an extremely low ceiling for most of the length of the vessel, in a spot that smells and feels like the inside of the bowels of a massive beast, are the hundred-odd soldiers – mostly Dutch, though many from Germany, a few from France and a scattering from other European countries, including one from England – all on their way to do a tour of duty in the East Indies.

  The separation of the soldiers from the rest of the ship is by strict design, as the VOC has learned to its cost over the years that, like gun oil and saltwater, soldiers and sailors do not mix well. This natural enmity is worsened by the fact that, during bad weather, when the gun ports are closed, all is dark and it is too dangerous to use the latrines, it is not at all uncommon for the sailors to use the open hatches down to the soldiers’ deck as an alternative spot to void themselves. The soldiers have come to feel a bit grim about it, but such is their lot.

  As the soldiers are mercenary men of martial but not nautical skills, it means that unless the Batavia is attacked by another ship – or an exceedingly unlikely attack comes from within – there is little use for them until they reach the East Indies. Fresh air? Only when all the hatch doors between decks are occasionally thrown open does the bravest air hazard below to confront the outrush of fug most foul. But with even the mildest bad weather, the hatches are battened down to protect the ship, and the soldiers have to live, just, with the air they already have. Sometimes, however, the soldiers do manage to rig up a special apparatus called a ‘windsail’ – a large open bag in the rigging connected to a kind of hose, with the whole thing designed to get some fresh air into the lower parts of the ship. Occasionally, it even works.

  Mostly, though, the soldiers on the orlop deck are doing one of three things. Primarily, they are sweltering in the dark rancidness, together with burgeoning colonies of rats, weevils, lice and other disgusting vermin. Sometimes, after arriving on the deck amid a waft of stench – exacerbated by the fact that, as there is no spare water for washing clothes, they often use their own urine, to provide that extra shine – furiously blinking from the sudden burst of light, they are seen to do training exercises in preparation for their tour of duty in Batavia. And, very occasionally, they are undertaking their own watches at key points on the ship. This includes mounting an around-the-clock watch on the armoury, the powder room and the Great Cabin.

  While the mercenary soldiers are the manifestation of the VOC’s iron rule, this watch-keeping responsibility takes up very little of their time, as they are so many and the role requires so few at any given time. They are therefore broadly treated much the same as dumb cargo. They live and sleep in the darkness of the orlop deck, below the waterline.

  At least one comfort for quite a few of the soldiers and a sprinkling of the sailors is that they have their wives and mistresses with them – and some even have children, too. The nominal leader of the soldiers, for example, Corporal Gabriel Jacobsz, has both his wife, Laurentia Thomas, and his seven-year-old daughter by his side. It is their intention that, once they reach Batavia, they will all live in the garrison together. Gabriel Jacobsz’s daughter is very good friends with six-year-old Hilletje Hardens, whose father, Hans, is one of Gabriel Jacobsz’s soldiers, and whose mother, Anneken, is also on the voyage. Notwithstanding the incredibly small space allowed them, it really is possible to have at least the rough vestiges of family life, and the sounds of the two girls constantly giggling as they play with their dolls is pleasing to all. Sometimes, to the great delight of the girls, they get to play with a real baby, as one of the women on their deck, Mayken Cardoes, gave birth not long after leaving Amsterdam, and she occasionally entrusts her little one to the girls to look after.

  Upper-Trumpeter Claas Jansz is accompanied by his wife, Tryntgien Fredericxs, and she is in turn squiring her younger sister Zussie out to the East Indies on the reckoning that in those climes, where European women are only a small part of the population, she may well find the man of her dreams.

  For such are the times that, while these women and children, and the other wives and mistresses, are neither paying passengers nor doing any work to keep the ship going, the Company is prepared to tolerate their presence. The fact is, it encourages the men to make the trip in the first place, and it also helps to get much-needed decent Dutch women into the Batavia settlement. The VOC is delighted that the gunner Jan Carstenz has brought his own notably beautiful wife, Anneken Bosschieters, with him, because they are precisely the kind of people who might, after Jan has served his time, become Vrijburgers, perhaps on one of the 68 estates in the Spice Islands.

  Fin
ally, there is a scattering of other women living among the sailors and soldiers – some even disguised as men to inveigle their way aboard the ship. They are women of adventure, lured by the dream of getting to the exotic East, in the only way they know how. Some are of easy virtue, some not, but in both cases the Company takes a less benign view of their presence. So numerous do they become on voyages to the East that within a year of the voyage of the Batavia, the Governor-General of the East Indies will write to the Heeren XVII of a recently arrived fleet:

  Click Here

  The likes of Lucretia, of course, will seldom see such women, not even from a distance. For all the people travelling on the Batavia, a strict segregation policy applies. Rarely would such a lady as she demean herself by going down to the lower decks, amid the stench of vomit, excreta and filthy clothes, and among all those toothless sailors on the gun deck – and still less would she venture into the even darker and more putrid netherworld of the soldiers on the deck below. Nor would such women as the strumpets who lived in that world ever set foot in such regal areas as the Great Cabin, the poop deck or the other cabin areas.

  Yes, there are the occasional times when Lucretia is out on the quarterdeck herself, but never at the same time as those from below. To begin with, any kind of regular ‘promenading’ is out of the question. That would require a stretch of bare deck, and there simply isn’t any, covered as it is in endless coiled lines, men repairing sails, carpenters sawing, soldiers patrolling and other passengers just like her, simply occupying a precious bit of space in the open air. To move through them is out of the question.

  It turns out that Lucretia is somewhat isolated on the ship. Gay chatter is in short supply for the belle of the Batavia, as it quickly becomes obvious that, while most of the men cannot take their eyes off her, most of the female passengers seem to have taken something of a set against her . . . perhaps for that very reason.