Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  But Cornelisz used his superficial charm to ingratiate himself with others and then to manipulate them. Gijsbert Bastiaensz’s account of the under-merchant’s execution agrees with Pelsaert’s in stating that the other mutineers condemned their former leader as a “seducer of men,” and there can be no question that Jeronimus was adept at using others to achieve his aims. Yet he was also weak and thoroughly incompetent in key respects. He shrank from the prospect of physical violence—his only victim on Batavia’s Graveyard was a defenseless baby—and he put up no resistance when he himself was captured. He was a poor judge of other people’s character; at home in Haarlem he had hired an insane midwife and a diseased wet nurse for his wife, and in the Abrolhos he badly underestimated Wiebbe Hayes. Moreover, Cornelisz showed little enthusiasm for making detailed plans and rarely thought ahead in any but the most general terms. It may be that this weakness first manifested itself in his mismanagement of his failed apothecary’s shop, but it was certainly in evidence on Batavia’s Graveyard, where the mutineers neglected to guard their boats, gave Hayes’s Defenders more than two weeks to prepare for an attack, and failed to bring their superior weaponry to bear on them with decisive effect. Jeronimus’s strategy was disastrous, yet he displayed such a bloated sense of his own self-worth that he promoted himself to the post of captain-general, dressed in outlandish uniforms, tried to seduce Creesje Jans, and ventured—fatally—onto Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with such a tiny bodyguard that he was captured without difficulty.

  Other facets of the under-merchant’s personality are not mentioned in the journals but may be inferred nonetheless. Cornelisz appears to have been impulsive and easily bored; many of the murders that took place in the Abrolhos, particularly the later ones, were ordered on a whim. The sufferings of others had no apparent effect on him; he stood and watched as people died, ignoring all their pleas for mercy. Freed of normal constraints by the wreck and the departure of the ship’s officers, Jeronimus took to living by his own moral code. It may well be that he adopted the tenets of the Libertines not out of any religious conviction, but because they mirrored the feelings he already had.

  Seen from this perspective, Jeronimus Cornelisz was almost certainly a psychopath: a man devoid of conscience and remorse, living his life free from the shackles of normal self-restraint. Though years of casual usage have stripped the word of much of its meaning—so that any violent criminal now tends to acquire the label—true psychopaths are not evil men incapable of self-control. On the contrary, they are always chillingly in command of their emotions. What they actually lack is empathy: the capacity to either understand or care what other people feel.

  Dr. Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, who developed the “Psychopathy checklist” widely used today to diagnose the syndrome, notes that:

  “Most clinicians and researchers know that psychopathy cannot be understood in terms of traditional views of mental illness. Psychopaths are not disorientated or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations or intense subjective distress that characterise most other mental disorders. Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behaviour is the result of choice, freely exercised.”

  A psychopath, in other words, understands the distinction between right and wrong. He robs or hurts or kills not because he does not know what he is doing but because he does not care that his actions have consequences for other people. A convicted psychopath thus goes not to a mental hospital, but to prison.

  The psychopath’s inability to feel guilt is his most distinctive trait. Ordinary criminals operate within the parameters of a well-defined code of conduct; they may reject everyday society, but they are still constrained by a sense of what is right and wrong. Such men may, for example, never hurt a woman or a child, or go to prison rather than betray a colleague to the authorities. Psychopaths simply do not think this way. A man afflicted with the syndrome will transgress all accepted boundaries if it benefits him to do so. He will rob his parents and abandon his own wife and child without feeling remorse.

  Other relevant symptoms of psychopathy include glibness and superficiality, impulsive behavior, and the lack of any sense of responsibility. Psychopaths are deceitful and manipulative people; they like to exercise power over others. Most possess good social skills and can be highly persuasive, even though they also lie “endlessly, lazily, about everything.” They remain characteristically unperturbed when their deceits are exposed; if one lie is disposed of, they will simply spin another, often unrelated, to take its place. They lack the capacity to plan ahead, preferring grand fantasies to realistic short-term goals. Above all, as Hare explains,

  “psychopaths have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astonishing egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the centre of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules.”

  A psychopath behaves this way because he lacks the range and depth of feelings that other men experience. He appears cold and unfeeling. Though he may well be capable of brief outbursts of emotion, “careful observers are left with the impression that he is play-acting and that little is going on below the surface.”

  Plainly Jeronimus displayed many of these symptoms. His practiced tongue and agile mind, his grandiose plans, and his manipulations were all characteristic of the psychopath. He appears to have been impulsive and was frequently betrayed by his inability to plan ahead. At no point in Pelsaert’s account of the mutiny, moreover, is there any indication that Cornelisz felt genuine remorse for what he had done. On the contrary, Jeronimus continued to justify his actions all the way to the gallows.

  True, not everything that the captain general said or did fits the psychopathic profile. Few psychopaths would have waited for nearly two weeks to impose themselves on Creesje Jans, and most would have actively participated in the slaughter that occurred in the Abrolhos. But Pelsaert’s journals and the predikant’s letter are patchy sources at best, and they may neglect to mention other incidents that might confirm the diagnosis. All in all, the evidence points strongly to the conclusion that Jeronimus was psychopathic.

  Why he was a psychopath is much harder to explain. There is little consensus, even today, as to whether such men are born or made. Some psychologists believe that psychopathy is actually a form of brain damage, others that it manifests itself in early childhood, the consequence of a wretched upbringing. All that can be said with any certainty is that the syndrome was considerably less common in the seventeenth century than it is now. Modern estimates imply that as many as 1 in every 125 present-day Americans are psychopaths of one sort or another—a total of two million across the country, and 100,000 in New York alone. But the same surveys suggest that China has many fewer psychopaths than the United States, and that psychopathy flourishes best in societies where stress is laid on individual freedom and instant gratification. If this is true, the syndrome is unlikely to have been common in the Dutch Republic of the Golden Age, which placed such powerful emphasis on conformity and the notion of good citizenship. Most of the people on the Batavia would surely never have encountered someone in whom the major traits of psychopathy were present to such a remarkable degree. Cornelisz was an exceptionally unusual character for his time.

  Even before he boarded the retourschip, moreover, Jeronimus would have been beyond help. There has never been a “treatment” for psychopathy, for those who suffer from the syndrome “don’t feel they have psychological or emotional problems,” says Hare.

  “They see no reason to change their behaviour to conform to societal standards with which they do not agree. [They] are not ‘fragile’ individuals. What they think and do are extensions of a rock-solid personality that is extremely resistant to outside influence . . . . Many are protected from the consequences of their actions by well-meaning family members or friends; their behaviour remains relatively unche
cked and unpunished. Others are skilled enough to weave their way through life without too much personal inconvenience.”

  Even if Jeronimus had somehow survived the journey east, therefore, his behavior would not have changed. He would have remained cold, calculating, and ruthless for the remainder of his life. Psychopaths may learn to modify their behavior, having recognized that they can make their own lives easier by doing so, but they do not “recover.” They never get better. They cannot be cured.

  One unanswered question still remains: what drove Jeronimus to act as he did on the Batavia? From what we now know of his psychopathy, there is no reason to suppose that the apothecary boarded the Batavia with the already-formed intention of seizing the ship. He is much more likely to have conceived the idea quite impulsively, and in all probability it was indeed Jacobsz’s grumbling, at the Cape of Good Hope, that first put the thought of mutiny into his head.

  Pelsaert was therefore right, in one respect, to think of Ariaen as the key figure in the story. Sailing with another skipper, or on a different ship, Cornelisz would almost certainly have reached the Spiceries without undue incident—and, once there, he could well have been successful. His psychopathy might not even have been noticed by the self-serving servants of the Company, for though Jeronimus would no doubt have tried to cheat and lie to his employers, most of them were cheats and liars, too. A psychopath, indeed, would have enjoyed certain advantages over the petty criminals who infested the Indies; given the opportunity, he would steal more ruthlessly and recklessly than any ordinary man, and with such single-mindedness that he would soon amass a fortune if not stopped. Jeronimus might, perhaps, have overreached himself and been detected and disgraced. But since he would not have had to kill anyone to achieve his aims, he would at least have avoided the appalling death awaiting him in Houtman’s Abrolhos.

  Nearly 400 years have passed since then, but the islands have hardly changed in all that time. Visions of the past persist in places such as these. At dusk on an October evening, with a full moon sailing in the sky, it is still possible to glimpse Jeronimus Cornelisz in the shadows on Seals’ Island. His body hangs there, swinging in the southwest wind that first brought him to the archipelago; the noose’s knot is tight under his ear and the head has snapped grotesquely to one side. The rope groans and creaks its way across the gallows tree, but the noise it makes cannot be heard. It is drowned out by the ceaseless shrieking of the mutton birds.

  Footnotes

  To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or “Return to text”.

  *1Surnames were still relatively uncommon in the United Provinces in the early seventeenth century. Most people identified themselves using patronymics—Ariaen Jacobsz would have been the son of a man named Jacob. Because it was unwieldy to spell out the full patronymic, which in this case is Jacobszoon, it was also common practice to abbreviate written names by omitting the “oon” of “zoon” (son) and shortening “dochter” (daughter) to “dr” When spoken, the name would have been pronounced in full.

  *2The officer in day-to-day charge of the crew and—other than his commissioned rank—the equivalent of a modern-day bos’n.

  *3The equivalent of just over $4.5 million at today’s prices.

  *4“Abrolhos” is generally held to be a loan word from Portuguese, a corruption of the sailor’s warning “abri vossos olhos,” or “Open your eyes.” A similar archipelago off the coast of Brazil is known by the same name.1

  *5The word derives from the Greek theriake and is the root of the English treacle.

  *6Van den Broecke, who evidently took real pride in her work, later testified before a solicitor that the resultant product tasted good.

  *7The final flourishing of antinomianism actually occurred in Britain in the aftermath of the English Civil War, when a sect known as the Ranters espoused very similar ideas.

  *8Commonly called the “Dutch East India Company” by historians to distinguish it from its rival, the English East India Company.

  *9The name “Jan” is the Dutch equivalent of the English “John” and was the most common Dutch male name of the time. The VOC’s nickname thus reflected its status as the “everyman” company of the United Provinces—one that affected every citizen’s life for better or for worse.

  *10Weapon of Zeeland.

  *11The name means “World-grasper.”

  *12De Jongh was an old enemy of Pelsaert’s, thanks to an incident in which the resident at Agra had paid a visit to his trading post carrying a Dutch flag before him, thus implying to the local Indians that he was the latter’s superior, which he was not. De Jongh retaliated by charging that Pelsaert “was considered by everyone to lie with every third word he said, and his mouth is rarely quiet.”

  *13“The Hague of the Counts,” which is the Dutch name for The Hague.

  *14Golden Lion.

  *15When the stern of the Batavia was salvaged in the 1970s, archaeologists discovered large quantities of a black, phosphate-rich substance inside the hull. Analysis revealed the presence of gristle and cereal husks, suggesting the black mass was a layer of human feces deposited in what had probably been the bilges.

  *16So called because the region was prone to prolonged calms, resulting in water shortages that sometimes forced transport ships to force overboard the horses that they carried.

  *17Indeed the word strike itself has nautical origins; it refers to the striking of a vessel’s sails, which was usually the first thing rebellious sailors did to assert their control over the ship.

  *18White Bear.

  *19The Little Seagull and the Great Moon.

  *20So freely did the townsmen engage in vicious tavern brawls that in seventeenth-century Holland the act of smashing a glass of beer over an opponent’s head was known as a “Monnickendam Kiss.”

  *21A member of the Dutch nobility.

  *22At this time the Dutch surgeon’s guild possessed the right to dissect one executed criminal annually for the instruction of its members, so that—as its charter put it—“they would not cut veins instead of nerves, or nerves instead of veins, and would not work as the blind work in wood.”

  *23Strong taste was frequently thought to be a guarantee of potency at this time.

  *24A contemporary Dutch phrase meaning “to have a right royal time.”

  *25Concord.

  *26Seawolf.

  *27She was named after a lordship in the southern part of the United Provinces.

  *28Turtledove.

  *29This brutal internecine conflict had raged throughout the Holy Roman Empire since 1618. It was notable not merely for its battles, but for the unusually appalling treatment meted out to the civilians on either side. The slaughter of women, children, and other noncombatants was commonplace throughout the war. It is not impossible that men such as Hendricxsz, Beer, and the other German mercenaries who joined Cornelisz may have been hardened by participation in such massacres.

  *30The indications are that Ariaen Ariaensz somehow escaped and contrived to make his way to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island.

  *31The word draijer means “turner” and thus denotes Hendricxen’s profession.

  *32A species of petrel, common throughout Western Australia.

  *33Modern Liège.

  *34Present-day Yardie Creek, at the southern end of Exmouth Gulf.

  *35A little later in the century one in seven of the entire European population of Batavia, excluding merchants and soldiers, were tavern-keepers. “I think it no exaggeration,” writes the historian C. R. Boxer, “to say that most of the Dutch and English males who died in the tropics died of drink, even making due allowance for the heavy toll taken by malaria and dysentery.”

  *36Coen was also capable of serious mistakes. The most spectacular came in 1621–22, when he decided to attempt the conquest of China. His tiny fleet of eight ships and just over 1,000 men got no further than the gates of Portuguese Macao, where they were comprehensively defeated.

  *37Coen had been so enraged when h
e heard of this that “his face turned white, and his chair and the table trembled.”

  *38“Weapon of Hoorn.”

  *39French trimming, usually of gold or silver lace.

  *40Wool of exceptional quality.

  *41Another Soldier, and one of the minor mutineers.

  *42In this instance, the phrase appears to denote Australia.

  *43Some of these men have been met before. “Lucas the steward’s mate” was Lucas Gerritsz, whom Allert Janssen had attacked on his way to the liquor stores when the Batavia was wrecked. “Cornelis the assistant” was Cornelis Jansz, and “Ariaen the gunner” may have been Ariaen Ariaensz, who had tapped a barrel of wine with Abraham Hendricx at the beginning of July and set the whole mutiny in motion.

  *44By now they numbered 47: 31 mutineers, 6 women, and 10 other men and boys.

  *45Pelsaert here confuses the ranks of these two mutineers. Van Os was the cadet, and Beer the soldier.

  *46“Wooden man,” a prototype surname adopted to distinguish him from his many namesakes; his was one of the most common names in the Dutch Republic at this time.

  *47Allert Janssen. Assendelft was the gunner’s hometown.

  *48The lance corporal and member of Cornelisz’s council also known as “Stone-Cutter.” “Cosyn” (cosijn), his other nickname, means “window-frame.”

  *49The spot has been identified as Wittecarra Gully, which lies just south of the mouth of the Murchison River near modern Kalbarri.

  *50Weapon of Enkhuizen.

  *51A valuable scarlet dye, made from the crushed bodies of insects.

  *52Weapon of Rotterdam.

  *53He gave his name to Tasmania.

  *54Gilt Dragon.

  *55South Village. This ship was named after a place in Zeeland.

  *56Bottles with a narrow neck and substantial circumference.

  *57“Knighthood of Holland.”