by Mike Dash
This was a terrifying discovery. The chief hope was that they had had the luck to run aground at low water. If so, the Batavia might yet refloat herself as the tide rose. But if they had struck at high tide, there was so little water under the ship that the receding sea would quickly leave her stranded and make it impossible to wind her off with the anchor, adding to the stresses on the hull and perhaps even breaking her back by snapping the great keel in two.
With the work of lightening the ship complete, they waited, wondering if the tide was high. It was only at some time between five and six in the morning that it became clear that chance was against them: the waters under the hull were not rising but falling. Slowly the jagged tips of the reef on which they had been stranded began to emerge above the waves, and before long the people on the ship found themselves surrounded on three sides by raging surf and claws of coral. As the waters receded, the Batavia began to bump violently on the reef. It became impossible to stand or walk on deck; attempts at salvage had to be curtailed, and both passengers and crew could do little but sit in miserable huddles, listening to the awful grating of the hull.
Dutch East Indiamen were built strong. Their timbers were twice as thick as those of other merchantmen. But they were not designed to withstand stranding on a coral reef and, in particular, their bottoms were not made to take the full weight of the massive mainmast unsupported. This mast, 180 feet of Scandinavian pine, weighed well in excess of 15 tons with all its canvas, yards, and rigging and ran down through all four decks to rest directly on the keel. Now, with the whole ship nearly clear of the water, fierce surf was thrusting the Batavia up off the reef six or seven times a minute, then ebbing rapidly away to let the hull crash back against the coral. And the mainmast had been turned into a gigantic pile driver, repeatedly smashing down onto the keel and threatening to grind right through the bottom of the ship.
Without her mainmast, the Batavia could scarcely sail. But with it, she would certainly founder there upon the reef. It was imperative to relieve the stress on the hull, and there was only one way to save the ship. Shortly after dawn, Jacobsz gave the order to fell the mast.
In the age of sail, cutting down a mainmast was an act of such dire significance that the skipper customarily accepted responsibility for the consequences by striking the first blow with his own axe. Jacobsz swung, then several others joined him in hacking at the mast where it passed down through the main deck. But, in their haste, they failed to calculate the necessary trajectory. Instead of falling overboard into the surf, the enormous mast with its spars and rigging thundered down onto the Batavia herself, crushing gear and railings, thoroughly entangling itself in the equipment left on deck, and causing a huge amount of damage.
By good fortune, no one was killed or even injured, but the ship’s company surveyed the devastation with horror. The mast could not be moved, and it was obvious there was no longer any chance of saving the Batavia. The only hope for those on board was that there was at least some land in the vicinity that would not disappear beneath the waves by noon, when the tide was full.
The upper-merchant clambered as high into the stern as he was able and looked north. Now that the sun had come up and the tide had receded, he could see they had run onto the southern tip of a huge, crescent-shaped reef. A single line of breakers stretched for two miles to the east of them, and one mile to the north and west. But in the distance Pelsaert could see islands.
The largest—and the only ones of any size—appeared to him to be nearly six miles away. But several pancakes of broken coral lay much closer than that—three to the northwest and at least one more to the east. Breakers surrounded the islet on the eastern side of the reef, and it seemed unlikely they could land on it. But the merchant could see that half a mile to the west of their position, the reef was broken by a clear deep-water channel that led into the heart of the mysterious archipelago. With a modicum of care, it might be possible for the ship’s boats to penetrate the reef and ascertain which, if any, of the islets would provide them with a haven.
The Batavia’s yawl, which was the smaller of the two boats that the big ship carried, had been launched while it was dark and now lay bobbing alongside in the surf. It was well suited to the task, and about seven in the morning the skipper and a handpicked crew pulled away to scout the archipelago. At nine o’clock they returned with encouraging news. They had visited several of the smaller coral islands, Jacobsz reported, and none seemed likely to be submerged by the tides.
Ariaen’s discovery meant that there was a reasonable chance of saving the Batavia’s passengers and crew. But Pelsaert still faced something of a dilemma. The VOC, he knew, did not look kindly on servants who were unlucky or incompetent enough to lose its property. His duty to his employers was certainly to save the cargo first and worry about the lives of the passengers and crew only when the valuables were safe. But he doubted this was a realistic course of action. Even if he could keep control of the sailors, it seemed unlikely that the panicky soldiers and civilians on board would stand by while the boats ferried boxes of trade goods and chests packed full of silver to the islands. So the upper-merchant compromised. “Because of the great Yammer that there was in the ship,” he duly noted, “of Women, Children, Sick, and poor-hearted men, we decided to put most of the people on land first, and meanwhile to get ready on deck the money and most precious goods.”
It was the right decision. At 10 a.m., before the first boatloads of survivors could be got away, the relentless pounding of the surf finally put an end to the resistance of Batavia’s tortured hull. The ship burst open below the water line, and tons of foaming reef water began to pour into the hold. The breach was so vast that the caulkers and the carpenters had to flee before the swiftly rising flood. A good many of the supplies on board were lost, and it was only with considerable difficulty that a little food and water were salvaged from the stores.
The sight of bales of trade goods floating in the flooded hold was sufficient to persuade most of the passengers and crew to abandon ship, and the main deck was soon crowded with men and women jostling for positions along the sides. As was common at the time, there was no real order to the evacuation. The strongest forced their way into the boats, leaving women, children, and senior VOC officials behind. A dozen others leapt into the sea and attempted to swim to land. They all drowned in the surf.
Ariaen Jacobsz and his sailors worked all day, but, fully loaded, the Batavia’s two boats could hold no more than 60 people and the conditions were atrocious. Transferring frightened people from the pitching deck into a rolling, yawing boat was dangerous work that could not be hurried; a moment’s inattention or the least miscalculation might hurl the fragile little craft against the ship, smashing them to pieces. And, once in the boat, the survivors had to be rowed the best part of a mile along the deep-water channel before they could be set ashore.
The boats’ crews took them to the closest of the islands the skipper had scouted earlier in the day. It was tiny, a mere mushroom of coral rubble that measured only 175 yards from end to end and offered no real protection from the biting wind. During the afternoon, four more boatloads of survivors arrived. They did what they could to make themselves comfortable, but the islet was hard and flat and sterile, lacking not only food and water but even sand on which to lie and rest. There was no shelter. All in all, it left a good deal to be desired.
By nightfall, with the rescue operation hardly half-completed, some 180 people had been set on land. But parents had been separated from their offspring, husbands from their wives—and it had been so imperative to pack as many people as possible into the boats that the luckless survivors on the island found themselves with virtually no supplies. Jacobsz and his men had managed to land about 150 pints of poor drinking water, a dozen barrels of bone-dry bread and—at the insistence of the upper-merchant—a small casket of the most valuable trade goods, packed with precious stones, worked gold and jewelery that would have fetched 60,000 guilders*3 in the Indies. Such
huge wealth was worthless on the reef; a few guilders’ worth of sailcloth and blankets would have been of greater use.
At sunset, back on the Batavia again, Jacobsz motioned Pelsaert to one side and insisted that his place was on the island. “It won’t help at all that we save water and bread,” the skipper said, “for everyone on land drinks as much as he can. To forbid this has no result unless you order otherwise.”
Twelve chests of VOC silver were still waiting on the main deck, but the merchant knew there was little more food or water to be had. He and Jacobsz jumped down into the yawl, intending to call at the little islet and introduce some form of rationing before returning to Batavia for the money. But no sooner had they pulled away than a violent squall arose and the little boat had to run for safety inside the reef. Fierce winds whipped up the waves, and once again the stricken ship all but disappeared in a storm of surf and spray. It was evident there was no chance of boarding her again before dawn, and it was only with some difficulty the boat’s crew contrived to fall back to the little island. They reached the survivors as they were settling down to an uncomfortable night. The conditions on the islet were appalling and, exhausted as they were, they slept only with difficulty, hard coral fingers in their backs.
On the Batavia, the plight of the other passengers and crew was equally unpleasant. About 120 people remained for the time being on board the sinking ship. For those on deck, the wind and rain brought with them the threat of exposure. Meanwhile, down below, the situation had deteriorated sharply in the absence of both the merchant and the skipper. Not every member of the crew had chosen to flee up to the main deck when the ship’s hull burst. A good number—convinced, perhaps, that they were dead men anyway—preferred to break into the gun-deck stores and drink themselves into oblivion among the casks of alcohol. One, Allert Janssen, a gunner from Assendelft in the North Quarter of Holland, made his way to the bottle room in the stern where the officers stored their personal supplies of wines and spirits. There he found his way barred by Lucas Gerritsz, the steward’s mate. In normal circumstances, Janssen’s very presence there, so close to the officers’ quarters, would have been a flogging offense; now, though, it was different. The gunner drew a knife and slashed at Gerritsz’s back, bawling: “Out, cats and dogs—you have been masters here long enough, now I [will be master] for a while.” The steward ran for his life, leaving the bottle room unguarded, and soon several of Janssen’s shipmates had joined him in sampling the fine wines and spirits within. Denied much alcohol for the better part of a year, these men quickly became dangerously drunk.
A second party of delinquents, led by a young VOC cadet named Lenert van Os and freed now from all fear of punishment, began to smash open the sea chests on the gun deck. They worked their way back along the ship, plundering as they went, until they reached the officers’ quarters in the stern. No one tried to stop them and, emboldened by drink and desperation, they broke down the door of Pelsaert’s quarters. A drunken young sailor named Cornelis Janssen, who was nicknamed “Bean,” was among the first to enter. He reeked of alcohol and had festooned himself with a considerable array of knives. One blade had been thrust through the fabric of his hat, and several others protruded from the pleats of his breeches. Confronted with this piratical apparition, the remaining cabin servants fled, leaving the merchant’s personal possessions to the mob. They rifled through the cabin and a Frisian seaman, Ryckert Woutersz, broke open Pelsaert’s sea chest and scattered the contents all about in the search for valuables. Soon he came across the upper-merchant’s personal collection of medallions. They were distributed among the rioters as booty.
Up on deck, the abandoned treasure chests of the VOC became an irresistible lure for anyone courageous or foolhardy enough to brave the shrieking wind and growling surf. An old soldier from the German town of Heidelburg named Jean Thirion proved bolder than the rest and chopped open one of the chests with a hatchet. Seeing what was happening, a handful of loyal sailors drove him off, and a carpenter was summoned to nail a length of plank over the breach. But by now discipline had all but broken down throughout the wreck. By morning the loyalists had themselves dispersed and a swarm of treasure seekers once again surrounded the damaged chest. They prized off the carpenter’s plank and tipped the contents out on deck. Thousands of guilders, enough to make a man rich for several lifetimes, bounced across the planking, but such was the seriousness of the Batavia’s plight that even Thirion and his drunken friends saw little point in hoarding them. Instead they turned the coins into playthings, hurling great handfuls of currency at each other’s heads in jest.
It was at about this time that Cornelis Janssen, still wearing his suit of knives, emerged from the Great Cabin with his share of the merchant’s booty: a gold medallion set in agate. Walking to the side, he tucked the medal into his hat with other valuables and tossed it into the sea. “There lies the rubbish,” shouted the inebriated Bean, “even if it is worth so many thousands.”
Back inside the coral crescent, where the roaring seas were calmed by their passage across the reef, rescue work got under way again an hour before dawn. The first priority was to move the majority of the survivors to a larger island. Filling both the boats with a total of 60 people, the sailors hauled up the deep-sea channel and around to the north side of a larger, womb-shaped island a mile from the Batavia. It was some 350 yards long and nearly as far across at its western end, but it tapered sharply to the southeast and for most of its length it was no more than 50 yards wide. Like the mushroom-shaped rock on which they had spent the night, it offered little in the way of shelter and no fresh water, but at least there was a small sandy beach where the boats could land, and room on the island for all the Batavia’s passengers and crew. By the afternoon about 180 men, women, and children had been transported to the larger island, together with a portion of their scant supplies of bread and water. Pelsaert, with 40 of the best seamen and a handful of favored passengers, remained on the islet, where the skipper had taken care to retain almost all of the water and a good deal of the food.
Conditions outside the reef remained atrocious. With considerable daring, one more trip was made from the Batavia to land and a new group of survivors was brought to safety inside the coral, but after that the weather closed in once again and by afternoon the skipper did not dare to bring rescue boats alongside the ship. There were still 70 men on board, the majority of them much the worse for drink and the excesses of the night before, but sober enough by now to realize that the Batavia would soon break up under the constant pounding of the waves. For several hours Pelsaert kept the rescue boats hovering nearby, as much in the hope of recovering the money chests as of saving lives. He prayed for a break in the bad weather, but none came. At dusk the upper-merchant retreated back inside the shelter of the reef, calling to the men on deck that they should construct some rafts and save themselves.
By nightfall on the second day, therefore, the situation at the wreck site had deteriorated further. The survivors huddling within the reef had been split between two islands, and the rescue of another boatload of people from the ship meant there were now 60 more mouths to feed. But supplies were already running dangerously low. Despite their attempts at rationing, the water was all but gone. If more could not be found within a day or two, they would all die of thirst.
On the smaller islet, Pelsaert and Jacobsz debated what to do. The discovery that they had been wrecked in a coral archipelago had persuaded the skipper that they were probably somewhere in an all but unknown chain of islands that the Dutch called Houtman’s Abrolhos*4 after Frederik de Houtman, the merchant who had first nearly run aground on them some 13 years before. The islands were completely unexplored, and it was uncertain whether any of them held fresh water. But they were known to lie several hundred miles to the east of the Batavia’s last estimated position, and a little less than 2,000 miles south of the Indies. If the ship was indeed in the Abrolhos, it might at least be possible for some of the survivors to reach Java in h
er boats.
The first imperative, however, was to find water. Pelsaert still wished to salvage the VOC’s money chests from the wreck, but he suspected—probably quite correctly—that malcontents would seize the boats and conduct their own searches of the nearby islands if he failed to take decisive action quickly. He knew that to lose control of the yawl and the Batavia’s larger longboat would be disastrous, not only to his shaky authority over the now-scattered refugees from the wreck, but also to his own prospects of survival. And supplies of water really were running short. So the upper-merchant authorized a search of the archipelago, beginning on the morning of 6 June. He also decided to transport one barrel of fresh water to the people on the larger island to the north.
Ariaen Jacobsz and his officers approved of the search for water, but grim realism left them aghast at Pelsaert’s determination to succor those on the womb-shaped island, which—being within sight of the wrecked ship lying stranded on the reef—had quickly been dubbed “Batavia’s Graveyard.” The 180 people on the island were stranded on a waterless lump of coral with neither a boat nor rafts upon which to escape; they had, the skipper reckoned, probably already consumed their supplies. The arrival of the upper-merchant with one small barrel of water would be of little comfort to them. They were much more likely to try to seize the boat.
Jacobsz told Francisco Pelsaert this, and he also warned the merchant that he could no longer expect the men to obey his every order. In situations such as this, those who had the skills to save themselves would do so—at the expense of others if need be. It was unrealistic to expect the rough-hewn sailors of the VOC to be exceptions to this rule, and they were unlikely to volunteer to help their comrades to the north if there was any chance the people there might damage one of the boats. “They will keep you there, and you will regret it,” the skipper warned Pelsaert. “Secondly, there is no-one who will sail with you.”
