Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  Like Cornelisz, Loos required the other mutineers to swear an oath of loyalty to him. This document, which was signed on 8 September, closely resembled the allegiances made to Jeronimus. At about the same time, a new ship’s council was elected. Nothing is known of its composition, but it was, in any case, entirely ineffectual, since Loos’s one real strategy was to continue the war against Wiebbe Hayes. He was encouraged in this by his men’s escalating complaints concerning rationing, but—since it was by now apparent that the Defenders were too strong and too well organized to be easily overrun—it is by no means clear exactly what Wouter hoped to gain by returning to the attack. The most likely explanation is that he planned to inflict sufficient damage to win concessions from the Defenders, particularly with regard to the supply of food and water. It is also possible that he hoped to raise the morale of his dwindling band by reminding them that they had a common enemy. In any case, Loos was determined to proceed. On Hayes’s Island, Bastiaensz was still trying to negotiate a truce—“I had made up a script,” he noted, “that they should have peace with each other, and that they [the mutineers] should not do any harm to the good ones.” But Wouter had no interest in such niceties. “They tore that in pieces,” Gijsbert wrote, “and have come at us.”

  The fourth attack on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island began at about 9 o’clock on the morning of 17 September and continued in a desultory fashion for about two hours, for the sides were not well matched. The committed mutineers by now were rather less than 20 strong, and the deaths of Zevanck, Pietersz, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen had deprived them of four of their best men. Of those who remained, only Loos and seven or eight other soldiers had much military experience. They were supported by a rather smaller number of gunners and sailors who were also useful fighting men, but the other active mutineers were either ill or little more than boys. The camp followers—another dozen or so men who had taken the oath of loyalty demanded by their new captain-general—had played no real part in events thus far, and some at least had signed under duress. Given the opportunity, some, if not all, of this last group might well defect to Wiebbe Hayes. They were certainly not trustworthy, and if they were included in the raiding party, they would all have to be watched. Some or all of them may in fact have been left behind on Batavia’s Graveyard.

  The Defenders, on the other hand, still numbered 46 or 47 fighting men. Half of them were soldiers and the rest were able-bodied sailors; they were better fed and rested, and they also had the advantage of the higher ground. In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Loos’s plan was to balance the odds by depending on his muskets. The mutineers had managed to drag two guns from the wreck, and each of them, properly handled, could fire one round a minute. By keeping the action at long range they might hope to pick off the Defenders one by one. Hayes’s men, it seems safe to assume, simply took cover, perhaps sheltering behind slabs of coral. Neither side dared engage the other at close quarters, and so the action sputtered on intermittently throughout the morning.

  By 11 o’clock the situation had begun to change. Four Defenders had been hit; three had severe flesh wounds, though only one, Jan Dircxsz, an 18-year-old soldier from Emden, had sustained a mortal injury. The mutineers, however, had suffered no losses at all, and it therefore seemed that Loos’s strategy was working. By keeping the action at long range, he slowly but surely had begun to even the odds against him. In a few more hours, with a little more application by his musketeers, he might hope to inflict more telling casualties; and if he did that, eventually the Defenders would surely have to break cover to attack him. When they did, the soldier thought, everything would come down to the matter of hand-to-hand combat, and his superior weapons might prevail. Some sort of resolution might be possible by midafternoon, and . . .

  It was then that Pelsaert and the rescue ship sailed over the horizon.

  8

  Condemned

  “The justice and vengeance of God made manifest.”

  GIJSBERT BASTIAENSZ

  PELSAERT STEERED THE SARDAM as close to the islands as he dared, tacking cautiously through the treacherous maze of shallows to the north. It was difficult work, and it was not until midday that the jacht came to anchor in a natural deep-water channel on the southeast side of the High Island, still two miles away from Wiebbe Hayes’s Island and about four from Batavia’s Graveyard. She was on the edge of further shallows there, and the commandeur could go no deeper into the archipelago.

  Pelsaert had arrived in the Abrolhos not knowing whether he would find the Batavia’s people alive or dead. The sight of smoke rising from the islands in the group had caused him to hope—as Cornelisz had once predicted—that some, if not all, of them might still be saved. As soon as the Sardam had dropped anchor, he had one of the ship’s boats loaded with supplies of bread and water and rowed for the nearest land, which happened to be the southwest corner of the High Island. It was not far away, and as the Sardam’s men strained at their oars, the commandeur examined the beaches and the interior of the island for any sign of life. There was none to be found but, even so, he leapt ashore as soon as the boat grounded in the shallows, still confident that survivors would be found. The oarsmen followed—and as they did so, Pelsaert glanced back out to sea and saw a wonderful sight. “A very small yawl with four Men” was heading toward him as swiftly as her crew could manage. The men in the boat were still too far away for the commandeur to determine who they were, but he could now at least anticipate that the Batavia’s story would turn out well.

  The sudden appearance of the jacht, coming as it did at the height of the climactic battle between the Defenders and the mutineers, had had a dramatic effect on the men fighting on both sides. For Wiebbe Hayes it seemed to be, quite literally, the product of divine intervention. Salvation had arrived when everything seemed lost, and he and his men greeted the ship’s arrival with frantic relief. For Loos and the other mutineers, Pelsaert’s return meant something altogether different: not life, but death; not rescue, but the certainty of retribution. All their plans had depended on dealing with Hayes’s men before the appearance of a rescue ship; now that strategy lay in ruins, and when the ship was seen they broke off the action almost at once and retired in some confusion to their camp. Hayes, meanwhile, ran for his own boats in order to warn the commandeur of what had happened in the archipelago.

  While Pelsaert tacked slowly through the shallows, the mutineers on Batavia’s Graveyard were debating what to do. Wouter Loos—who had never held the men in thrall as Jeronimus had—lacked the captain-general’s demonic singleness of purpose. Without the advantage of surprise, the fight had gone out of him. But other members of Cornelisz’s band, including Stone-Cutter Pietersz, Jan Hendricxsz, and Lucas Gellisz, were not yet ready to surrender. “Come on,” Jan Pelgrom urged, “won’t we now seize the jacht?” Loos demurred—“No, I have given up the idea,” he replied—but Pelgrom found plenty of support for his idea, and within minutes a group of heavily armed mutineers were tumbling into the most seaworthy of their boats and pulling as quickly as they could for the High Island.

  The Defenders and the mutineers raced to be the first to reach the Sardam. Wiebbe Hayes kept his skiffs on the north side of his island, safe from capture by the mutineers; to reach them he had to cross almost two miles of rough ground, thick with nettles and riddled with the burrows of nesting birds, and then row the best part of three miles from his mooring to the jacht. The mutineers’ boat splashing up from the south had an almost identical distance to travel. Neither party knew exactly where the other was, or who would be the first to find the jacht, and Pelsaert, on the High Island, was as yet unaware of either Jeronimus’s treachery or the danger he was in. The outcome of the mutiny itself thus hung in the balance.

  Wiebbe Hayes’s task was to find Pelsaert, persuade him to believe his undeniably amazing account of what had happened in the islands, and then warn the people in the Sardam before the murderers could surprise them. The mutineers’ one hope was to get aboard
the Sardam and attack before her crew realized they were in danger. Jeronimus had been quite right to predict that the rescue jacht would be only lightly manned, to leave room for large parties of survivors; she had left Java with a crew of only 26, and perhaps a quarter of those men were with Pelsaert in the boat. The remaining sailors, finding armed mutineers among them, might yet be overwhelmed; and if they were, Jeronimus’s gang would control the one means of escape from the Abrolhos. The Defenders would have to come to terms or be abandoned, and the mutineers might thus secure the freedom of their captain-general. As for Pelsaert—still standing on the beach trying to discern who was in the fast-approaching boat—his difficulty would lie in deciding whom he should believe.

  It was a while before the commandeur at last made out the identity of the people in the yawl. They came “rowing round the Northerly point,” he later recalled, “and one of them, a man named Wiebbe Hayes, sprang ashore and ran towards me, calling from afar: ‘Welcome, but go back on board immediately, for there is a party of scoundrels on the islands near the wreck, with two sloops, who have the intention to seize the jacht.’ ” The Defenders’ leader had just sufficient time to gasp out a brief summary of events in the archipelago before the commandeur, suddenly alert to the danger he was in, made off to warn the Sardam. As he jumped into his boat, Pelsaert ordered Hayes to bring Cornelisz to him, “bound”; then he pulled like fury for the jacht.

  Hayes and his men had won their race with the mutineers, but not by much. Pelsaert was still some distance from the Sardam when he “saw a sloop with people rowing come round the Southerly point of the High Island.” It was the mutineers’ boat, coming on with steady strokes, and the commandeur had barely enough time to scramble up the sides of the jacht and alert the crew before the sloop pulled alongside. One look at the 11 men on board—dressed in their ostentatious laken uniforms, dripping with gold and silver braid and crewing a vessel filled with swords and cutlasses—was enough to convince Pelsaert that Hayes’s story was true. At his command, the swivel guns on the Sardam’s poop were leveled at mutineers’ boat and men with pikes lined the deck. Thus reinforced, the commandeur felt ready to repel boarders. He hailed the boat, demanding: “Wherefore do you come aboard armed?”

  Even now, Jan Hendricxsz and the other cutthroats in the sloop were not quite ready to surrender. “They answered me that they would reply to that when they were on the ship,” Pelsaert recalled, but by now he was thoroughly alarmed and would not permit any such thing. A brief standoff ensued, the men in the boat refusing to lay down their arms and the Sardam’s men threatening to open fire, and it was only when it at last became apparent to the mutineers that their cause was hopeless that they threw their weapons overboard and clambered, unarmed, onto the jacht. Each man was seized the moment that he stepped on board, securely bound, and locked up in the forecastle.

  Pelsaert began the process of interrogation that same afternoon, at once anxious and appalled to discover the true extent of the disasters that had engulfed the archipelago. Most of his information came from “a certain Jan Hendricxsz from Bremen, soldier,” who immediately and freely confessed to having killed “17 to 20 people” on the orders of Jeronimus. Hendricxsz had been one of the first men to join the conspiracy on the Batavia, and he possessed an intimate knowledge of all Cornelisz’s stratagems and plans. Under questioning by the commandeur, the German mutineer soon revealed not only the terrible details of the murders and massacres in the Abrolhos, but the original plot to seize the ship, and the skipper’s role in it, which Pelsaert had long suspected but never had confirmed. Armed with this information, the commandeur then had the other mutineers brought before him, one by one, confronting each man with statements of his guilt:

  “We learned from their own confessions, and the testimony of all the living persons, that they have drowned, murdered and brought to death with all manner of cruelties, more than 120 persons, men, women and children as well, of whom the principal murderers amongst those still alive have been: Lenert Michielsz van Os, soldier, Mattys Beer of Munsterbergh, cadet,*45 Jan Hendricxsz of Bremen, soldier, Allert Janssen of Assendelft, gunner, Rutger Fredricx of Groningen, locksmith; Jan Pelgrom de Bye of Bommel, cabin servant, and Andries Jonas of Luyck, soldier, with their consorts.”

  Other names were also mentioned. Those of councillors David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and Jacob Pietersz cropped up several times in the course of the interrogations. Nevertheless, the evidence of Jan Hendricxsz and his fellow mutineers seemed conclusive on at least one point. Jeronimus Cornielsz had been the cause of all the trouble.

  Hayes brought Jeronimus aboard late that same afternoon. The captain-general arrived under close guard. Stripped of his men and all his power, he was reduced to something of a curiosity. Even now, however—disheveled, tied up, stinking of decomposing birds, with his red cloth finery in tatters—Cornelisz plainly retained something of his weirdly compelling aura, the hypnotic fascination that had bound the mutineers together and made men willing to kill for him. Nor had two weeks of plucking feathers in a limestone pit deprived him of his facile tongue, his agile mind, or his ingenuity. Francisco Pelsaert, a less clever and a much less complex man, hardly knew what to make of his former deputy. “I looked at him with great sorrow,” wrote the commandeur,

  “such a scoundrel, cause of so many disasters and of the shedding of human blood—and still he had the intention to go on . . . . I examined him in the presence of the [Sardam’s] council, and asked him why he allowed the devil to lead him so far astray from all human feeling, to do that which had never been so cruelly perpetrated among Christians, without any real hunger or need of thirst, but solely out of bloodthirstiness.

  “[Jeronimus] answered, that one should not blame him for what had happened, laying it on David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and others, who have been killed, that they had forced him and willed him to do it; that also one had to do a great deal to save oneself; denied that he had ever had the intention to help in the plan to seize the ship Batavia, and as to the idea of seizing any jacht that might come, he said Zevanck had proposed this, to which he had only consented on account of his own safety without meaning it. For, firstly, he believed that they would never be delivered; [and secondly] that skipper Ariaen intended to throw the commandeur overboard [from the longboat] . . . . In this manner he tried to talk himself clean, with his glib tongue telling the most palpable lies, making out that nowhere had he had a hand in it, often appealing to the [other mutineers], who would say the same thing.”

  Unable to penetrate this barrage of untruths for the time being, Pelsaert halted the interrogation at dusk. There were other things to do: salvaging the wreck and subduing the remaining mutineers, who were still on their island. Cornelisz was returned to his prison in the forecastle, and next morning, before dawn, Pelsaert took the Sardam’s boat to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, where he armed 10 of the Defenders with swords and muskets. At daybreak he sailed to Batavia’s Graveyard, “where the rest of the scoundrels were, in order to capture and secure them.” Half a dozen mutineers had stayed on the island, including Wouter Loos, Lenert van Os, and Mattys Beer; but when they saw a boatload of fully equipped soldiers disembarking on the beach, even these hardened men surrendered without a fight. Pelsaert had them securely bound and immediately began to search the island for the Company’s valuables, and in particular the casket of jewels he had landed on Traitors’ Island three and a half months earlier. He was pleasantly surprised to discover his hoard intact, down to and including the Great Cameo of Gaspar Boudaen—“these were all found,” he wrote later, “except a ring and a gold chain, and the ring has been recovered hereafter.” In the course of hunting for the valuables, the commandeur’s search parties also found fresh evidence of the mutiny in Jeronimus’s tent. From various bundles of papers they recovered copies of the oaths that the mutineers had sworn to Cornelisz and Loos and the promises that the women kept for common service had been forced to make. These and other incriminating documents we
re handed to Pelsaert.

  The commandeur must have encountered Lucretia Jans during this short stay on Batavia’s Graveyard, but he makes no mention of their meeting in his account of the mutiny. Creesje had spent the last two weeks sequestered with Wouter Loos and had been treated comparatively decently since Jeronimus’s capture, but having lived through shipwreck, extreme thirst, and repeated rape, she was a different woman from the lady Pelsaert had known aboard the Batavia. There must also have been other reunions at about this time—Jan Carstensz, one of Hayes’s men, with his wife Anneken Bosschieters; Claes Jansz the trumpeter with his Tryntgien; the predikant with his daughter Judick—but the awkwardness, and what was said, and how they explained themselves one to the other, are likewise passed over without comment in the journals; they can only be imagined.

  That evening, with the search complete, Pelsaert rowed over to the wreck. It was unusually calm, and the Sardam’s boat was able to approach the site without much danger. There was little enough to see:

  “We found that the ship was lying in many pieces, [and that] all above water had been washed away except a small piece of bulwark . . . . A piece of the front of the ship was broken off and thrown half on the shallow; there were also lying 2 Pieces of Cannon, one of brass and one of iron, fallen from the mounts.—By the foreship was lying also one side of the poop, broken off at the starboard port of the gunners’ room. Then there were several pieces of a greater or lesser size that had drifted apart to various places, so there did not look to be much hope of salvaging much of the money or the goods.”

  The upper-merchant nevertheless drew comfort from a statement made by Reyndert Hendricxsz, the Batavia’s steward and one of the unwilling mutineers. He had been employed as a fisherman and, venturing out to the wreck one day, had seen several of the money chests lying on the bottom. These, it seemed, should still be there, and Pelsaert resolved to search for them on the next calm day.