Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  There can be little doubt that this second failure, coming so soon after the loss of the Batavia, would have put an end to Pelsaert’s career. As it was, the high officials of the Company in Java—to whom the thankless task of finding buyers for the trade goods fell—complained bitterly about the impossibility of getting a good price for them. The plate, which the commandeur had confidently predicted would yield a 50 percent profit, was eventually disposed of in India—after six months’ fruitless haggling—for a “vile price” in 1632, but no amount of effort could persuade the Moguls to show any interest in Gaspar Boudaen’s Roman cameo, the fabulous jewel that Jeronimus had displayed to seduce the mutineers with dreams of unimagined luxury. It had accompanied Pelsaert’s toys to India, but no buyer could be found, and by 1633 it was in Batavia again. After years of being peddled unsuccessfully in Asia, it was put up for auction in Amsterdam in 1765. In 1823 the jewel was purchased by King Willem I for 5,500 guilders. It can now be seen in the royal coin collection in Leiden.

  While all this was going on, the remnants of Pelsaert’s fragile reputation had finally been destroyed by the revelation that the commandeur had been deeply involved in illegal private trade. Soon after his death, a search of Pelsaert’s baggage had turned up a variety of jewels and other goods valued at almost 13,500 guilders. These, the Company suspected, were to be sold for private profit, which was strictly forbidden, and Pelsaert no doubt expected to receive a commission for his part in the transactions. Upon investigation it emerged that a number of the items—including a second agate cameo, this one brand-new and engraved with a likeness of the Great Mogul—belonged to Gaspar Boudaen, who was eventually compelled to appear before the Gentlemen XVII of Amsterdam to beg, unsuccessfully, for their return. Others were the property of a second merchant, Johannes Dobbelworst of Amsterdam. All these goods were confiscated by the VOC.

  Pelsaert’s early death thus cost his family most of the fortune he had labored to amass. Barbara van Ganderheyden, the commandeur’s elderly mother and the chief beneficiary of his will, did eventually receive his outstanding salary, together with the sum of 771 guilders—the value of her son’s personal possessions. The Company, however, banked the 10,500 guilders it earned from the sale of the confiscated jewels, and although Van Ganderheyden was eventually promised compensation amounting to 3,800 guilders, the VOC made it clear that this amount would only be paid in full and final settlement of all the claims the Pelsaert family might have against it.

  Even then, the payment took forever to come through. Van Ganderheyden applied for her money in 1635, but it was evidently not forthcoming, for she repeated the request in 1638. Pelsaert’s mother was dead by the end of the latter year, probably aged somewhere in her middle sixties. It seems probable that she never saw any of the money her son had worked so hard for.

  Wiebbe Hayes, whom Pelsaert had promoted to the rank of sergeant at a salary of 18 guilders a month, received further recognition and reward upon his arrival in Batavia.

  He was commissioned as an officer in the Company’s army and made a standard-bearer. It was an astonishing promotion for a man who had left Amsterdam as a common soldier, but certainly no less than he deserved. As a standard-bearer, Hayes’s salary was increased again, to 40 guilders a month—roughly equivalent to that previously enjoyed by Jeronimus Cornelisz—and he was promised the chance of further promotion “according to opportunity and merit.”

  The Defenders were rewarded, too. All Hayes’s common soldiers became cadets, with a salary of 10 guilders a month—a gesture that was not quite as generous as it sounds, since they already earned 8 or 9 guilders a month as privates. His sailors had their pay increased to the same figure. In addition, the Council of the Indies awarded all those who had “shown themselves faithful and piously resisted evil” in the Abrolhos an additional gratuity of two months’ wage, a bonus worth somewhere between 10 and 20 guilders a man. The two dozen sailors of the Sardam, who had helped Pelsaert to put down the mutiny, were given 100 pieces of eight (worth about 240 guilders in total) to share among themselves.

  Hayes himself was not heard from again after landing in Batavia. There is no trace of him in the records of his hometown, Winschoten, but the archives there are so incomplete it cannot be said with any certainty whether he lived to return there. Perhaps he moved elsewhere and married, or took up residence in a crowded town such as Amsterdam, which he could now certainly afford. It is equally possible, however, that Jeronimus’s captor died somewhere in the Indies, perhaps in battle, but more likely manning an outpost on some distant island, of some unknown tropical disease.

  Toward the end of December 1629, Gijsbert Bastiaensz sat down to write a letter to his family at home. Remarkably, his narrative of the mutiny—rambling and almost incoherent in places, and hurriedly composed to catch the fleet returning to the Dutch Republic—survived to become the only independent account of events on Batavia’s Graveyard. It shows that the predikant still far from recovered from his tribulations in the archipelago (“we have just come out of such a sorrow that the mind is still a little confused,” he wrote) and seeking consolation in religion. “Having yielded myself to the providence of the Lord, who tries his children for his benefit,” Bastiaensz concluded, “[I] through the Grace of God have gained some strength and power, for I could hardly stand on account of weakness.”

  As it happened, the predikant’s trials were not yet over. His role in the Abrolhos incident had come to the attention of Jacques Specx and the Council of Justice at Batavia, who wanted to know not only whether he had done all he could to oppose Jeronimus and his godless henchmen, but exactly how a minister of the Reformed Church had come to swear an oath of allegiance to a heretic. All the papers relating to Bastiaensz’s actions were turned over to the public prosecutor, who spent almost four months looking into the case, and it was not until the spring of 1630 that the predikant was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Batavian Church Council. Even then, the governor-general remained suspicious; between 18 and 22 April, he clashed on three separate occasions with the church authorities over their desire to proclaim Bastiaensz’s innocence from the pulpit. Specx plainly thought the predikant had displayed fatal weakness in the Abrolhos. Had a better man been assigned to the Batavia, he told the leaders of the Church Council, “things might not have gone the way they did.”

  So Bastiaensz was called to account for his equivocal behavior on Batavia’s Graveyard and emerged with his reputation barely intact. The Church Council’s support at least meant that he could now preach anywhere in the lands under its jurisdiction, and it only remained to find him a suitable church. There was some talk of sending him to Surat, but it came to nothing, and it was only after a long while in Batavia that Bastiaensz was dispatched to the remote Banda Islands to minister to the troops guarding the world’s supply of nutmeg. The predikant remained in Java long enough to complete two years’ mourning for his dead wife and marry, in July 1631, Maria Cnijf, the widow of the Bailiff of Batavia. Shortly thereafter he departed for the Bandas, where he survived for at most 18 months before being struck down and killed by dysentery in the spring of 1633.

  Gijsbert Bastiaensz, who had experienced so much on Houtman’s Abrolhos, now lies buried in an unknown grave on another long-forgotten island. News of his death was not forwarded to Batavia until the summer of 1634. Plainly it was not regarded as an event of any great significance.

  Of the handful of people from Batavia’s Graveyard who did live to see the Dutch Republic once again, Judick Gijsbertsdr suffered more than most.

  The predikant’s one surviving child had sailed on the Batavia as the eldest daughter of a family of nine. She arrived in Java a little more than a year later with only her father for company, quite destitute, and having survived scurvy and shipwreck, the brutal murder of her mother, two sisters, and four brothers, and two months as the “fianceé” of Coenraat van Huyssen. She was one month shy of her 22nd birthday, and her troubles were far from over.

  Judick’s imm
ediate concern would have been her precarious financial position. Her father’s investigation by the Church Council of Batavia kept him from working for several months after their arrival, and since the family had lost almost all of their possessions in the wreck, Bastiaensz and his daughter probably found it hard to make ends meet. Judick would have found it expedient to marry, and though her father’s poverty and her own loss of virginity might have rendered her an unattractive prospect in the United Provinces, the marriage markets of the Far East worked quite differently. White women were a rarity in Java, and pretty, single European girls were rarer still. The merchants and soldiers of the town coveted new arrivals “like roasted pears,” and the predikant’s daughter would have had no shortage of suitors.

  Sadly, good fortune eluded her even then. Within a few weeks of her arrival Judick had met and married a certain Pieter van der Hoeven—whose profession is not recorded—and so, she must have hoped, secured her future; but he died within three months of their wedding day, adding widowhood to her recent tribulations. She completed a full year’s mourning before marrying again, this time to Helmich Helmichius of Utrecht, whom she accompanied to the Spice Island of Ambon. Judick’s new husband—a predikant of absolutely no distinction—was probably an acquaintance of her father’s. This time the marriage lasted for a while, but in 1634 the bloody flux struck down Helmichius, as it had claimed Gijsbert Bastiaensz the year before, leaving the girl orphaned and twice-widowed.

  Even the VOC was moved by this new misfortune, and on the orders of the Council of the Indies Judick received 600 guilders to compensate her for her widowhood and general suffering. This substantial payment—the equivalent of perhaps $48,000 today—enabled her to return to Dordrecht with her second husband’s estate still intact. She was back in her hometown by October 1635, when, aged 27 and in robust health, she made a will naming two uncles and an aunt her “universal heirs.” From this it would appear that neither Judick’s relationship with Coenraat van Huyssen nor her two marriages had produced surviving issue. The will does, however, show that she was at last comfortably off. She left in excess of a thousand guilders to be distributed to her relatives, the poor committee of the Reformed Church of Dordrecht, and a religious institution in the town.

  There is no record of Judick Gijsbertsdr’s death in the archives of Dordrecht. She may well have married for a third time and moved away from her hometown or been caught in the great epidemic of bubonic plague that swept through the city in 1636, throwing normal recordkeeping into temporary disarray. Without further clues it is impossible to say.

  Creesje Jans, who had traveled 15,000 miles to rejoin her husband, reached Batavia at last only to discover he was dead. Having survived so much herself, she now found herself alone in a ruined town where she had no business and few friends.

  Her husband, Boudewijn van der Mijlen—it will be recalled—had been sent in September 1627 to Arakan, a Burmese river port, to purchase slaves for the Dutch settlements in Java. He had orders to remain there indefinitely, and there is no record that he ever did return to Batavia; certainly he was dead by July 1629, when “Lucretia Jans of Amsterdam” is mentioned as his next of kin in the records of the town. He had been in his late twenties, and Creesje had just turned 28 when she discovered she had been widowed.

  The woman capable of arousing enormous passion in suitors as diverse as Jeronimus, Ariaen Jacobsz, and Francisco Pelsaert thus found herself without a man. Life in the seventeenth century was harsh, and it was rare to reach maturity without losing a father or a mother, a sibling, or a spouse. Creesje Jans had nevertheless endured far more than was usual even in that age, and it seems inconceivable that she would not have been profoundly marked by her experiences and loss. Still, she had unusual courage and strength of spirit, and she evidently remained a fine prospective wife, for in October 1630 she married a certain Jacob Cornelisz Cuick. The couple lived on in Batavia until about 1635—probably the time it took for Cuick to see out his contract with the VOC—and then returned together to the Netherlands, where they were both still alive in 1641.

  Creesje’s motives for remaining in Batavia and remarrying can only now be guessed at. Unlike Judick Gijsbertsdr, she had money—her own and that of her first husband, whose arrears of pay, in a remote outpost such as Arakan, may well have totaled several hundred guilders. She was still beautiful, had assets, and could certainly have contracted a good marriage with a senior Company official. The man she had made her new husband was, however, a soldier, and a mere sergeant at that. He had fought during the Susuhunan’s siege but lacked the social status and the prospects Van der Mijlen had enjoyed. Creesje’s choice therefore requires some explanation.

  The answer appears to lie in the church records of Cuick’s hometown, Leyden, where Creesje and her husband stood as godparents to no fewer than four children of Pieter Willemsz Cuick and his wife Willempje Dircx between September 1637 and December 1641. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that this Pieter Cuick was Jacob the soldier’s brother, and at least possible that his wife, Willempje, was none other than Lucretia’s stepsister—the same Weijntgen Dircx with whom she had lived in the Herenstraat in Amsterdam almost 20 years before.

  Once allowance has been made for the extravagant variations in the spelling of proper names that were all too common at this time, therefore, it would appear that Creesje’s second husband may have been her own stepbrother-in-law. This discovery may well explain Creesje’s willingness to marry, as it were, beneath herself. Alone and friendless in an unknown town far from everything she knew, it would have been natural to seek out any familiar face. Jacob Cuick, whom Creesje may perhaps have known and liked in Holland, could well have seemed a better choice than a stranger who could not begin to understand her extraordinary tribulations.

  Lucretia Jans and her new husband disappear from sight after 1641. They do not seem to have dwelled in Leyden, where no further trace of their existence can be found, and perhaps went to live in Amsterdam, where the surviving records are so enormous and so poorly organized that it is difficult to search for them. It can be said with some confidence that no Jacob Cornelisz Cuick was ever interred there, but one tantalizing clue can still be found to his wife’s fate: at the beginning of September 1681, a Lucreseija van Kuijck died in Amsterdam and was buried there on the sixth day of the month. If this Van Kuijck was really Creesje of the Batavia, she had survived into her late seventies and outlived her suitors and her persecutors alike—some small recompense, perhaps, for the suffering she had endured.

  While Creesje Jans tried to make a new life in the Indies, Ariaen Jacobsz remained rotting in the dungeons of Castle Batavia. The skipper had been confined there since the middle of July 1629, arrested on the strength of Pelsaert’s accusations, and held—along with Zwaantie Hendricx—on suspicion of plotting mutiny.

  From the beginning, Jacobsz resisted all attempts to make him talk. His physical stamina must have been immense; that he survived not only the sea voyage to Batavia in an open boat but a long spell in a squalid prison, doubtlessly interspersed with none-too-gentle questioning, was a remarkable achievement. Zwaantie, too, was interrogated about her actions on the ship, but little progress seems to have been made during the time that Pelsaert was absent in the Abrolhos.

  Even the problem of exactly who had arranged for Evertsz and his men to attack Lucretia Jans was never resolved to the Company’s entire satisfaction. “The skipper,” Specx conceded in a note to the Gentlemen XVII,

  “was very much suspected that [this] had happened with his knowledge, yea, even with his aid and at his instigation; about this he, and a certain other female who had been the servant of Lucretia have been examined by the fiscaal and brought before the Council of Justice, but through the obscurity of the case no verdict has yet been given.”

  From these comments, it appears that Ariaen had consistently proclaimed his innocence, and that Antonij van den Heuvel had failed to extract anything resembling a confession even after the commandeur�
�s return from Batavia’s Graveyard with fresh evidence and accusations. “We do not think that [Jacobsz] is wholly free,” the governor-general concluded cautiously,

  “being certain that if he had publicly maintained authority and justice as well as he secretly undermined both, many of the committed insolences would not have happened aboard the ship, nor would the previous actions have remained unpunished.”

  But without some sort of confession, the true extent of the skipper’s involvement in the mutiny could never be known.

  The problem confronting the Councillors of the Indies was thus a simple one. They certainly believed Jacobsz to be guilty, at least to some degree, of the charges ranged against him. But they also felt that Pelsaert shared the blame for what had happened on Batavia and afterward, not least for his lax handling of the skipper. All that was certain, Van Diemen concluded, was that “a completely Godless and evil life has been conducted on the mentioned ship, of which both the skipper and Pelsaert are greatly guilty, may the Almighty forgive their sin.” Because of this, the Councillors clearly thought that it would be unwise to take the commandeur’s allegations entirely at face value; and since the only other evidence against Jacobsz came from the mouths of now-dead mutineers, only a full confession could establish Ariaen’s guilt. In the absence of any such admission, the existing stalemate could endure indefinitely.