Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny

by Mike Dash

  The community within the walls was singularly one-dimensional. Virtually the entire white population worked directly for the VOC. Over the years, the Gentlemen XVII did make repeated efforts to entice emigrants from Europe to settle in the Indies as “free-burghers”—private citizens who would, it was hoped, provide the sort of infrastructure a real community required—but since the newcomers suffered appallingly from disease and were never allowed to profit from the trade in spices, they made up no more than a tiny fraction of the population. The few would-be settlers who did make the journey rarely stayed for long. Drained and depressed by the muggy pall that hung limply over the whole settlement, they found the town intolerable. Disease was rife, the canals swarmed with mosquitoes, and the midday heat was so intense that even Jan Company did not require its clerks to be at their desks at noon. They worked from 6 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 6 p.m. instead.

  The ruler of Batavia was the governor-general of the Indies. He was a senior merchant, sent out from the Dutch Republic by the VOC, who controlled—either directly or through local subordinates—not only the town itself, but all the Company’s factories and possessions from Arabia to the coast of Japan. The governor-general was charged not only with ensuring the profitability of the spice trade but with diplomatic and military affairs as well, and his powers within Batavia itself rivaled those of any eastern potentate. A Council of the Indies, made up of eight upper-merchants of wide experience, offered advice and played some part in the decision making, but it was rare for its members to stand up to a man on whom they themselves largely depended for advancement. Since it took a minimum of 18 months to send a request to the Netherlands and receive an answer, strong governors could and did defy even the Gentlemen XVII for years.

  There were only two significant restrictions on the power of an able governor. One was the law—Dutch statutes applied throughout the VOC’s possessions, and legal affairs were in the hands of the fiscaal, a lawyer sent out from the Netherlands. The other was the ever-changing size and strength of the Company’s military forces. Like every other European power active in the Eastern oceans, the Dutch were permanently short of ships and men, and each governor-general was aware that if his factories and forts ever were attacked—whether by native armies, the English, or the Portuguese—his forces were so meager that the loss of a single ship, or a company of soldiers, might determine the outcome of the battle. The soldiers and sailors of the VOC understood this, too, and were much harder to control than they had been in the Netherlands. Men fought, drank, and whored their way through five years’ service in the East with little fear of punishment, and they were capable of causing considerable disruption within Batavia itself.

  Only a governor of strong character could adapt to the debilitating conditions, deal with his own men and the local rulers, and still increase profits for the Gentlemen XVII; but in 1629, when the emaciated crew of Pelsaert’s longboat finally stumbled ashore in Java, it happened that just such a man had charge of all the VOC’s possessions in the East—a governor who was at once stern, unbending, humorless, God-fearing, honest, and austere. His name was Jan Coen, and he was the architect of the Dutch empire in the Indies.

  Coen was a native of the port of Hoorn, in the North Quarter of Holland, and had served the Company since 1607, standing out so starkly among the self-serving private traders who peopled the VOC hierarchy in the East that he was promoted very swiftly. He was an upper-merchant at the age of 25 and governor-general by 1619, when he was only 32. Unlike many of the merchants serving in the East, Coen believed in using military force to expand the VOC’s dominions and had no compunction in unleashing the Company’s armies against both native rulers and his European rivals. He had already all but driven the English East India Company out of the Spiceries, founding Batavia along the way, and conquered the Banda Islands,*36 securing the world’s supply of nutmeg for the Dutch. The Gentlemen XVII held him in the highest regard, even tolerating the blunt and caustic criticisms of their own tightfisted lack of ambition that were a feature of Coen’s frequent letters home.

  Nevertheless, as Pelsaert would have known, the governor’s unprecedented ruthlessness had caused the VOC all sorts of trouble in the last decade. The most notorious of several incidents had occurred in 1623 on the spice isle of Ambon, when the VOC wrongly suspected its English competitors of plotting an attack on the Dutch factory. Fifteen East India Company merchants were arrested, along with several Japanese mercenaries. The men were tortured until they confessed—one had flames played along the soles of his feet “until the fat dropt and put out the candles”—and then were executed. When news of the “Amboina massacre” reached London, the outcry that erupted was so violent that the Gentlemen XVII were forced to promise that Coen would see no further service in the East. Privately, however, the Company knew that it could not do without him. Within three years it had sent its most notorious servant back to the Indies, sailing under an assumed name, to begin a second term as governor-general.

  Coen had returned to Batavia in September 1627 to find the city under threat. The Bantamese, whose lands lay to the west, had fallen quiet, but to the east of the Dutch enclave lay the much larger empire of Mataram, “an oriental despotism of the traditional kind” whose sultan controlled three-quarters of Java. The VOC—with its gaze fixed firmly on the spice trade—had little interest in its neighbor, which was a purely agricultural society with a barter economy, but Mataram coveted Batavia. Its ruler, Agung, was a conqueror who dreamed of ruling huge tracts of the Indies. He had already subdued several smaller sultanates and taken the title “Susuhunan,” which means “He to whom everything is subject.” Now he began to plan to overthrow the Dutch.

  Within a year of Coen’s return, the Susuhunan attacked. In August 1628 Agung laid siege to Batavia with an army of more than 10,000 men, and the governor-general was compelled to order the evacuation of the southern and western quarters of the town. To deny Batavia to the enemy, Coen was forced to burn most of the settlement down and withdraw to the fortress, where he and his garrison endured a three-month siege that ended only when the Mataramese ran out of supplies. The siege was not lifted until 3 December, and the Dutch knew that Agung would almost certainly return the following August, when his next harvest had been gathered in. Thus, when Pelsaert’s emaciated, bone-weary sailors reached their destination—having no doubt sustained themselves during their ocean voyage with visions of feasting and debauchery in the taverns of the town—they found it lying in ruins and the inhabitants preoccupied with the prospects of a fresh attack.

  In these straitened circumstances, news that a brand-new retourschip and her cargo had gone aground on an unknown reef was a particularly devastating blow. The Batavia, her money chests, and Pelsaert’s trade goods were together worth at least 400,000 guilders, the equivalent of about $30 million today, and the 280 people abandoned in the Abrolhos could have helped to swell Coen’s depleted garrison. The merchants of Jan Company had always understood that a small proportion of their ships would inevitably be lost on voyages to and from the Netherlands, but, even so, the wrecking of the Batavia was a serious disaster.

  Pelsaert and Jacobsz must have appreciated this. Both men would have known that their future careers, and perhaps even their liberty, now rested in the hands of the most implacable man ever to serve the VOC—someone who “could never forget misdeeds even when they resulted from understandable human weakness, and whose heart was never softened by the sufferings of his opponents.” Only the previous month, Coen had vividly demonstrated his willingness to punish all those who transgressed his fearsome standards, no matter what their station, by flogging a girl named Sara Specx in front of the town hall. Sara was the half-Japanese daughter of the VOC fleet commander Jacques Specx, and her crime had been making love in the governor’s apartments.*37 Because she was only 12 years old, and her lover, who was the nephew of the town clerk of Amsterdam, no more than 15, even the fiscaal and the Councillors of the Indies had begged Coen to show compassion; b
ut though there was evidence to show that the intercourse had been consensual and the lovers wished to marry, the governor-general had remained unmoved. He had the boy beheaded and was only narrowly prevented from having Sara drowned. The skipper and the commandeur knew that they could expect no mercy from such a man.

  The longboat had arrived in Batavia on a Saturday. No work was permitted in the citadel on Sundays, but as soon as the Council of the Indies reconvened on 9 July the commandeur was summoned and asked to account for the loss of his ship. Pelsaert cannot have relished this audience with Coen, and he delivered what can only be described as a partial account of the whole episode, emphasizing that his navigators had repeatedly assured him that the ship was still well clear of land, and stressing his own determination to find water for the castaways. The decision to head for Java was presented as a regrettable necessity rather than a matter of self-preservation, and the commandeur was also careful to give the governor-general some cause for guarded optimism. The most precious trade goods had been landed in the archipelago, he reminded his interrogators, and even in the midst of the evacuation of the ship he had seen to it that buoys were placed at the wreck site to indicate the positions of valuables that had vanished overboard.

  Jan Coen, it seems, was not overly impressed by this account, but one thing did count in the Pelsaert’s favor. On Coen’s last voyage out to Java, the governor-general had learned all about the dangers of the South-Land’s coast; he had nearly run aground on it himself. “When we chanced upon the Land of the Eendracht,” Coen had written in a letter home,

  “we were less than two miles away from the breakers, which we noticed without being able to see land. If we had come to this spot during the night we would have run into a thousand dangers with the ship and crew. The ship’s position fixed by the mates was 900 to 1,000 miles away, so that land was not expected at all.”

  This near disaster had occurred in September 1627, and the governor must have recognized that there were clear parallels between his own narrow escape on board the Wapen van Hoorn*38 and the loss of the Batavia. The fierce currents of the Southern Ocean had swept both vessels much farther east than they had realized, to the confusion of their skippers, and it was only Coen’s good fortune in coming onto the South-Land during the day, rather than in the middle of the night, that had saved him. Since the governor-general was, for all his harsher qualities, at least scrupulously fair, he thus forbore—for the time being—from any criticism of the commandeur. Instead, he offered Pelsaert one chance to redeem himself.

  According to the records of the Council of the Indies,

  “It was put forward by His Hon. to the Council, since it was apparent that it was possible that some of the people and also some of the goods might be saved and salvaged, whether . . . they should be sent thither with a suitable jacht . . . and it was found good to despatch the Sardam, arrived here from the Fatherland on the 7th inst.; to provide the same with provisions, water, extra cables and anchors, and to send back thither Francisco Pelsart, commandeur of the wrecked ship Batavia . . . in order to dive for the goods, with the express order to return hither as soon as possible after having done everything for the saving of the people and the salvaging of the goods and cash.”

  Coen’s proposal was immediately endorsed by the other members of the council, Antonio van Diemen and Pieter Vlack. Directions were given for the Sardam to be rapidly unloaded and prepared for the voyage south, and while this was being done the governor-general wrote out his instructions to the commandeur.

  At first glance, the orders that Pelsaert eventually received were reasonably straightforward, but they carried undertones of threat and had been drafted carefully to ensure that the commandeur had no excuse for any second failure. The Sardam was to sail to the Abrolhos as rapidly as possible, it was explained, and once there she would save not only any survivors but also as much money and equipment as possible, “so that the Company may receive some recompense to balance its great loss.” Time was not a consideration; Pelsaert should be prepared to spend “three, four or more months” at the wreck site if need be. Even if he had to wait for the southern summer to arrive before completing salvage operations he should do so, establishing a temporary base on the South-Land itself if storms drove him from the islands.

  The commandeur was to be supplied with six divers, Coen went on—two Dutchmen and four men from Gujerat—and the Sardam’s crew was to be kept to a minimum, apparently in the hope that a large number of survivors might yet be found. In the event that no sign of the Batavia’s people could be found, the jacht was to sail on to the South-Land and scour the coast for traces of the passengers and crew. Above all, Pelsaert was cautioned, it was his duty “to salvage the cash, which is an obligation to the Company and on which your honour depends.” Failure to carry out these orders, it was definitely implied, would not be tolerated.

  Ariaen Jacobsz had not been present at the council meeting to hear the commandeur’s attempt to place the blame for the disaster on his shoulders. He may still have been recovering from the rigors of their recent voyage or may simply not have been asked to attend; at any rate, it would appear that once they had arrived in the Indies, Pelsaert kept his distance from both the skipper and the boatswain, Evertsz.

  The commandeur had evidently come to suspect both men of complicity in the assault on Creesje Jans long before the Batavia was wrecked. How he guessed they were involved we do not know for certain, but it certainly appears possible that Lucretia had recognized Evertsz as one of the masked men who had attacked her by his height or size, or strong North Quarter accent; and once that connection had been made, shipboard gossip, or something a little more definite than that, seems to have alerted Pelsaert to the role played by the skipper. Cornelis Dircxsz, the Alkmaar man who alone of those approached by the high boatswain had declined to have anything to do with the attack, is so carefully cleared of any involvement in the crime in the ship’s journals that it is at least possible it was he who eventually informed on his companions. Whatever Pelsaert’s motives and his evidence, however, it is clear that shortly after his arrival in Batavia he denounced both Jacobsz and Evertsz to his superiors. On 13 July Ariaen was suddenly arrested and thrown into the dungeons of Castle Batavia. Jan Evertsz followed him into the cells.

  No record of the high boatswain’s arrest survives, but it is evident the allegations that he faced were serious, and every attempt was made to extract the truth from him. Justice, in Evertsz’s case, would have meant interrogation at the hands of the fiscaal, Anthonij van den Heuvel, or one of his subordinates. Sitting or lying, probably tightly bound, in a chamber deep within the citadel, the high boatswain would have been confronted with Pelsaert’s charges and the evidence against him and asked to confirm whether they were true. Denials were rarely taken at face value, and if the case was deemed serious enough, Evertsz would undoubtedly have been tortured in an attempt to make him talk.

  This procedure was perfectly legal, though Dutch law did stipulate that a confession extracted under torture was not in itself enough to secure a conviction. Instead, the prisoner would be allowed to recover his senses and then asked to confirm the admissions he had just made. Only a “freewill confession” of this sort, made no more than a day after torture was applied, was acceptable as evidence of guilt. Naturally, however, the retraction of confessions made under duress was not the end of the matter and generally led only to the application of even harsher tortures, as Torrentius the painter had already discovered. Since the end result was almost inevitably the same, the Dutch insistence on freewill confession was thus something of a legal fig leaf.

  Few men were capable of resisting the attentions of the torturer for long, and the high boatswain of the Batavia was not one of them. Before long a full confession of his involvement in the attack on Creesje Jans came tumbling from him. Given all that Evertsz knew about the skipper’s role in events on board the ship, and particularly his plans for mutiny, it is tempting to wonder exactly what he said d
uring his interrogation at Castle Batavia. No evidence survives, but while it seems not at all unlikely that Jacobsz’s name came up in connection with the “very great insolences, yea, monstrous actions, that were committed on the mentioned ship,” the one surviving account—by Councillor Antonio van Diemen—confirms only that Evertsz was subsequently hung for the assault and makes absolutely no mention of Jeronimus Cornelisz. Whether this detail implies that the high boatswain was simply unaware of Jeronimus’s closeness to the skipper, that he contrived not to mention the planned mutiny in order to avoid still greater punishment, or that he was even more afraid of the under-merchant than he was of being tortured is unclear.

  More is known of the charges brought against the skipper. The minutes of the Council of the Indies observe that there were two of them:

  “Because Ariaen Jacobsz, skipper of the wrecked ship Batavia, is notorious through allowing himself to be blown away by pure neglect; and also because through his doings a gross evil and public assault has taken place on the same ship . . . it has been decided by His Hon. [Coen] and the Council to arrest the mentioned skipper and bring him to trial here in order that he may answer those accusations made to his detriment.”