by Mike Dash
The case against the skipper was thus reduced to a simple test of will, and to everyone’s frustration, Ariaen remained in prison as late as June 1631, the charges still unproven despite the belated application of torture. “Jacobsz,” Van Diemen noted in frustration, “skipper of the wrecked ship Batavia, is still imprisoned, although [he] has several times requested a relaxation and a return to the fatherland; on the strong indictment of having had the intention to run off with the ship [he] has been condemned to more acute examination.” In the meantime, the Councillor suggested, the Gentlemen XVII might wish to examine the papers pertaining to the case and “give an order in this matter.”
What happened to Ariaen when he was tortured again (for that is what Van Diemen’s comments meant) remains a mystery. No further reference to the skipper has been found in the records of the VOC, and, frustratingly, all the transcripts of his interrogation—which might have shed a good deal of light on events on the Batavia—have vanished, too. It seems unlikely that Jacobsz was released, and if he had been executed one might expect to find some reference to the fact in the record. More probably he died of injury or illness in his cell. The skipper had already survived two years in the malarial dungeons under Castle Batavia—an achievement equal in its own way to his voyage in the longboat—but it would be almost two years more before a reply could be expected from the Gentlemen XVII, and that was more than even he was likely to endure.
Zwaantie Hendricx, Creesje’s loose-moraled servant, likewise disappears from the records of Jan Company. The likelihood is that she, too, perished in the fortress, dying some time between December 1629, when she was definitely in custody, and June 1631, by which time Jacobsz was being held alone. Just possibly, however, she walked free for lack of evidence, to make her own way in the Indies.
If so, the girl would soon have found herself in an uncomfortable position. She had no employment; there was little demand for expensive European maids in a settlement supplied with abundant native labor; and her marriage prospects were far worse than those of Judick and Lucretia. With Ariaen locked up and likely to remain so, though, Zwaantie would have had little option but to wed; had she then remained in Batavia she, like every other emigrant, would have had a less than even chance of seeing the Netherlands again. Imprisoned, she could hardly have survived—but even free the odds are that she died in Java, a wife but not, perhaps, a much-changed woman.
Half a world away from the squalid dungeons of Castle Batavia, off one of the cramped and crowded streets that twisted their way through Haarlem’s poorer quarters, ran a narrow little alleyway called the Cornelissteeg. The houses there were small and poorly appointed, and the people who dwelled in them were mostly artisans—water carriers, carpenters, singers, and the like. It was to this wretched accommodation, far from the luxuries of the Grote Houtstraat, that Belijtgen Jacobsdr came to live after her husband sailed on the Batavia.
Jeronimus’s wife had fallen a long way. Only a few months earlier she had been a respectable and—to all appearances—prosperous member of Haarlem’s upper middle class. Now she had lost her home, her business, and her husband. VOC officers could have a portion of their wages paid to their next of kin, so Jacobsdr would not have starved; nevertheless, she would hardly have been human had she had not resented the abrupt change in her circumstances.
Matters were made worse by Heyltgen Jansdr. Belijtgen’s former wet nurse continued to harass her long after Jeronimus was gone. As late as the summer of 1630 Heyltgen and her husband, Moyses Starlingh, came down to the Cornelissteeg one afternoon while Belijtgen was out and began to hurl torrents of abuse at her front door in front of her astonished neighbors. In the course of this tirade, Heyltgen was heard screaming her familiar insults; Jeronimus’s wife, the nurse called out, was a pig and a whore riddled with syphilis, and if she dared to leave her home Heyltgen would “cut her face and trample on it.” Receiving no response from the empty house, the wet nurse and her husband returned that same evening. Belijtgen was still not home, and Moyses tried to break down her door, loudly announcing he would wait for her inside. According to the neighbors, whose testimonies were recorded the next day, Starlingh was in a violent mood, and they feared that he would loot the property if he got in.
Heyltgen’s tirade must imply that the old dispute over Cornelisz’s son had still not been resolved, though it was now almost 18 months since Jeronimus had buried the boy. Whether or not Belijtgen Jacobsdr had taken legal action over her dead child cannot be said for certain, since Haarlem’s judicial archives are very incomplete. The one trace of what may be the same dispute occurs in the city burgomasters’ records, which often concern themselves with the resolution of petty quarrels between members of the lower classes. The relevant memorial, issued on 6 July 1629, concerns a wet nurse and a mother—neither, unfortunately, is named—who were told to make their peace in a dispute over a child. Both women were bound over, and the nurse was ordered to pay to the mother seven shillings’ compensation. If the parties concerned were indeed Belijtgen and her tormentor, it must be assumed that the burgomasters’ attempts at arbitration had no lasting effect—and observed that the compensation paid seems minimal in the extraordinary circumstances. But such, perhaps, was the price of an infant’s life in the early seventeenth century.
What happened next remains unknown; the fracas in the Cornelissteeg is the last sign of Belijtgen’s life in Haarlem. Three weeks later, on 7 July 1630, news of the Batavia tragedy reached the Dutch Republic on the ship Wapen van Rotterdam,*52 and within days the details of the mutiny were circulating in pamphlets and printed laments. Cornelisz’s bloody role in the affair thus became notorious, and one can imagine that his wife found it impossible to remain in Haarlem.
Did Belijtgen return to wherever she called home? There is no way to know for certain. The meager remains of her unfortunate existence provide no resolution for her story; like her enigmatic husband, she lived and died in history’s penumbra—a shadow figure whose origins and motives remain unknown, and whose real character and hopes, and loves and fears, can now only be guessed at.
Upon the coral islets of the Abrolhos, all sign of the Batavia and her crew soon disappeared.
The wooden hulk of the retourschip, already battered almost beyond recognition by the sea, did not take long to vanish beneath the waves. Caught between the ceaseless pounding of the breakers and the reef, Pelsaert’s flagship disintegrated plank by plank until her upperworks had been reduced to so much flotsam and the remaining contents of the hold were scattered all across the ocean bed. Within a year or two, the only indication she had ever been there was the broken wreckage of her masts and spars, washed up on the rocky beaches of the archipelago.
The islands of the Abrolhos bore witness for a little longer to the Dutchmen who had lived and died there. In their frantic search for anything of value to the VOC, Pelsaert and his men had picked Batavia’s Graveyard almost clean of debris. But on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, a few scraps of sailcloth fluttered on the scrub, and the remains of the Defenders’ dwellings still testified to their stubborn refusal to surrender.
There were less tangible signs of human intrusion, too. Beneath the surface of the island, the freshwater lenses that had floated in the waterholes and saved the lives of Hayes’s men had been drained off by thirsty Dutchmen, leaving the water in a number of ancient wells so brackish it was all but undrinkable. The animal population had been substantially reduced, and several colonies of tammars and sea lions—which had survived in unchanging balance for several thousand generations—had been hunted almost to extinction during the Defenders’ three-month war with Cornelisz’s band.
Then there were the seven bodies on Seals’ Island. The dead mutineers had been left to dangle from the makeshift gallows that the Sardam’s carpenters had thrown up for them, and by the time the ropes—rotted by salt-laced gales of rain—finally sagged and snapped, the island birds would have all but picked the corpses clean. Before long the gallows would have toppled and
fallen too, leaving little more than piles of bones and wood to bleach and crumble slowly on the strand.
Across the deep-water passage between the islands, on the deserted and infertile skeleton of Batavia’s Graveyard itself, an altogether stranger change occurred. When the survivors of the wreck had landed, they had found the isle a barren place. Its sandy soil was too poor to support much life, and, scoured clean by the wind, it had long been all but devoid of vegetation. In the early 1630s, however, new patches of undergrowth sprang up among the coral outcrops, establishing themselves where the soil was deep and clear of birds’ nests and debris. For a decade or more, the northern portion of the island bloomed.
The explanation for this unexpected fertility lay a foot or two beneath the surface, where the bodies of Jeronimus’s victims rested in their shallow graves. As they decomposed, the remains of Hendrick Denys, Mayken Cardoes, the predikant’s family, and all the rest released their nutrients into the earth, providing freshly fertile ground for the spores of tea-tree scrub and dandelion, and the site of each burial pit was soon marked by a little wreath of stubborn greenery. Slowly, over many years, the plants consumed the cadavers, enveloping them in a dense black mass of probing roots. They fed off them until they were quite gone, and—in doing so—transformed death into life, and burial into rebirth.
Epilogue
On the Shores of the Great South-Land
“They shall be put ashore as scoundrels and death-deserving delinquents, in order to know once, for certain, what happens in this Land.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
WOUTER LOOS AND JAN PELGROM, the two mutineers whom Pelsaert had marooned on 16 November 1629, were never heard from again.
Their immediate prospects of survival were fair. Wittecarra Gully, at the southern end of Gantheaume Bay, is one of the few places on the Western Australian coast where water can always be found. In the southern winter a small stream flows down the gully into salt marshes along the shore, and though the water in the gully is brackish and unpalatable by the coast, and dries up altogether in the summer, a spring about two miles upstream would have provided a steady supply of fresh water—even during the dry season—for anyone prepared to venture inland. The more substantial Murchison River is only a few miles to the north, and though food is not abundant in the region, the availability of water attracted many Aborigines to the area. The local people belonged to the Nanda culture and were cultivators, growing yams and living in huts grouped into permanent villages. Had they had wished to, they could have helped Loos and Pelgrom and kept them alive.
The exact fate of the two mutineers would have been decided by their first and most important decision: whether to stay where they were, or take their boat and attempt to sail north along the coast. It would have been pointless for them to make for the Indies; the Dutch colonies were too far away to be reached in so small a craft, and in any case they would have been executed the moment they stepped ashore. Their only real alternative was to head for a point on the coast, at about latitude 24 degrees south, where the commandeur had seen men on the shore on 14 June. That spot was almost 200 miles away to the north. Neither Loos nor Pelgrom could navigate or were in any way accomplished sailors, and their boat (which Pelsaert described as a champan) would appear to have been one of the jerry-built small craft constructed on Batavia’s Graveyard from driftwood. An ocean voyage—had they attempted it—would almost certainly have killed them.
Had the mutineers remained where they were, however, they could not have avoided making contact with the local people for long. Pelsaert had foreseen this eventuality and had taken care to provide the men with beads and “some Nurembergen”—the cheap wooden toys that the German town of Nuremberg was famous for even then—“as well as knives, bells and small mirrors” made of iron and copper, which the Dutch knew, from their experience with the Bushmen of the Cape, were highly prized by “savages.” Loos and Pelgrom were advised not to be too ready with their limited supplies of gifts—“give to the Blacks only a few until they have grown familiar with them”—but to treat the local people with trust and consideration. “If they will then take you into their Villages,” the commandeur’s instructions went on,
“to their chief men, have courage to go with them willingly. Man’s luck is found in strange places; if God guards you, you will not suffer any damage from them, but on the contrary, because they have never seen any white men, they will offer all friendship.”
Whether or not the two mutineers took Pelsaert’s advice is a matter for conjecture. Loos, who had shown in the Abrolhos that he possessed both courage and the skill of leadership, was perhaps intelligent and mature enough to have stood some chance among the Nanda. The hotheaded Pelgrom, on the other hand, was younger and considerably less stable and may well have proved a liability. The two men had been marooned without weapons of any sort and would have been easy prey for the Aborigines, whom they would have needed in order to find food. Without the goodwill of the local people they would surely have died shortly after they were put ashore, either violently or of slow starvation.
The portents for friendly cooperation between Dutchmen and Aborigines were not good. A jacht named Duyfken, which was the first Dutch ship to land men in Australia—and probably the first Western vessel to sight the continent, so far as can be ascertained—had explored the east coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the summer of 1606 and lost half her crew to an attack by natives. Her successors, the Arnhem and the Pera of 1623, provoked open hostility among the people of the Cape York peninsula by repeatedly attempting to seize some of the local hunters and carry them off on board the ships. The Arnhem lost 10 men to a surprise attack during this reconnaissance, including her skipper and an assistant who was “torn to pieces” by the Aborigines.
The northern coast was so removed, both geographically and culturally, from the western seaboard that it is extremely unlikely that the Nanda had any direct knowledge of these earlier encounters, but the early history of mistrust and hostility between Dutch sailors and native Australians was such that Loos and Pelgrom were unlikely to receive a warm reception. The European tendency, which the two mutineers would almost certainly have shared, was to view the Aborigines as violent, primitive, and treacherous; the Australian view (at least in the northeast of the country, where early traditions survived long enough to be recorded) was that the whites were munpitch—mischief spirits associated with the bodily remains of the recently deceased. It would be hard to imagine a less promising basis for mutual trust.
Nevertheless, Pelsaert had given Loos and Pelgrom some hope of eventual salvation by clearly stating in their instructions that they should “look out keenly” between the months of April and July, “the time that the ships make the South-Land there” in the hope of rescue, and later Dutch ships were occasionally instructed to watch out for signs of the mutineers and to take them on board them if the men themselves desired it. In 1636 a certain Gerrit Thomasz Pool was given command of two jachten, the Cleen Amsterdam and the Wesel, and a commission to explore the whole known coast of Australia; his sailing instructions reminded him that “Francisco Pelsaert having AD 1629 put ashore two Dutch delinquents, who had in due form of justice been sentenced to forfeit their lives, you will grant passage to the said persons, if they should be alive to show themselves.” Pool was killed in New Guinea, however, long before he could reach the Western Australian coast, and although Abel Tasman—sent to circumnavigate the continent*53 in 1644—was also furnished with specific instructions regarding the wreck of the Batavia, the two mutineers, and the VOC’s missing chests of money, he too turned back before reaching the Abrolhos.
Tasman’s orders made it clear that the Company’s main interest in the Batavia mutineers was the hope that they would have acquired valuable information about the interior resources of the red continent; the old tales of Beach and its limitless reserves of gold had not yet been relegated to the realms of legend. It is interesting to speculate on what the great navigator might actual
ly have found had he ever reached the spot where the two men had been put ashore. Pelgrom and Loos would have been no more than 33 and 39 years old in 1644—assuming they had survived at all—and in 1697 the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh found a well-made clay hut, with sloping roofs, by Wittecarra spring. It had been built in quite a different style to those usually found in the area, and it has since been suggested (on no sure evidence) that it must have been built by Dutchmen. If that is the case, it was almost certainly constructed by the two Batavia mutineers, and a landing party seeking water might conceivably have encountered Cornelisz’s men.
In the event, no real attempt was ever made—by Jan Company or anyone else—to discover what had become of the two mutineers, but Loos and Pelgrom did not remain alone in Australia for long. During its 200-year history, the VOC lost 1 in 50 of its ships outward bound, and nearly 1 in 20 on the return voyage, a total of 246 vessels. At least 3 of these ships, and possibly as many as 8 or 10, were wrecked along the western coast. A minimum of 75 more Dutchmen, and perhaps as many as 200, are known to have been cast up on the South-Land as a result.
The first of these disasters occurred in 1656, when the Vergulde Draeck,*54 a retourschip from Amsterdam, ran aground on a reef three miles off the coast and about 50 miles north of the present-day city of Perth. Sixty-eight members of the crew reached land, and three men from a rescue ship were subsequently abandoned in the same area when they ventured into the bush in search of them and became lost. At least a few of these men probably survived for some time, for a variety of apparently Dutch artifacts—from ship’s planking to an incense urn with a Chinese dragon entwined around its stem—have turned up inland from the wreck site since the ship ran aground.
