East India

by Colin Falconer

  Are they really abandoning us? She thought.

  I should care more that I am about to die, she thought.

  But I don’t.

  ***

  The Houtman Rocks, Ambroise thought.

  They had been warned before they had left Amsterdam, he had received a directive from Batavia from Jan Pieterszen Coen himself, a reef at twenty-eight and a third degrees off the Southland, approach no closer than a hundred miles before turning north for Java. And the skipper had ignored it--the arrogant gin-soaked bastard had led them right onto the rocks. He had relied on his dead reckoning, and he was wrong.

  The skipper had taken soundings. He climbed up the cleats and shoved his way across the crowded deck and back to the poop, the leadsman behind him.

  “Seven fathoms at a musket shot astern, shallows from the bows. What did I tell you? It is a sand bank not before known. I’ll put out a kedge anchor astern and we can wind ourselves off with the capstan. If we are at low water, it will be easy enough with the rising tide.”

  “You put us on the Houtman Rocks!’

  “It is not the Houtman! What do you know of the sea?”

  The moon had sunk below the horizon. From the main deck came the sound of mothers calling out their children’s names, while the pastor led his family and the devout in a hymn. The ship shuddered again.

  “We must overboard the cannon,” the skipper said.

  “What? You will lose our cannon?”

  “The Company would rather lose the cannon than the ship.”

  “But you said it is just a sandbank!’

  “I cannot float her off with the cannon weighing her down. Get me the bosun up here.”

  “He is in chains until we reach Batavia.”

  “You want me to save this ship, Heer Commandeur? I want my bosun! He’s one of the most experienced men I have.”

  Ambroise hesitated.

  “I need the bosun!’

  Ambroise called to the provost and gave him the order. He hurried from the quarterdeck to see it done.

  Where was Christiaan? He needed his cool head right now.

  ***

  The gun deck was chaos. It was pitch black and everyone was screaming, trampling on each other in their panic to scramble up the companionways to the deck. Michiel saw sailors hurling the passengers violently aside, then heaving the bronze pieces from their mountings and pushing them through the ports into the sea. The constable, Konick, held a lamp and screamed at them to work faster. He had tears running down his face. He had made his men polish those pieces every day since Amsterdam, buffing them till they shone. The crimson paint was still fresh on the muzzles.

  They were all going to drown and he still had time to weep for his cannon.

  Michiel was surprised at how calm he felt. He had faced death before, knew it would claim him one day. When you were a soldier it always just a day away. He went back to the orlop to rescue his pipe and his tobacco and made his way back to the companionway to join his men on deck.

  A wave of spray soaked him through as soon as he came through the hatch.

  He looked around. What a sight. The passengers were corralled on the starboard side by the listing of the ship, the sailors were fighting with them, trying to get them back below, but they wouldn’t go. The skipper was roaring orders from the poop deck but no one could hear him.

  “What are you doing up here?” the provost yelled at him.

  “Getting ready to die, like everyone else.”

  “Get some men and follow me! We have to get the silver chests up from below. We’ll use the capstan.”

  Michiel grabbed Gerrit Westerveld and Richard Merrell, and followed him back down the ladder. The ship jarred with every wave, canted now so hard onto her beam they could not stand upright. The timbers sounded as if they were going to burst apart.

  The little shit Strootman and one of the gunners, Schenck, were already down there, had broken out the wine barrels. He was surprised to see one of his own Frenchies, Jean Monfort, had joined them. Well, that was a surprise. Typical of a garlic eater, their answer to every crisis lay in the bottom of a flagon.

  “What are you doing?” the provost shouted at them.

  “We're getting ready to die!’

  “Help us get the bullion chests onto the deck!’

  Schenk dropped his breeches and showed the provost his arse. Michiel wished he had his pikestaff handy.

  “We're not going to get off here,” Monfort said. “We're fucked, the lot of us.”

  “I'm ordering you to move the bullion!’

  “Fuck off.”

  The provost spat and moved on. No time to argue with him, the garlic eaters had always been a law to themselves. That was the trouble with mercenaries, Michiel thought. Pay them as much silver as you liked, but once you took your boot off their neck, they stabbed you in the back.

  God have mercy on us all.

  ***

  The wind picked up from the south-west, bringing flurries of rain.

  Ambroise gathered the ship's council on the quarterdeck; the skipper, the three steersmen, along with the bosun, mad-eyed and hunched over, his wrists still raw from the shackles. What use would he be to them now?

  “Where's Christiaan?” Ambroise shouted.

  “Who knows?” the skipper shrugged. “Perhaps he's lost.” He spat on the deck. “The Devil looks after his own.”

  They had taken repeated soundings, fore and aft. They were on a falling tide and winching themselves off the reef would not be as simple as the skipper had thought. Even jettisoning the precious cannon had not helped them. There was thirty-eight tonnes of stone in the hold as ballast, meant for the façade of the sea gate of Batavia castle.

  Compared to that, the cannon were nothing.

  The ship had listed even further to starboard and the sea foamed around them, each roller lifting her and threatening to drive the mast through the keel like a nail through wood.

  “We have to lose the main mast,” the skipper said.

  “How can we reach Batavia if you do that?”

  “That is my concern, not yours.”

  “Your concern was getting us safely to the Indies, and look how miserably you have failed at your commission! I shall hold you responsible for this disaster with the Company!’

  “Do what you will. But unless we lose some weight off the ship, you’ll be taking your complaint to the fish!’

  Arie Barents, the upper steersman, nodded. “We’ve no choice if we want to float her off.”

  Cutting the main mast was such a drastic action the skipper would have to wield the first blow with the axe himself; it was a regulation of the Honourable Company. When he set off across the main deck with axe in hand, there was a collective moan from the passengers, even from some of the sailors. They knew how dire their situation must be.

  ***

  After his first strike, the sailors took over and set to work with their axes. Ambroise could not bring himself to watch. Instead he turned his vicious gaze on the skipper. I should have replaced you at the Cape when I had the chance, he thought. Your arrogance has finally outstripped your talents as a seaman.

  He closed his eyes and tried to pray, but no words would come; all he could hear in his head was the hammer of the axes over the rush of the wind.

  Finally there was a crack like cannon fire and the great mast creaked and started to fall. Just at that moment a swell passed under the boat and sent the mast pitching forward to tangle in the sheets and lines of the foremast. A man screamed as he was pinned against the bulwark, another lost his fingers to a wet and coiled rope.

  The mast landed athwart the deck in a tangle of rope and canvas. Instead of lifting her, it made her cant even further to the wind. A broken section of topmast thumped like a battering ram against the port side.

  The skipper and steersmen screamed themselves hoarse, but the crew could not shift it, and a wave washed across the decks, dragging more men over the side.

  Good God in he
aven.

  “Can you do nothing right?” Ambroise screamed.

  “Go to hell!’ the skipper screamed back at him, but his words were lost on the wind.

  ***

  Cornelia crouched on the deck, sodden and trembling, trying to prepare. After this longest night, and these unimaginable hours, light was finally leeching into the horizon. She thought at first that the smudge she saw on the horizon was ocean swell. But as the light grew stronger the crabbed silhouettes became more distinct.

  “Land!’ she screamed.

  An eerie stillness fell over the boat as everyone turned to stare.

  “God be thanked!’ the pastor shouted, and his cry was taken up by other throats.

  Their prayers were answered. Their good Calvinist god had come to their aid.

  Chapter 28

  The Houtman Rocks

  A HIGH island loomed from the grey horizon, too far distant to be of help to them. There were exposed reefs closer to hand, and Ambroise sent the skipper to investigate them in the yawl. On his return the skipper assured him that the shoals would not be covered by the high tide. Ambroise decided to land the passengers there with the money and treasures while they went about the business of saving the ship.

  He pushed through the press of people stranded on the main deck; they screamed and grabbed at him, demanding to be saved. What was he supposed to do? He had not put them on this cursed reef.

  He went below, and was astounded to hear singing coming from the hold. Some men had broken open one of the brandy casks and were reeling around, drunk. One of them, Monfort, was attacking one of the money chests with an adze.

  “Get away from that!’ he shouted.

  “Cul de vache!’

  Unbelievable. Ambroise wrestled the axe out of his hand, threw him bodily to the floor. “I’ll have you flogged!’ he screamed at him. He went for’ard to get the small wooden box he had hidden in his private chests, then went back up to the gunnery deck. He ordered one of the carpenters to repair the broken money chest in the hold.

  Mutiny fomenting down there, he thought. Not much between them and anarchy now.

  ***

  The skipper ordered the women and children into the lifeboats first but there was no one listening anymore. It was every man for himself. The sailors were loading barrels of biscuits and water into the yawl and fighting off the terrified passengers with their fists at the same time. The yawl slammed against the hull with each surge of the swell while the mob fought with each other for a place onboard.

  Cornelia felt herself carried along in the surge of desperate people. Someone clawed her in the face, a man’s elbow took her and she almost went down. The sailors tried to force them all back. Nothing to be done about it, for all the skipper's curses.

  The pastor was one of the first in the boat. It seemed God had seen fit to preserve him.

  But then, he had given the Lord an inordinate amount of help.

  The bosun and the skipper were arguing over what to do. She shrank into the shadows, didn't want them to see her. Ambroise said the bosun was one of the men who had attacked her.

  “What are we going to do?” the bosun shouted. “I'm not sitting on some reef to die of thirst with this rabble.”

  The skipper seemed in an agony of indecision, for all his arrogance until now. He didn’t answer.

  “We have to get the yawl,” the bosun said. “God's death, look at these cattle! Let’s leave them.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We have to get rid of the commandeur. Let’s do it now!’

  She looked back at the deck, where men were fighting with the women and children, even crawling over them to get into the boat. The waves were breaking over the gunwales, making it even more perilous for the sailors to evacuate the boat.

  Ambroise saw her crouching there, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her towards the yawl. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where have you been? We have to get you on the boat!’

  “Ambroise!’ She wanted to warn him about what she had heard, but he passed her on to two sailors, and they dragged her through the riot on the deck towards the yawl.

  “It will be all right!’ he shouted at her. He turned away and headed back towards the stern to where the skipper and bosun stood watching at the gilded rail.

  ***

  Michiel Van Texel peered through the grey light, at the uncertain silhouettes scattered on the horizon. Just a few scraps of reef, by what he could make out, perhaps not even that when the tide rose. It looked to him like they were finished. What was better, dying from a musket ball or dying with a mouth full of seawater? Death was death, however you took it, and the Company's wages were paying for it however it came.

  Look at that lot, fighting for a place on the boat. He saw one God-fearing Dutchman push a child against the bulwark and send him sprawling, in a panic to save his own miserable life. Another child, separated from his mother, went over the side into the foaming water. For pity's sake, these people had no shame before God.

  The pastor, of course, had found himself a place on the yawl with his brood, couldn't have a damned preacher trusting to God like the rest of us.

  He saw the preacher’s daughter, Hendrika, caught in the throng and fighting with the sailors lined against the bulwark. She would be crushed or drowned, for all that the bravehearts around her cared. And her father already in the yawl. He could not credit that a man would turn his back on his own honour, on his own family.

  He shoved his way among them, found her hand.

  “This way,” he said.

  He had worked on farms as a boy, shouldered his way among the milking herds many times and it was no different to that. You used your elbows, your weight and a rough voice. “Get this girl on!’ he shouted to one of the sailors and he lifted her off her feet and over the side. Skinny little thing, weighed next to nothing, she would have lasted no time on her own.

  “Praise to the Lord,” she said, her hand outstretched towards him. Eager hands helped her down into the boat.

  Praise to the Lord. What did the Lord have to do with it? He hadn't seen Him push His way through the crowd for her. God was all very well in His place, but sometimes a man had to trust to his own arm if he wanted to get himself out of a fix.

  ***

  Cornelia did not know how she made it into the boat. She was shoved over the side and had to scramble down the cleats in the darkness, her trembling fingers scrambling for purchase on wet timber. A breaker slammed her into the hull and she fell screaming, expecting to land in the water, instead dropping in the skiff. Someone broke her fall, but her ankle turned under her weight and she saw a bright flash of pain and passed out.

  She came to as the yawl rowed clear of the wreck. She raised her head and saw the hulk of the Utrecht looming above them. The greasy morning light revealed the full extent of their disaster. They must have struck at high water for now the great ship lay hard on her beam, her main mast athwartships in a tangle of lines and shrouds, sailors and hysterical passengers crawling over her like ants over the carcass of some dying beast.

  She had been saved from the Utrecht’s death throes. But saved for what?

  She covered her face and crouched in the scuppers, soaked and shivering, barely aware of the people around her. Stripped of everything, she was reduced to this, clinging to life from instinct and nothing else.

  ***

  The ship was over on its beam now, it was impossible to stand or walk upon the wet and sloping deck; instead you climbed her, holding onto ropes or the upper works to keep balance. As Ambroise went down the ladder he saw the provost down there with his jacket off screaming instructions to a knot of soldiers toiling at a capstan, trying to lift another.

  “Get that chest secure, then get to the boats,” he shouted at him. “Leave the rest. We need the soldiers on the islands, to keep order. There are reports of fighting over the water.”

  “Just this one last chest to secure away, commandeur!’

  Ambr
oise clambered along the deck to the companionway and down to the main cabin. There was someone blocking the way, he recognised the lance corporal they called Steenhower, and a couple of the others, Willem Groot and Gerrit van Hoeck; Steenhower had a piece of silk plundered from the chests around his waist. The corporal laughed when he saw him, and wiggled his hips like a Mogul concubine.

  “What are you doing? Get out of here and back up on the deck!’

  “Look at me, I'm Cornelia Noorstrandt!’ Steenhower flounced through the bilge, wiggling his backside outrageously, the parody of beauty with his ugly, boil-scarred face.

  Another wave hit the ship broadside and sent them all tumbling. It only made the drunken soldiers laugh the harder. Steenhower cursed as the jug of brandy he was holding shattered against the bulwark.

  “Get out of here!’ Ambroise roared. His hand went to his sword.

  A moment of stillness and the laughter stopped. The three soldiers put their hands to their own weapons. These men were mercenaries, paid to kill for the Company, but they would just as well kill for themselves if they had to. And they were all going to die anyway, so who cared now for Company rules or a Commandeur just out of his sick bed?

  He fled, hauled himself through the door of the council room, found Salomon du Chesne gathering up documents and placing them in a leather satchel.

  “Leave all that,” he snapped, ‘come with me.”

  They had to climb into his cabin. His papers littered the floor; even his heavy sea chest was hard up against the starboard bulwark. He unlocked the drawer of his desk, found the casket he had hidden there, gave it to Salomon along with the key; he entrusted him also with the small wooden crate he had brought from the for'ard hold.

  “You must guard these with your life. They are the property of the Company. Wrap them in cloth so no one can recognise them for what they are. Should anything happen to me, you are to ensure that they find their way into the hands of Jan Pieterszen Coen, the Lord General in Batavia.”