by Mike Dash
The identity of the fifth man to hang has never been certain. When the time came to pass sentence on the minor mutineers, Specx and his Council seem to have found themselves torn between the urge to punish all of Jeronimus’s men and the feeling that the youngest and most impressionable of them might deserve some mercy. Confronted with Rogier Decker, who was 17, and Abraham Gerritsz, the 15-year-old runaway whom Pelsaert had picked up in Sierra Leone, they ruled that only one should die. The manner in which the matter was decided was a torment in itself. The boys were to
“draw lots which of the two shall be punished with the Cord, and he who shall draw himself free from Death shall be severely flogged, with a Halter around his neck.”
Andries Liebent, Hans Frederick, and Olivier van Welderen also received new sentences. The three “delinquents” (Pelsaert’s word) were tied to a pole and flogged severely, after which they were put in chains and sent away from Batavia to endure three years of exile; Frederick—who had helped to kill three men—was made to wear a heavy wooden halter around his neck as well. In the circumstances none is likely to have survived their exile long enough to return a free man. The young sailor Cornelis Janssen was flogged and branded as a looter and a mutineer. Claes Harmansz, who was just 15, was flogged as well. Isbrant Isbrantsz, who was an officer and the one mutineer to consistently protest that he had acted under duress, was the only man treated with real leniency. His sentence was to stand, “with a halter round his neck,” to watch the execution of justice.
The worst punishment of all was reserved for Stone-Cutter Pietersz. Like Jeronimus himself, the lance corporal had taken little active part in the killing on Batavia’s Graveyard, though he had taken part in the massacre of the survivors on Seals’ Island and helped to organize the murder of the predikant’s family. He had, however, played an active part in plotting the mutiny on the Batavia, and as one of Cornelisz’s councillors he had helped to determine who should live and who should die. Because Hayes and Pelsaert had, between them, denied the authorities in Java the chance to punish David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen, much less Jeronimus himself, Pietersz was now made to pay for all their sins. For though he played a lesser role in the mutiny than any of those men, his guilt could hardly be denied. On the last day of January 1630, “Lieutenant-General” Pietersz was taken out to be “broken from under upwards, and the body put upon a Wheel.”
Breaking on the wheel, as it was generally known, was the most painful and barbaric method of execution practiced in the Dutch Republic and was, in effect, a form of crucifixion. In Pietersz’s case the condemned man, stripped to a pair of linen drawers, would have been led out to a scaffold on which had been assembled a huge cart wheel—still fitted with an axle—a bench, some ropes, and a thick iron bar. He would have been lashed, spread-eagled, to the bench and positioned so that the executioner had easy access to his limbs. Taking up the heavy bar, and with great concentration, this man would have proceeded to smash the bones in the prisoner’s arms and legs, starting with the fingers and the toes and working slowly inward. The aim was to completely pulverize each limb, so that when Pietersz was lifted from the bench onto the wheel, his upper arms were broken in so many places that they could be twisted and bent to follow the circumference of the wheel, while his legs were wrenched backward from the thighs, forced right around the outer rim, and tied off with the heels touching the back of the head. The latter operation was difficult to complete without allowing the broken femurs to protrude, but a skilled executioner took pride not only in ensuring that his victim remained fully conscious throughout the operation, but also in crushing his bones so thoroughly that the skin remained intact. As a further refinement, it was common for the condemned man’s ribs to be stoved in with several further blows, so that every breath became an agony.
Once the grisly operation had been concluded, Pietersz’s wheel would have been hoisted upright and the axle thrust deep into the ground close by the scaffold so that the Stone-Cutter’s final moments could be witnessed by the assembled crowd. Death—generally as the result of internal bleeding—might take hours; in a place such as Batavia, the dying man’s pain and distress would have been exacerbated by the cloying heat and the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that would have filled his eyes and mouth. The strongest men sometimes survived into a second day, and Pietersz, a brawny army veteran, may not have lapsed into unconsciousness until the early hours of February 1630.
The lance corporal thus lived to be the last of Jeronimus’s close confederates from the island, and, when he died, the mutiny on Batavia’s Graveyard in some respects died with him. It had cost the lives of two in every three of the people who had sailed from Texel 15 months earlier—at least 216 men, women, and children from a total complement of 332, which was a slightly higher proportion of deaths than that suffered by the passengers and crew of the Titanic almost three centuries later. Even today, the massacres on Houtman’s Abrolhos remain the bloodiest page in the history of white Australia.
It only remains to trace the fate of the survivors.
1629 proved to be a disappointing year for the Gentlemen XVII. In addition to the loss of the brand-new Batavia, with most of her cargo and two chests of silver valued at 44,788 guilders, another ship from Pelsaert’s flotilla, the ’s Gravenhage, had been disabled by bad weather in the Channel and required costly and extensive repairs. A third retourschip, the Wapen van Enkhuizen,*50 had blown up off the coast of Sierra Leone on 12 October when fire reached her powder magazine. The survivors—there were only 57 of them, many terribly wounded—were picked up by the Leyden, which herself lost her skipper and her upper-merchant in an attempt to fight the fire, plus another 170 men—more than half her crew—from disease on the outward voyage. The survivors were eventually forced to put in to the port of Sillebor, in Sumatra, for a month to nurse the sick, which greatly irritated the Gentlemen and cost the Leyden’s remaining officers all chance of earning bonuses for the speed of their voyage out.
Even so, none of these disasters put more than a dent in Jan Company’s profits for the year, and thanks to Hayes and Pelsaert and the Sardam’s men, even the loss of the Batavia could be viewed with some equanimity by Antonio van Diemen. “The 5th of this month returns here to anchor from the Southland the yacht Sardam,” Van Diemen wrote in December,
“bringing with them 74 souls from the wrecked ship Batavia together with 10 chests of Cash, amongst them the chest No.33 with nine sacks of ducats. Item, the Cash with Jewels to the value of 58,000 guilders and some wrought silverwork, three barrels of Cochineal*51 and other baggage . . . . Thanks be to the Almighty for this, we would not have expected it to come out so well.”
An attached list of the goods retrieved mentions 32 items, from money chests and cannon to a “pack of old linen.” Toward the bottom of the page, one of the minor pieces listed is “a small cask filled with vinegar,” of the sort that had cost the lives of the five men in the Sardam’s boat. Its value was so insignificant that Van Diemen did not bother to assess it.
Not many of those who outlived Jacop Pietersz and his fellow mutineers fared well.
One of the few who did was Johannes van der Beeck. Torrentius, in whose name Jeronimus had been accused of murdering some 115 men, women, and children, served only 2 years of his 20-year sentence for heresy. He was housed in relatively comfortable surroundings, granted a good ration of wine, and was permitted to receive and entertain visitors in his cell. His wife, Cornelia—from whom he had been separated for 14 years—was among those who called on him. She received permission to stay with him for up to two weeks at a time.
Torrentius still had some powerful friends, both in the Netherlands and overseas. They included the stadholder, or governor, of the Dutch Republic, Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange himself, who tried unsuccessfully to get the painter released soon after he was sentenced. Another of Van der Beeck’s admirers was King Charles I of England, who seems to have been untroubled by his heresies. In 1630 the King wrote to Holland to inquire
if Torrentius could be sent to England. Frederik Hendrik agreed to pardon him, very much against the wishes of the burgomasters of Haarlem, and Charles, in turn, promised that the painter “will not be allowed to exercise his godless tongue, but only his art.” The English ambassador, Sir Dudley Carleton, sent to bring Van der Beeck to the English court, formed a relatively favorable impression of the painter, portraying him as “neither so Angelical as his friends proclaim him, nor yet so Diabolical as his adversaries does publish him.” Torrentius’s pardon was signed on 11 July 1630, four days after the first ships of the Indies fleet reached Rotterdam with news of the Batavia disaster, and thus before his supposed role in inspiring Cornelisz’s mutiny became generally known. Whether his release would have been agreed had the ships arrived a few weeks earlier is an interesting question.
Van der Beeck was at the English court from 1630 until 1641 or 1642. He seems to have given—in the words of Horace Walpole—“more scandal than satisfaction.” He painted relatively little. Eventually, his royal pension cut off by the Civil War, he crept back into Holland incognito. He had run out of money, but his elderly mother helped to support him. The painter died in February 1644, either forgiven or forgotten by the Calvinist authorities, for the great heretic of Haarlem was buried within the walls of Amsterdam’s New Church, in consecrated ground.
Most of Torrentius’s paintings were confiscated and burned by the public hangman during and after his trial, and the few that he produced in England were soon lost. For many years it was thought that none of his works had survived, but just before the outbreak of the First World War a single masterpiece was rediscovered. It is a still life, showing a flagon and a jug flanking a wineglass and a bridle, which had once been owned by Charles I. The painting had disappeared after the royal collection was auctioned off in 1649, and somehow found its way back to the Netherlands. It was in the Dutch Republic around 1850, its provenance long since forgotten, and eventually came into the possession of a grocer named J. F. Sachse, of Enschede. It miraculously survived a great fire that razed the city in 1862 and was finally recovered and identified in 1913—by which time Sachse’s children were using it as the cover for a barrel of currants. After that it was restored. The painting now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Jacques Specx lived on to die, in 1652, as replete with wealth and honor as a lifetime in the spice trade could make a man. He returned to the Republic late in 1632, having been a quarter of a century in the East; since leaving home in 1607, aged 18, he had spent no more than 12 months in the Netherlands and devoted most of his energies to opening up the Dutch trade with Japan. On his way home he seized the uninhabited island of St. Helena in the Company’s name, and for a few years the isle became a popular refueling station for Dutch spice ships on their homeward voyage. Eventually, however, pirates and privateers learned that it was a rich hunting ground, and by the 1660s a sharp increase in the loss of ships had forced the VOC to abandon their new possession.
Home at last, Specx became a director of the Company—one of the Gentlemen XVII—in 1642 and held the post for the last nine years of his life. He died at the ripe age of 63; his voyages had made him rich, and he bequeathed his children a considerable inheritance, including several portraits of himself made by artists of the stature of Rembrandt van Rijn.
Specx’s half-Japanese daughter, Sara, whom Coen had flogged for her supposed immorality, fared less well. After her father’s return to Batavia she was nursed back to health, but because she was Eurasian he was nevertheless compelled to leave her behind in Java upon returning to the Netherlands. (Dutch law at this time forbade Eurasians to enter the Republic. The intent was to encourage men who had fathered families in the East to remain there, thus easing the VOC’s perpetual shortages of manpower.) The girl, who was 15 when this happened, remained in the East and seems to have been well cared for in her father’s absence. A few years later she made a good marriage to a predikant named Georgius Candidius. The groom was 20 years her senior, and the union endured for less than 12 months before Sara Specx died at the Dutch factory in Formosa, of unknown causes, around the end of 1636. She was only 19 years old.
Perhaps half a dozen active mutineers slipped through Pelsaert’s net before they could face charges for their crimes. Four of them—Dirck Gerritsz, Jan Jansz Purmer, Harman Nannings, and the bos’n’s mate—were sailors who seem to have been among the crew of the longboat. Three of them had taken part in the assault on Lucretia Jans, which had cost Jan Evertsz his life, but their names only emerged when the other members of their party were interrogated in the Abrolhos. By the time the commandeur returned to Java, the men had dispersed, and there is no record that any of them were ever brought to trial.
Luckier still was Jan Willemsz Selyns, the Batavia’s upper-cooper, who seems to have led something of a charmed life. He had taken part in the awful massacre of women and children on Seals’ Island on 18 July, when almost 20 people died, and was thus at least an accessory to murder. Then, on 5 August, he had come under suspicion as a potential defector to Wiebbe Hayes and only survived Jeronimus’s attempt to kill him when Wouter Loos personally intervened on his behalf. Later, he had been a member of the boat’s crew that set off to capture the Sardam and murder half her crew, and he had thus been held on board the jacht for further questioning. Many of those with whom he shared a cell—Jacop Pietersz and Daniel Cornelissen among them—were executed for their crimes, and all the other members of the group had at least been flogged and keelhauled, but so far as can be ascertained Selyns entirely escaped punishment. Perhaps he simply died of natural causes en route to Java, but Pelsaert’s journals make no mention of this, and it seems more likely that he somehow convinced the commandeur of his innocence.
The fate of a sixth man, Ryckert Woutersz, is still a greater mystery. The disgruntled gunner, whose loose tongue had revealed Jeronimus’s plans soon after the wreck, had certainly schemed to seize the ship and taken part in the attack on Creesje, but his name does not appear on the lists of suspects compiled by Pelsaert and he was never accused of any crime. At some point the gunner simply disappears, and it seems likely that it was Cornelisz who dealt with him, arranging for his throat to be slit one night in the Abrolhos as payment for his treachery. There is no proof of this, however, so perhaps Woutersz did somehow contrive to stay alive and found his way to Batavia with the other survivors of the under-merchant’s brief and bloody reign.
Francisco Pelsaert reverted briefly to his womanizing ways. Almost as soon as he had disembarked in Java—and certainly long before he finished his report to the Councillors of the Indies—the upper-merchant contrived to form a close liaison with a married woman named Pieterge, who was the wife of a certain Willem Jansz. Pieterge’s husband was away from Batavia, and the woman took full advantage until, in December 1629, she and two female friends were caught by the local predikant carousing in the “young, rash” company of de gentlemen Croock, Sambrix, and Pelsaert. Pieterge and Pelsaert received stern warnings from the cleric, and the whole affair was reported to Batavia’s Church Council. The preacher’s notes leave little doubt that the relationship was a sexual one, which would probably have continued for some time had it not come to the attention of the Church.
The warnings had the required effect, however, and the affair seems to have been over by the end of January 1630, when Pelsaert was summoned before the Council of the Indies to present his credentials. This interview must have caused him some concern. The Council might have been expected to deal harshly with a man who had not only failed to keep good order on his ship, but also abandoned several hundred people to Jeronimus’s mercies while he himself sailed to Java to fetch help. However, the prompt recovery of almost all of the Batavia’s trade goods and the capture of the under-merchant and his men stood to Pelsaert’s credit, and in the end the commandeur was neither greatly criticized nor heaped with praise. Instead he was dispatched to Sumatra as second-in-command of a military expedition to Jambi, a pepper port placed under
siege by the Portuguese. He spent the months of May and June 1630 helping to lift the blockade.
The Jambi adventure kept the commandeur occupied while he waited for the September monsoon winds that would finally take him back to Surat. The silver “toys” designed to please the Great Mogul and the cameo he had shipped to the East on behalf of Gaspar Boudaen were all destined for the court at Lahore, and Pelsaert must have been keenly aware that only the successful completion of this part of his mission was likely to restore him to full favor with the Gentlemen XVII. In the meantime, all he could do was put his own version of events in the Abrolhos in writing for his employers, the directors of the chamber of Amsterdam.
The Batavia journals, which contained a lengthy account of the events of the mutiny, reached Amsterdam in July 1630. The Gentlemen XVII read them and were unimpressed by the commandeur’s actions and behavior. By then, however, it was far too late for them to make their displeasure known. Pelsaert was already dying, most probably exhausted by the same illness that had all but killed him on board the Batavia during the journey from the Cape.
That fever, it appears, had never quite abated, and the commandeur had spent much of his time on board the Sardam in his bunk, “wholly ill and reduced to great wretchedness.” He must then have enjoyed a brief remission, during which he took part in the Jambi expedition, but by the middle of June his health had collapsed again, and he was struck down by a long and terminal illness that ended, the records of the Company attest, with his death some time before mid-September. He was then about 35 years old and had spent almost half his life in the service of the VOC.
Francisco Pelsaert thus survived his nemesis, Cornelisz, by no more than 11 months, and his career, which in the summer of 1628 had seemed to hold great promise, never recovered from the wrecking of his ship. In some respects, indeed, the commandeur was fortunate to have died at the moment that he did. The markets of India, which he had professed to understand better than any other Westerner, had changed fundamentally with the death of the Emperor Jahangir in 1627; the Great Mogul’s successor, Shah Jahan, did not share his taste for Western fripperies. The VOC came to the unwelcome realization that there was no longer any market for Pelsaert’s gold and silver toys. They had cost, it will be recalled, around 60,000 guilders, and so far as the Councillors of the Indies were concerned, blame for the debacle rested squarely with the late commandeur, who had pressed ahead with his commissions even after news of Jahangir’s death had reached him in the Netherlands.
