Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  MAP: THE UNITED PROVINCES c. 1628

  MAP: ROUTE OF THE BATAVIA

  MAP: HOUTMAN’S ABROLHOS

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE

  Prologue: Morning Reef

  1. The Heretic

  2. Gentlemen XVII

  3. The Tavern of the Ocean

  4. Terra Australis Incognita

  5. The Tiger

  6. Longboat

  7. “Who Wants to Be Stabbed to Death?”

  8. Condemned

  9. “To Be Broken on the Wheel”

  Epilogue: On the Shores of the Great South-Land

  FOOTNOTES

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  DUTCH PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  OTHER BOOKS BY MIKE DASH

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  For Penny: my Creesje

  “I looked at him with great sorrow: such a scoundrel, cause of so many disasters and of the shedding of human blood. Besmirched in every way not only with abominable misdeeds but also with damnable heresy . . . and still he had the intention to go on.”

  FROM THE INTERROGATION OF JERONIMUS CORNELISZ

  BY FRANCISCO PELSAERT

  Preface

  ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN THIS BOOK IS INVENTED. It is closely based on contemporary sources, and direct quotes, where they appear, are drawn from those same documents. In the few places where I have drawn my own conclusions about the thoughts and actions of the Batavia’s passengers and crew, I have indicated the fact in the notes.

  Jeronimus Cornelisz and his companions sailed at a time when the use of surnames was still rare in the Dutch Republic, and when it was correspondingly common for names to be spelled and written in several different ways within a single document. I have taken advantage of this fact to avoid the possibility of confusion between two similarly named people, where there is contemporary authority for such usage. Thus Daniel Cornelisz, a mutineer, is referred to as “Cornelissen” throughout, to prevent him being confused with Jeronimus; and of the two Allert Janszes who were on the ship, one has become Allert Janssen.

  It is impossible to make accurate comparisons between prices in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic and today’s prices, but—roughly estimated—one guilder in 1629 bought the equivalent of $75 in 2001.

  Place names are spelled as they were in the seventeenth century, thus Leyden rather than Leiden, and Sardam rather than Zaandam.

  MIKE DASH, London, June 2001

  Prologue

  Morning Reef

  “The pack of all disasters has moulded together and fallen on my neck.”

  FRANCISCO PELSAERT

  THE MOON ROSE AT DUSK ON THE EVENING OF 3 JUNE 1629, sending soft grey shafts of light skittering across the giant swells of the eastern Indian Ocean. The beams darted their way from crest to crest, racing each other for mile after mile across the empty vastness of sea, until at last they caught and silhouetted something for an instant, a great black mass that wallowed in a trough between the waves.

  In another second, the shape surged onward, rushing up the shifting wall of water in its path until it breasted the next swell. As it did so, it reared up momentarily and the moon fixed it as it slapped back into the water and sent plumes of fine white spray into the air on either side.

  In the half-light of the southern winter, the black mass stood revealed as a substantial ship, steering north with the sting of a sharp wind at her back. She was built in the European style, squat and square-sailed, and she looked unbalanced, being considerably lower forward than she was aft. Her curved beak of a prow hung so close to the sea that it was frequently awash with a foam of dark water, but from there her decks curved sharply up like some massive wooden scimitar, rising so steeply that she towered almost 40 feet out of the water at the stern. As the ship came on, the moon was bright enough to pick out some of the larger details along the hull: her figurehead (a wooden lion springing upward), a tangled mass of rigging, the giant iron anchors lashed upside down along her sides. Her bows were blunt, and both the broadness of her beam and the fullness of her draught marked her as a merchant vessel.

  Although the moon was bright that evening, there was too little light for the ship to be identified by the flags that writhed and snapped from all three of her masts, and there was little sign of activity on deck. The gunports had all been closed, and not even the quick glint of a lamp or two, shining through chinks in the hatches, hinted at life within. But an enormous lantern, five feet tall, hung over the stern, and its yellow glow illuminated the richly decorated woodwork beneath just well enough for a keen eye to pick out painted details that revealed the great ship’s name and her home port.

  She was the East Indiaman Batavia, seven months out of Amsterdam on her maiden voyage and still some 30 days’ sailing from her destination, the Dutch trading settlements on the island of Java. Behind her, trailing in the phosphorescence of her wake, lay 13,000 miles of sea. Ahead were another 1,800 miles of uncharted ocean that had, by the end of the third decade of the seventeenth century, been crossed by only a handful of European vessels. There was rumor and speculation aplenty, among the geographers of England, the Netherlands, and Spain, about what might lie over the horizon in the immense blank that stretched south on their globes from the known waters of the Indies, but little information and no certain knowledge. The few charts of this unknown region that the Batavia carried were fragmentary in the extreme, and all but useless as navigational aids. So she sailed on blind into the gathering night, trusting to God and the skipper as the hourglass trickled away the minutes to midnight and the change of watch.

  The ship had been brand-new when she left the Netherlands, but she was weathered now. Her upperworks, which had been painted pale green with embel-lishments in red and gold, were chipped and worn and scoured by sea salt. Her bottom, which had once been smooth and clean, was now festooned with so many barnacles and weeds that their drag slowed her progress north. And her hull, built though it was from oak, had been subjected to every conceivable extreme of temperature, so that it now shuddered as the ship rolled in the swell. First the Batavia’s timbers had swollen in the northern winter, for she had left Amsterdam late the previous October when the northern seas were already cold and stormy. Then they had been shriveled by the sun as the ship sailed along the fever coasts of Africa, swung west on passing Sierra Leone, and crossed the equator headed for Brazil. Off the coast of South America she had at last turned east, picking up a current that carried her to the Cape of Good Hope and then fierce easterlies that took her through the Roaring Forties and the Southern Ocean, where it was winter once again and perpetual gales hurried her onward, between the barren little islets of St. Paul and Amsterdam and into the unknown waters to the east.

  At least it was warmer now, and the storms had abated as the Batavia headed north after more than seven long months at sea. But the endless discomforts of the voyage had if anything grown worse, and outweighed the slow improvement in the weather. The fresh food was long gone, the water was alive with worms, and below deck the ship herself stank of urine, unwashed bodies, and stale breath. Worst of all, in its own way, was the plodding monotony of the endless days at sea, which ate away the spirit of the passengers and undermined the efficiency of the crew.

  At 12 the watch changed. The new watch, the midnight watch, was always acknowledged to be the most difficult and dangerous of all. Working conditions were at their worst, and the alertness of the men could not always be taken for granted. For these reasons it was customary for the skipper himself to be on deck by night, and as the last grains of sand slid through the glass, a small doorway opened on one of the upper decks and he
came up.

  The master of a Dutch East Indiaman was a man who enjoyed almost unlimited power in his small kingdom. He commanded a ship that had cost 100,000 guilders to build and contained a cargo that, in the Indies trade, was worth many times more. He was charged with the safe navigation of his vessel and responsible for the lives of all the hundreds of souls under his command. But, on the Batavia as on every other Dutch East Indiamen, the skipper was also the subordinate of an officer who typically had no experience of the sea and little understanding of how to manage a ship.

  This man was the upper-merchant, or supercargo. He was, as his title implied, a commercial agent who bore the responsibility of ensuring that the voyage was a profitable one for his own masters, the directors of the Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie—the United East India Company—which owned the ship. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the VOC was not only the most important organization, and one of the largest employers, in the United Provinces of the Netherlands; it was also the wealthiest and most powerful company on Earth. It had become wealthy and powerful by putting trade and profit ahead of every other consideration. Thus the supercargo and his deputy, the under-merchant, had the authority to order the skipper to make sail, or stay at anchor in some flyblown port until the holds were full, even if death and disease were striking down the crew.

  The master of a Dutch East Indiaman was therefore in rather an unusual position. He was expected to combine the powers of seamanship and leadership that have always been demanded of any skipper with a degree of tact and even submissiveness that did not often come easily to men hardened by many years at sea. He had command of his ship from day to day, it is true, but he might at any moment be given an order he would be expected to obey. He could set a course but did not decide where his ship was heading. In port, he had very little power at all.

  The skipper of the Batavia was a tough old seaman with considerable experience of the Indies trade, a man named Ariaen Jacobsz.*1 He came from Durgerdam, a fishing village just a mile or two northeast of Amsterdam, and he had been a servant of the VOC for two decades or more. The upper-merchant, who was called Francisco Pelsaert, was in many respects Jacobsz’s opposite—not only in wealth and education, which was to be expected in this period, but in origin as well. For one thing, Pelsaert was no Dutchman; he came from Antwerp in the Southern Netherlands, the great rival of Amsterdam. Moreover, he had been born into a Catholic family at a time when the VOC required its officers to be Protestant; he lacked Jacobsz’s powers of leadership; and despite long service in the Indies, he was as indecisive as the skipper was self-confident. The two men were not friends.

  As for Ariaen Jacobsz, he was a veteran of several voyages to the East and probably in his middle forties, which would have made him one of the oldest men on board. That he was a superb sailor is beyond doubt; he had already skippered another large VOC merchantman with some success, and the East India Company was not in the habit of trusting its newest ships to indifferent officers. But the records of his service show that Jacobsz was also choleric, quick-tempered, and sensitive to any slight; that he sometimes drank to excess; and that he was a lecher who was not above imposing his attentions on the female passengers whom he carried in his ships.

  These, then, were the men charged with safeguarding the Batavia in the early hours of 4 June 1629. It was not a responsibility that weighed heavily on the skipper. For 211 days at sea, watch had followed watch with scarcely a noteworthy incident. The conditions on this night were good; the wind was blowing in gusts from the southwest, and with no sign of any storm or squall the weather was almost perfect for sailing. The ship was sound, and the noon position that Jacobsz had computed the previous day put the Batavia 600 miles distant from any known land. There seemed no need for particular vigilance from the men on watch, and since there was little or no real work to be done, some at least were able to talk and rest. Jacobsz himself stood gazing out to sea from a vantage point on the upper deck. A lookout watched beside him, and the steersman was stationed just below the skipper’s post.

  It was at some time after 3 a.m., when the alertness of the crew was at its lowest ebb, that the lookout, Hans Bosschieter, first suspected that all was not well. From his position high in the stern, the sailor noticed what appeared to be white water dead ahead. Peering into the night, Bosschieter thought he could make out a mass of spray, as though surf was breaking on an unseen reef. He turned to the skipper for confirmation, but Jacobsz disagreed. He insisted that the thin white line on the horizon was nothing more than moonbeams dancing on the waves. The skipper trusted to his own judgment, and he held the Batavia’s course, sailing on with all her canvas set.

  When the ship struck, she therefore did so at full speed.

  With a tremendous crash, the Batavia impaled herself on the half-hidden reef that had been lying in her path. In the first second of impact an outcrop of coral 15 feet beneath the surface tore the rudder half away; then, a moment later, the ship’s bow hit the main body of the reef. Massive though she was, Batavia’s forward momentum brought her lurching out of the water, and her foreparts ground their way over the first few feet of the obstacle in a roar of shattered rock and splintered wood. The whole ship howled as shards of coral gouged their way along her sides, and her hull trembled from the blow.

  Up on deck, Jacobsz and Bosschieter and the other men of the midnight watch were flung to the left and sent staggering against the Batavia’s sides and railings as the ship smashed into the reef. Down below, in the dark and crowded living spaces, the rest of the ship’s passengers and crew, another 270 people in all, were tipped from their hammocks and sleeping mats onto the deck. Lamps and barrels, crockery and ropes torn from their fastenings rained down on their heads, and in an instant the ordered, sleeping ship became a pitch-black pandemonium.

  It took only a second or two for the Batavia to shudder to a halt. The coral cradle that the ship had torn out of the reef forced her stern down into the water and twisted her hull at an unnatural angle, like a human body broken in a fall. The noise of the initial collision rolled away into the darkness, to be replaced by the roar of breakers striking the hull and shouts of fear and panic from below.

  The upper-merchant was the first on deck. Pelsaert had been lying half-asleep in his cabin in the stern, only a few feet from the spot where Jacobsz and Bosschieter had been standing, and the impact of the collision had thrown him out of bed. Picking himself up off the cabin floor, he hurried up, still clad in his nightclothes, to discover what had happened.

  He found the ship in chaos. The Batavia had taken on a list to port and her timbers were shaking under the repeated pounding of the waves, which piled up under her stern and kept her bottom grating ominously against the coral. A cold veil of sea spray—thrown up by the impact of the surf against the hull—hung in the air all round the ship, and wind whipped the spume across the decks and into the faces of the half-naked men and women who now began to swarm up through the hatches from below, soaking and half-blinding them as they emerged.

  Pelsaert fought his way onto the quarterdeck. The skipper was still there, yelling orders to the crew. Even the upper-merchant, with his limited knowledge of the sea, could tell immediately that the situation was serious. “What have you done,” he screamed to Jacobsz over the general din, “that through your reckless carelessness you have run this noose around our necks?”

  The Batavia’s position was indeed desperate. Not only was the ship stuck fast on the reef; her 10 great sails still billowed from the yards, pinning her ever more firmly to the coral. The timbers of the bow had been crushed in the collision, and though there were as yet no serious leaks below, it seemed from the groaning of the hull that her seams might burst at any moment. Worst of all, they were lost. The Batavia—at least in Jacobsz’s opinion—was nowhere near any known shoal or coast. None of the other officers had had cause to question the skipper’s estimate of their position. So no one had the least idea of where they were, what they had struck, or t
he nature and extent of the shallows they had blundered into.

  The blustery southwesterly was whipping up the seas around them and the moon had almost set, but they set to work to try to save the ship. The most urgent need was to reduce the stress on the hull. Seamen were sent clambering up the masts to furl the Batavia’s 8,900 square feet of canvas, while down on the gun deck the ship’s high boatswain*2 and his men ran back and forth, urging the rest of the crew to lighten the ship by throwing overboard almost anything that could be moved. They carried tarred rope “starters” to lash the back of any man who shirked his duty, but there was little need to use them. Every sailor on the ship knew that without this urgent action he might not live to see daylight.

  The Batavia’s gunners seized axes and swung at the cables that lashed their cannons to the deck. Freed from their constraints, the massive bronze and iron pieces—weighing around 2,200 pounds each—were maneuvered out through the ports and into the sea, lightening the ship by up to 30 tons. A rain of boxes, rope, and other gear from the main deck followed the guns. While this was happening, another group of sailors took the smallest of the Batavia’s eight anchors and secured it to a good length of cable. When morning came, the anchor would be run out from the stern into deeper water and the cable attached to a capstan in the hope that the ship could be hauled backward off the reef.

  By now it was nearly dawn. The wind scoured the decks with ever-greater savagery, and it began to pour with rain. Up on the poop, Pelsaert called for the sounding lead, a slim cylinder of metal on a long line used to determine the depth of the water around a ship. As quickly as he could, the leadsman sounded all around the ship, finding no more than 12 feet of water around the bows and a maximum depth of 18 feet at the stern, only fractionally more than an East Indiaman’s normal draught of 16 1/2 feet.

  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.