Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  Early Dutch-Aboriginal relations Noel Loos, “Aboriginal-Dutch Relations in North Queensland, 1606–1756,” in Jeremy Green, Myra Stanbury, and Femme Gaastra (eds.), The ANCODS Colloquium: Papers Presented at the Australia-Netherlands Colloquium on Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History (Fremantle: Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 1999), pp. 8–13.

  “. . . look out keenly . . .” “Instructions to Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom de By van Bemel,” JFP 16 Nov 1629 [DB 229–30].

  Gerrit Thomasz Pool Heeres, op. cit., p. 66; Schilder, op. cit., pp. 129–37.

  Abel Tasman The relevant portion of Tasman’s instructions read as follows: “. . . Continue your course along the land of d’Eendracht as far as Houtman’s Abrolhos, and come to anchor there at the most convenient place, in order to make efforts to bring up from the bottom the chest in which eight thousand rixdollars, sunk with the lost ship Batavia in 1629, owing to half a brass cannon having fallen upon it . . . and so save the same together with the said gun, which would be good service done to the Company, on which account you will not fail diligently to attend to this business. You will likewise make search on the mainland to ascertain whether the two Netherlanders who, having forfeited their lives, were put ashore here by the commandeur Francisco Pelsaert at the same period, are still alive, in which case you will from them ask information touching the country, and, if they should wish it, allow them to take passage hither with you.” Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 81–2; Schilder, op. cit., pp. 139–94.

  “. . . circumnavigating the continent . . .” In 1642–3 Tasman actually sailed south from Mauritius, east across the Roaring Forties until he came across Tasmania, east again to New Zealand, and then north through Polynesia, reaching the Indies via the north coast of New Guinea. He saw no part of the Australian mainland throughout the voyage. In 1644, he explored the northern coast and sailed down the west coast to about latitude 23H south. Beacon Island (Batavia’s Graveyard) lies at lat. 28 28’, about 350 miles further to the south. Cf. Schilder, op. cit., p. 154; Sigmond and Zuiderbaan, op. cit., pp. 72–85.

  “The ‘mutineers’ hut” De Vlamingh’s landing party found five huts in all, but this was the only one regarded as worthy of description—implying it was probably noticeably superior in construction and design to the other four. Gerritsen, op. cit., p. 227; Playford, Voyage of Discovery, pp. 46–7. Gerritsen fails to identify this structure with the two mutineers, whom he believes were marooned a little further south at Hutt River, preferring to suggest it was built by Jacob Jacobsz, the skipper of the Sardam, and the crew of the boat apparently lost in the Abrolhos on 12 October 1629. In any case, there is no real reason to suppose it was not built by the Nanda people.

  VOC losses J. R. Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols., 1979–1987), I, pp. 75, 91.

  The wreck of the Vergulde Draeck James Henderson, Marooned (Perth: St. George Books, 1982), pp. 42–155. The wreck site was rediscovered in 1963 by Graeme Henderson, who is now the director of the Western Australian Maritime Museum; he was then a schoolboy on a fishing expedition.

  The three rescuers R. H. Major, Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia (Adelaide: Australian Heritage Press, 1963), p. 58. The real total may have been higher than this; a second party of eight sailors sent after the first three also vanished; their boat was found smashed to pieces on a beach, and it remains a matter of some doubt whether the crew ever got ashore. The VOC nearly lost a third boatload two years later, when another effort at rescue and salvage was made. Fourteen men from a fluyt, the Waeckende Boey, led by the steersman Abraham Leeman, were abandoned on the coast and had to sail their small boat back to the Indies. Most of them survived the voyage, but landed on the southern coast of Java many miles from Batavia. Only Leeman and three other men eventually reached the city alive. Henderson, marooned, pp. 95–155.

  Evidence of survival Ibid., p. 96; Gerritsen, op. cit., pp. 48–63.

  “. . . followed by the Zuytdorp . . .” Two other ships, the Ridderschap van Holland (1694) and the Concordia (1708) may have been lost on the Australian coast before this date. C. Halls, “The Loss of the Ridderschap van Holland,” The Annual Dog Watch 22 (1965): 36–43; Playford, Voyage of Discovery, pp. 4, 71n; Femme Gaastra, “The Dutch East India Company: A Reluctant Discoverer,” The Great Circle 19 (1997): 118–20. Halls’s view, that the Ridderschap van Holland sprung her mast, limped north to Madagascar, and fell victim to the pirate leader Abraham Samuel at Fort Dauphin on the southern coast, cannot be correct; Samuel did not arrive at the port until some time after July 1697. There certainly was a rumor that he had captured a Dutch ship and killed all her crew, but contemporary documents date this supposed event to January 1699; the vessel concerned was probably a small slaver. There were, however, plenty of pirate ships on the northern coast of Madagascar, based on St. Mary’s, that could perhaps have accounted for a wounded retourschip. Jan Rogozinski, Honour Among Thieves: Captain Kidd, Henry Every and the Story of Pirate Island (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2000), pp. 67–8.

  The fate of the Zuytdorp Without a boat—the Zuytdorp’s pair must surely have been reduced to matchwood by the surf—their only real hope of rescue was to attract the attention of another Dutch ship as she passed along the coast. The cliffs offered good vantage points, and they had gone aground close to the spot where VOC ships normally made their Australian landfall, but any experienced hands among the survivors would have known that although fires were often seen along the shoreline, they were routinely attributed to the local Aborigines and ignored. It must have been for this reason that the Zuytdorp’s men went to the effort of hauling ashore eight bronze breech blocks for the swivel guns mounted on the poop. In the right circumstances these could have been loaded with shot and used to signal to passing ships. Unfortunately for the survivors, however, none of the guns could be got out of the stern before it broke up and drifted away. The breech blocks were then abandoned at the foot of the cliffs, where they were eventually rediscovered more than 200 years later.

  There was plenty of driftwood about, however, and the survivors evidently did gather large quantities of it and built at least one huge bonfire on the cliffs immediately above the wreck site. Up to seven other East Indiamen would have made their way along the coast during the next two months, beginning with a ship called the Kockenge, which apparently passed the Zuytdorp survivors’ position only a week after they came ashore, and the discovery of what appears to be the remains of a signal fire next to the wreck site—a substantial layer of charcoal mixed with melted hinges, barrel rings, and clasps—suggests that at least one of them came within view of the shipwrecked sailors and that the Zuytdorp’s survivors hurriedly lit their beacon and piled everything they had onto the fire—sea chests and barrels as well as driftwood—in the desperate hope of being noticed. That they received no response is suggested by another modern discovery along the cliffs: the smashed remains of many old Dutch bottles that had once been filled with wine or spirits, which appear to have been drained by men determined to drink themselves into oblivion.

  The ship had run aground early in the southern winter, and there would have been sufficient fresh water about to sustain a small group of survivors for some months. The men could have collected large quantities of shellfish from along the cliffs, and if they were able to salvage any firearms from the ship, it would have been possible for them to hunt for kangaroos. In these circumstances, it seems likely that they stayed close to the wreck site for as long as they could in the hope that rescue ships might be sent from Java when their failure to arrive was noticed. By September or October, however, the rains would have ceased, and any survivors would have had to move inland in search of water. The only supplies available for miles in any direction were Aboriginal soaks—areas of low ground where water ran and collected during the wet season, and which the local Malgana tribe “farmed” by digging them out and covering them with stones
to keep wildlife away and prevent evaporation.

  The Zuytdorp’s men would have required the help of the Malgana to have located these rare spots, but there is some evidence that Dutch sailors did receive assistance from the local Aborigines. The Malgana were certainly aware of the wreck; the event made such an impact on them that 120 years later, when British colonists arrived in the area, it was still talked of as though it had been a recent happening. Aboriginal tradition suggested that the survivors had lived along the cliffs in two large and three small “houses” made of wood and canvas, and exchanged food for spears and shields. Playford, Carpet of Silver, pp. 68–77, 78–82, 115, 200–4; The ANCODS Colloquium, p. 49; Fiona Weaver, Report of the Excavation of Previously Undisturbed Land Sites Associated with the VOC Ship Zuytdorp, Wrecked 1712, Zuytdorp Cliffs, Western Australia (Fremantle: Western Australian Maritime Museum, 1994); Mike McCarthy, “Zuytdorp Far from Home,” Bulletin of the Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology 22 (1998): 52. The Zuytdorp, incidentally, was the same ship that lost a large proportion of her crew in the Gulf of Guinea on the voyage out; see chapter 3.

  The tobacco tin Playford, Carpet of Silver, pp. 214–5; McCarthy, op. cit., p. 53. It has also been argued that the lid could have been carried to Wale from the Zuytdorp wreck site by an Aboriginal farm hand in more recent years; no definite resolution of this conundrum is likely.

  “The third and last . . .” Two other retourschepen—the Fortuyn (1724) and the Aagtekerke (1726), the former from Amsterdam and the latter a ship of the Zeeland chamber, both on their maiden voyages—disappeared between Batavia and the Cape just before the loss of the Zeewijk, and may possibly have deposited survivors on the Australian coast. C. Halls, “The Loss of the Dutch East Indiaman Aagtekerke,” The Annual Dog Watch 23 (1966): 101–7; Graeme Henderson, “The Mysterious Fate of the Dutch East Indiaman Aagtekerke,” Westerly (June 1978): 71–8; Playford, Carpet of Silver, pp. 28–9.

  The Zeewijk and her survivors Hugh Edwards, The Wreck on the Half-Moon Reef (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).

  “. . . from New South Wales to China . . .” David Levell, “China Syndrome,” Fortean Times 123 (June 1999): 28–31. The distance between the two territories was supposed by these prisoners to be about 150 miles (it is actually 5,565 miles from Sydney to Beijing). The first recorded attempt was made by 20 men and one pregnant woman in November 1791; the last around 1827.

  Evidence of survival Gerritsen, op. cit., pp. 70–81; Playford, Carpet of Silver, pp. 217–32. Gregory’s recollection may not be entirely reliable, as he recorded it only in 1885. Much of other evidence advanced by Gerritsen, such as the presence of what appear to be Dutch loan words in Aboriginal languages, have been subject to considerable criticism by specialists.

  Unfortunately for the Aborigines of the western coast, the great majority died out soon after the first Europeans arrived with their guns, diseases, and modern agricultural practices, and evidence of the sort supplied by Daisy Bates and her contemporaries can never be more than merely anecdotal. It is also true that relations with passing sealers or the earliest settlers, or genetic mutation, could account for the light-skinned individuals found in the areas where the Zuytdorp survivors and the Batavia mutineers came ashore. Only genetic evidence is likely to prove at all conclusive; but since old Aboriginal skeletons are sometimes exposed by wind and water throughout Western Australia, it may eventually be found.

  One clue that intermarriage between Dutch and Aboriginals did actually occur may already have emerged. In 1988 Phillip Playford, one of Australia’s leading experts on the Zuytdorp, was approached by a woman whose part-Aboriginal husband apparently suffered from porphyria variegata, a condition that can cause rashes, blisters, and sensitive skin. This disease is an inherited one and can be passed to children of either sex. It is also relatively rare, except among the white population of South Africa, where an estimated 30,000 people carry the gene for the condition.

  Geoffrey Dean, a British doctor based in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, became aware of the unusual incidence of porphyria in the region in 1949 and devoted years to researching the family trees of all the sufferers he treated. He claimed to have traced all known cases of the disease to a single Dutch couple, Gerrit Jansz van Deventer and Ariaantje van den Berg, who were married at the Cape in 1688. Van Deventer had settled there in 1685, and his bride was one of eight orphans sent out to provide wives for the early burghers three years later. The couple had eight children, half of whom Dean showed must have carried the gene for porphyria variegata. Dean and Playford have suggested that the disease may have been introduced to Australia by an Afrikaner signed on to the Zuytdorp at the Cape to help make good the extensive losses among the crew that had occurred on the passage from the Netherlands, who survived the wreck and lived long enough to join an Aboriginal community.

  A good deal of work remains to be done if this disease is to be traced to the arrival of Dutch mariners on the western Australian coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It remains entirely possible that it was introduced at a much later date, and its appearance in Australia cannot can be regarded as definite evidence for the long-term survival of Loos and Pelgrom and their compatriots. Nevertheless, evidence of interaction between VOC sailors and the Aborigines continues to emerge occasionally, and it is not impossible that a definite link will be established one day. Interview with Dr. F. W. M de Rooij, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 26 June 2000. De Rooij’s work in South Africa has confirmed Dean’s thesis that most South African porphyriacs can trace the source of their disease to their kinship with Ariaantje van den Berg. Playford, Carpet of Silver, pp. 227–32; Geoffrey Dean, The Porphyrias: A Story of Inheritance and Environment (London: Pitman Medical, 1971), pp. 114–30; The ANCODS Colloquium, pp. 50–1; “First Europeans in Australia,” History Today (June 1999): 3–4. A second condition—Ellis van Creveld syndrome, which results in children being born with short limbs, extra fingers or toes, and heart defects—exists among the Aborigines of Western Australia and has also been tentatively linked to the arrival of shipwrecked Dutchmen. It has been calculated that about one Aborigine in 40 carries the recessive Ellis van Creveld gene—the second-highest incidence of the disease among any community in the world. The highest incidence, tellingly enough, occurs among the Amish people of Pennsylvania, a Mennonite sect whose ancestors emigrated from the Netherlands in 1683.

  “. . . purely anecdotal evidence . . .” Even today, speculation as to the existence of Dutch survivors has not entirely died away, and the most recent discovery is, in fact, also one of the strangest. It concerns reports of an expedition into the interior of Australia that set out from Raffles Bay, at the end of the Coburg Peninsula in the Northern Territories, some time prior to 1834. (Raffles Bay was the site of a British military outpost established in 1818 and abandoned in 1829, which may date the expedition more precisely.) This party included a Lieutenant Nixon, and it was on his private journals that newspaper reports concerning what appeared to be a whole colony of white people living in the interior were eventually based.

  Nixon and his colleagues, it appears, explored the interior of the Northern Territories for two months. One day, to their considerable surprise, they reached a spot quite different from the untamed wilderness they had been traversing: “a low and level country, laid out as it were in plantations, with straight rows of trees.” Exploring further, Nixon then encountered “a human being, whose face was so fair, and dress so white, that I was for a moment staggered with terror, and thought I was looking at an apparition.”

  The “apparition” spoke in broken Dutch, which—remarkably enough—was understood by Nixon, who had spent time in the Netherlands in his youth. It thus emerged that the local people believed they were descended from the survivors—80 men and 10 women—of a Dutch ship that had been wrecked on the coast many years earlier. This group had been forced by famine to go inland, where they had established their colony and lived off maize and fish from a nearby river. They
were now led by a man who claimed descent from a Dutchman named Van Baerle, and “did not have books or paper, nor any schools; their marriages were performed without any ceremony, they retained a certain observance of the Sabbath by refraining from daily labours and performing some sort of superstitious ceremony on that day all together.” Evidently they had refrained from mixing with the local Aborigines.

  This tale could be a nineteenth-century hoax, and it would be unwise to accept it at face value without any supporting evidence. However, research by Femme Gaastra, the noted Dutch historian of the VOC, has discovered that an assistant named Constantijn van Baerle was indeed lost, with 129 others, on the ship Concordia, which vanished in the Indian Ocean some time in 1708. Van Baerle is not a particularly common surname in the Netherlands; just possibly, then, this discovery corroborates Lieutenant Nixon’s original report. Femme Gaastra, “The Dutch East India Company: A Reluctant Discoverer,” The Great Circle 19 (1997): 117–20, citing the Leeds Mercury of 25 Jan 1834, p. 7 col. a. The sponsors and the purpose of the expedition remain a mystery. Its members are reported to have been conveyed back to Singapore on a merchant ship, which may suggest it was not naval in origin. From an examination of the map, it would appear that the Coburg Peninsula—which lies 700 miles to the east of Batavia—and the interior of Arnhem Land generally are far from the first places one would look for the survivors of a ship that had sailed west from Java and was apparently last heard of near Mauritius.