by Mike Dash
The little convoy had entered the scurvy belt, an area of the South Atlantic that stretched from the Tropic of Capricorn all the way to the Cape. In the 1620s (and for another 200 years), scurvy was a menace on every lengthy ocean voyage, generally manifesting itself three to four months after a ship had left port. The first cases usually occurred among the most malnourished members of the crew, and it was only when a vessel was becalmed and drifted slowly across the ocean for months on end that the officers suffered with the men, but the symptoms of the disease were unique and all too familiar to veterans of the Indies trade such as Jacobsz and Pelsaert. They included painful and swollen legs, fetid breath, and spongy, bleeding gums. After a while, the victim’s mouth became so swollen and rotten with gangrene that his teeth would fall out one by one. Eventually—after about a month of suffering—he would die an agonizing death.
Cases of scurvy occurred on almost every voyage to the Indies; a retourschip usually lost 20 or 30 men to the disease, generally between the equator and the Cape. Sometimes the death toll was far worse. On the Eerste Schipvaart of 1595, more than half the men in the fleet were dead of scurvy by the time the ships reached Madagascar. When the handful of survivors finally reached Texel two years later, there were not enough fit men left on board one of the ships to lower her anchors.
Little progress had been made in treating the disease by the time the Batavia sailed three decades later. Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, which is found in fresh food and particularly in fruit and fruit juice—supplies of which had usually run out by the time a ship reached the equator. But this fact was unknown in 1628, and doctors differed as to what caused the illness and how it should be treated. Foul air below decks was often blamed for the disease, as was a surfeit of salt meat. Wine was a popular, if ineffective, remedy. Perhaps surprisingly, the vitamin-rich juices of lemons and limes—which were to be recognized, late in the next century, as a preventative and cure—were already known to be effective in combating scurvy, although no one fully understood why. They were prescribed as a remedy by a number of naval surgeons, and quantities were carried aboard some ships, particularly those of the rival English East India Company. But this cure was only one among many tried by the VOC, and its unique efficacy was not recognized in the seventeenth century. In consequence the Batavia lost nearly a dozen seamen to scurvy on the passage between Sierra Leone and the Cape.
The dead men were buried at sea. There was not enough wood for coffins, so the deceased were sewn up inside spare pieces of sailcloth and, after a short burial service, tipped into the sea. A dead sailor’s mess-mates would try to make sure that his body was well weighted with sand or lead, in the hope that it would sink too quickly for the sharks that were by now a common sight around the Batavia to tear it apart.
Even in the seventeenth century, sharks enjoyed an evil reputation for ferocity, and Dutch sailors sometimes told stories of fish that had been caught and cut open to reveal the severed legs or arms of recently deceased shipmates in their bellies. Seamen viewed all sharks as man-eaters and would go to considerable trouble to hook them on their lines. Sometimes a captured fish would be killed and put to good use on board—the rough, sandpapery skin was used to sharpen knives, heart and liver became ingredients for the surgeon’s nostrums, and the brains were turned into a special paste that was thought to ease the agony of childbirth. But on other occasions, the men of a retourschip would exact revenge for all the sailors who had died between the jaws of a shark. It was considered fine sport to torture a captured monster by gouging out its eyes and cutting off its fins. Then an empty barrel would be tied to the mutilated animal’s tail and the shark would be returned to the Atlantic. Unable to see or swim or dive, the wounded fish would thrash wildly in gouts of its own blood, endlessly circling and smashing into the sides of the ship until it either died of exhaustion or was eaten by its fellow predators.
Cruel sports such as this were among the few permitted outlets for the baser instincts of the men. Violence and disputes were severely punished, and the total lack of privacy made any form of sexual activity all but impossible for those who lived before the mast. On the great majority of East Indiamen this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there were no more than a handful of women on board—and most of those were either married or prepubescent. A few of the men (though not, it seems, too many) were active sodomites, but the penalties for being caught engaging in a homosexual relationship were draconian; if the commandeur decreed it, the lovers could be sewn, together, into a sailcloth shroud and thrown alive into the ocean. The great majority of such affairs were thus conducted not among the men of the lower deck but between officers and common sailors, since the officers alone had access to private cabins and the status to coerce their partners (some of whom, at least, were unwilling) into silence.
The Batavia, however, carried an unusual number of female passengers. There were at least 22 women on the ship, and although most were married and were traveling to the Indies with their husbands, a few were to all intents and purposes unattached. This was a little peculiar, as the VOC had already learned from bitter experience that to allow unmarried women to sail alongside several hundred young men—all tight-packed together with little to occupy them for anything up to nine months—inevitably led to trouble.
As early as 1610 the Company’s first attempts to procure wives for its lonely merchants in the Indies had ended in humiliation when Governor-General Pieter Both was dispatched to Java with 36 “spinsters” who turned out to be prostitutes. A few years later Both’s successor, Jan Coen, abandoned the attempts he had been making to purchase slave girls in the East and had the orphanages of the Netherlands scoured for young Dutch women instead. “You, Sirs,” Coen lectured the Gentlemen XVII in his uniquely blunt style, “would only send us the scum of the land, [and] people here will sell us none but scum either . . . . Send us young girls, and we shall hope that things will go better.” These “company daughters” were packed off to the Batavia and provided with food and clothing on the voyage east on the understanding that they would marry when they got there. Most were between 12 and 20 and sailed with only a single chaperone to look after groups of up to several dozen girls. Unsurprisingly, even the plainest of the “daughters” attracted the unwelcome attentions of the crew long before the coast of Java appeared over the horizon.
By 1628 Jan Company had learned from these mistakes. It was now rare for any women, other than the wives and daughters of its most senior merchants, to be granted permission to sail out to the Indies. But for some reason the VOC’s proscriptions appear to have been flouted on the Batavia. It is probable that some of the women who found their way on board, including a group of half a dozen sailors’ wives, were actually stowaways. Certainly councillor Jacques Specx, who commanded the larger half of that year’s Christmas fleet, uncovered a host of whores and common-law spouses on the ships in his flotilla, writing home from the Bay of Biscay: “We want for nothing save honest maids and housewives in place of the filthy strumpets and street wailers who have been found (may God amend it) in all the ships. They are so numerous and so awful that I am ashamed to say any more about it.” Pelsaert appears to have checked his ships less scrupulously than Specx. Any stowaways on the Batavia managed to remain hidden until it was too late to send them back.
Among the unchaperoned women on Pelsaert’s ship were the alluring Lucretia Jans and Zwaantie Hendricx, her traveling companion and maid. They made an unlikely couple: Creesje patrician and aloof, her servant Zwaantie earthy and available. Whether Zwaantie had been Lucretia’s maid in Amsterdam is not known; it has been suggested that she was hired—and hired in haste—solely to accompany Creesje on the voyage east. The contention is unprovable, but it fits the facts, for these two women were uneasy companions, and the ill feeling that sprang up between them was to be the cause of considerable trouble on board the Batavia.
The problems began shortly after the ship sailed from Sierra Leone. During the crossing of
the North Atlantic Ariaen Jacobsz had become infatuated with Creesje Jans. The skipper, who had left a wife at home in Durgerdam, somehow persuaded himself that he could attract Lucretia, who was not only married, but several degrees his superior in social status. He quickly learned otherwise. Creesje rejected his initial advances, but apparently she did so gently, for they remained for a while on friendly terms. But as the Batavia set course for the wagenspoor, and Creesje continued to resist, her relationship with Jacobsz began to deteriorate.
Jeronimus saw what Pelsaert and the rest had missed. As the Batavia left the African coast in her wake, he tackled Ariaen in private. “I chided him,” the under-merchant later recalled, “and asked what he intended with that woman. The skipper answered that because she was fair, he desired to tempt her to his will, and to make her willing with gold or other means.”
Jacobsz’s bribes appear to have been as unwelcome to Creesje as his earlier advances, and this time she must have told him so in blunter terms. Abruptly the skipper broke off the pursuit. But long before the ship approached the Cape, the irrepressible Ariaen had picked up another scent. This time the object of his affections was Zwaantie, and this time he was successful.
It never was explained whether the Batavia’s skipper seduced the maid because he desired her or simply to spite her mistress. Whatever the reason, the burgeoning relationship between Ariaen and Zwaantie placed Lucretia in a delicate position. It was impossible to keep secrets on board ship, and Jacobsz’s scandalous dalliance with the maid was soon a public humiliation for Creesje; but she could hardly avoid the skipper all the way to the Indies, and while they remained at sea he could make her life less than pleasant if he chose. Furthermore, it was unthinkable for a woman of her station to travel without a servant, but there was no obvious replacement for Zwaantie on board the Batavia. Creesje had little choice but to make the best of the situation.
As for Jacobsz and his mistress, they seem to have been united not only in their dislike of Lucretia—the skipper smarting from rejection, the maid from the real or imagined slights of her employer—but by their lustful natures. Ariaen was “crazed anew” by his passion for the servant girl, while Zwaantie, so the cook’s gossipy wife confided to Jeronimus as they approached the Cape, “was a whore” who denied her lover nothing. If the under-merchant desired proof of this allegation, it soon presented itself. Repairing to the officers’ privy in the stern one day, he opened the door to find the skipper already there, making love to Zwaantie in the awkward confines of the closet.
So the Batavia and her consorts neared the Cape of Good Hope. As Jan Huygen van Linschoten had predicted in his Reysgeschrift, the first indication that they were approaching land was the sight of Cape gannets—white birds with black-tipped wings that the Dutch called “velvet sleeves”—wheeling and calling around the convoy while it was still well out to sea. A day or two later, the sailors began to notice mats of broken, trumpet-stemmed reeds floating in the water and then the bones of dead cuttlefish bobbing on the waves. These were sure signs that the Batavia was within 30 miles of land.
They dropped anchor under Table Mountain on 14 April 1629, having been nearly six months at sea. The Cape was quite unlike the coast at Sierra Leone. It was delightful country, green and teeming with life. Since its discovery by Batholomeu Diaz in 1488, the Tavern of the Ocean had become a port of refuge for almost every European vessel heading east. English and Dutch, French, Portuguese and Danes all came to barter for supplies with the Hottentots who farmed cattle in the hinterland.
Ships heading for the Coromandel Coast rarely put in at the Cape, but on board the Batavia and the Sardam, the Dordrecht, the Assendelft, and the little warship Buren, men readied the ships’ boats and carried the scurvy-ridden and the sick ashore. Landing parties set up sailcloth tents for them along the edge of the beach. Other seamen hunted sea lions and penguins along the beach, or fished and gathered mussels from the rocks while they waited for the Hottentots’ arrival.
It was Pelsaert’s duty to negotiate for supplies of food. The natives of the Cape had grown used to dealing with visitors from Europe. A mutually beneficial trade had sprung up, for the Hottentots had oxen and sheep to sell, and the sailors iron hoops and copper plates that could be fashioned into ornaments and spears. The rate of exchange seemed laughably advantageous to the Dutch, who on one occasion bartered a copper bracelet for a sheep, and on another received “three oxen and five sheep for a crooked knife, a shovel, a short iron bolt, with a knife and some scraps of iron, worth altogether perhaps four guilders in Holland.” But metal was hard to come by at the Cape, and for their part the Hottentots seemed content that it was they who had the better of the deals.
Neither party really understood the other. The Dutch thought the inhabitants of the Cape primitive and ugly, and their journals contain numerous disparaging comments concerning the near nakedness of the Hottentots and the foul smell of the animal fat they rubbed into their bodies to insulate against the cold. The Africans found the Dutch greedy and violent, and in the early years of the seventeenth century men on both sides died as a result of this mutual mistrust.
Pelsaert’s greatest problem was communication. Europeans could not understand a word of the extraordinary language of the bushmen, who talked by clicking their tongues—“their speech is just as if one heard a number of angry turkeys, little else but clucking and whistling,” one baffled merchant wrote—and when the Hottentots eventually appeared the commandeur had to rely on mimicry and mime to make his wishes known. Indeed, everything about the Cape “savages” seemed alien to the Dutch, and they were utterly repulsed by the Hottentot diet. The locals liked their meat uncooked, and their greatest delicacy, the Dutch observed, was the intestines of an ox, which they “ate quite raw after shaking out most of the dung.”
It took Pelsaert some time to secure the necessary supplies, and his absences ashore had consequences he could hardly have predicted. While Pelsaert was inland bartering for sheep, Ariaen Jacobsz took a boat and embarked on an illicit pleasure trip around the bay in the company of Zwaantie and his friend Jeronimus Cornelisz. Afterward the little group rowed from ship to ship in the southern dusk, enjoying the hospitality of the other vessels in the fleet until Jacobsz became thoroughly inebriated. The skipper’s behavior deteriorated rapidly, and he began to lash out with his fists and tongue. By the time the commandeur returned to the Batavia, several complaints had already been lodged against him.
The episode reflected badly on Pelsaert and his flagship and greatly worried the commandeur. “They went ashore without my knowledge when I had gone in search of beasts,” he recorded in his journal, “until the evening, when they sailed to the Assendelft where Ariaen behaved himself very pugnaciously, and at night time went to the ship Buren, where he behaved himself worse.” Jacobsz, the commandeur concluded, had been “very beastly with words as well as deeds.”
The skipper’s behavior was a serious problem for Pelsaert. The drunkenness and violence were bad enough, but the fact that Jacobsz had taken a boat without the commandeur’s permission was worse. It was clear that the skipper would have to be disciplined if the commandeur was not to lose face, and early the next morning Pelsaert called Jacobsz into the Great Cabin and “chided him over his arrogance and the deeds committed by him, saying that if he did not refrain from his unheard-of behavior, [I] would take a hand; with more other good admonishments.” This dressing-down, like Ariaen’s antics with Zwaantie, could not be kept secret for long, and it was soon the talk of the Batavia. The skipper had been humiliated, and his old antagonism for Francisco Pelsaert was rekindled.
Jacobsz smoldered while his men slaughtered cattle on the beach and packed the fresh meat into empty barrels. Down below, the carpenters and caulkers finished their repairs and made things ready for the voyage across the Southern Ocean. They were ready to weigh anchor by 22 April, having spent only eight days at the Tavern of the Ocean—less than half the typical duration of a visit to the Cape.
T
he Batavia that sailed from Table Bay was not the ship that had left Amsterdam the previous October. Ten of her men were dead and now she creaked with fatigue and crawled with vermin. She was full of tired and squabbling passengers. But in this the Batavia was no different from the majority of East Indiamen that sought shelter at the Cape and could count herself more fortunate than many. What made Pelsaert’s flagship unique was not that there was unrest, but the exalted rank of those embroiled in the dispute. So long as the commandeur and the skipper of a retourschip acted together, rivalries and sexual jealousy among the crew could be dealt with easily enough. But once the two most senior men on board took issue with each other, there was no one to restrain them or their growing enmity.
Up on the quarterdeck, Jeronimus stood with his friend the skipper as Jacobsz nursed his wounded pride. “By God,” muttered the old sailor, glancing at the other vessels in the fleet, “if those ships were not lying there, I would treat that miserly dog so that he could not come out of his cabin for fourteen days. And I would quickly make myself master of the ship.”
This was dangerous talk. What the skipper threatened was mutiny, and if Pelsaert had heard what was being said he would have been within his rights to have Jacobsz thrown overboard or shot. But Jeronimus neither demurred nor went to tell the commandeur.
The two men stood in silence for a while, and the skipper’s words hung in the autumn air as Cornelisz considered them. At length the under-merchant spoke.
“And how would you manage that?” he asked.
4
Terra Australis Incognita
