Batavia Epub

by Pete Fitzsimons

  For her help in all things to do with the form and texture of the book, I offer my deep appreciation to my treasured colleague at the Sydney Morning Herald Harriet Veitch, just as I do to my long-time researcher Sonja Goernitz, who was a great help across the board. Let me particularly acknowledge the work of my dear friend, and principal research editor on this book, Henry Barrkman. I have never worked as closely with anyone in the writing of a book, and, by its end, he was more familiar with the primary documents than I was. He was a constant sounding board as to how I might extrapolate from them, how the principal characters interacted, what the most likely chronology was for various events, and, when information conflicted, which account was the most likely. My debt to him is enormous.

  I thank all at Random House, particularly Margie Seale, Nikki Christer and Alison Urquhart, for backing the project from the first, and my editor, Kevin O’Brien, for his meticulous approach and keen dedication.

  Peter FitzSimons

  Neutral Bay

  Author’s Note

  References

  As described in the Preface, in telling this story I have strictly adhered to the two primary documents: Pelsaert’s Journal and the Predikant’s Letter. Both have been thoroughly referenced throughout and, together with my secondary sources, appear at the back of the book in the Notes and References section. Additionally, I have included comments in this Notes and References section to not only indicate where I may have taken liberties in departing from the primary texts – for example, in the creation of dialogue or the extrapolation of events from evidence given in those texts – but also, and I believe uniquely, provide justification for so doing. I believe all such departures are soundly underpinned by the documentary evidence and/or information from expert consultants and will add to the reader’s overall enjoyment without significantly compromising historical accuracy.

  Pelsaert’s Journal

  Frequently, a reference to Pelsaert’s Journal will postdate a section’s dateline, or a sequence of references to the Journal will appear chronologically out of step. This is because Pelsaert’s Journal is not a strict, day-by-day account but contains many retrospective references and also narrates certain events and testimonies in a different order from that in which they occurred.

  Naming conventions

  Writing this book put me on intimate terms with the difficulties of Dutch nomenclature. Because surnames did not exist in the Dutch Republic in the early part of the seventeenth century, a man’s full name comprised his first name followed by a ‘patronymic’, derived from the first name of his father with the letters ‘zoon’, son of, added to the end to indicate descent. For example, ‘Claas Gerritszoon’ defined a man as Claas, Gerrit’s son, the ‘s’ being possessive. Because this ending was a bit of an eyeful, it was common practice to drop the ‘oon’ and abbreviate the patronymic, in this case to Gerritsz (although the ‘oon’ is always pronounced in spoken Dutch). Strictly speaking, a full point should be used after the ‘sz’ to highlight the abbreviation, but I have followed the example of those who have gone before me, such as Drake-Brockman, in omitting the punctuation mark in favour of ease of reading.

  A man would never have been referred to by his patronymic alone, rather by either his title and first name, in this case Opperstuurman Claas, or simply his first name, Claas. But, to my twenty-first-century ear, referring to a rough sailor type as Opperstuurman Claas or simply Claas sounds less apt than the more manly-sounding patronymic Gerritsz. Also, using a person’s full name on each and every occasion is cumbersome and repetitive. Accordingly, although historically incorrect, when not giving a name in full I name men according to their shortened patronymic. The only real exception to this rule has been that of the central character Jeronimus Cornelisz, whom I have referred to mostly as simply Jeronimus, because that name and mode of address struck the right note in terms of personality.

  The naming convention adopted in this book has presented problems, given the number of men in this story who have identical patronymics. In such cases, I have distinguished lesser characters by using their full names (title and first name), country of origin, or, where all else has failed, including the ‘oon’ ending in their patronymic.

  A woman’s full name comprised her first name plus the patronymic ‘dochter’, daughter of. For example, Lucretia Jansdochter translates as Lucretia, daughter of Jans. The female patronymic was frequently abbreviated to ‘dr’. For all women, who are few enough in this book to avoid confusion through shared first names, when not including an abbreviated patronymic without the ‘dr’ – for example, Lucretia Jans – I have used solely their first names.

  Measurements

  I have avoided using both modern measurements, such as kilograms, kilometres and metres, and seventeenth-century Dutch measurements, such as a mutsken, equivalent to around a quarter of a pint, or kannen, equivalent to around one and three-quarter pints, and have instead used imperial measurements such as tons and miles, for ease of storytelling while still retaining an old-world feel.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Spice Trade

  Jesus Christ is good, but trade is better.

  Unofficial motto of the Dutch East India Company

  Our story is set in a time of strangely overlapping cusps.

  For it takes place as the era of exploration is gradually giving way to the age of colonialism. It is a time when, as one powerful empire is destroying itself through religious zealotry, another is rising fast through its own fervent embrace of a new creed: corporate power. It is at the end of an epoch when most people live their entire lives within 20 miles of their birthplace, and on the leading edge of an age when events on one side of the planet can have an impact on even the most far-flung, seemingly inconsequential crag of rock on the other. And such is the strange symmetry of this story that even the particular crag of rock that will feature in these pages, the Abrolhos Archipelago, is two things at once: the southernmost group of islands in the world defended by coral reefs and the northernmost group of islands in the southern hemisphere populated by sea lions.

  And it all comes together in this saga, which, by any measure, is one of the most stunning stories the world has known. It combines in just the one tale such momentous elements as the world’s first corporation, the brutality of colonisation, the battle of good versus evil, the derring-do of seafaring adventure, mutiny, love, lust, bloodlust, greed, treasure, criminality, a reign of terror, murders most foul, sexual slavery, natural nobility, survival, retribution, rescue, first contact with native peoples and so much more.

  To do the story justice, thus, and put it all in context, let us begin some 135 years before its principal events occurred...

  In 1492, it wasn’t just the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus who was sailing the ocean blue. Christoffa Corombo, sailing for Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, was just one of many mariners heading out from Europe, looking for a route to the place known as the Spice Islands.

  While gold may have been the common obsession of mankind since antiquity, the thing that ran it close and then surpassed it in the 1500s and 1600s was spice. Cinnamon, particularly, was so vaunted for its extraordinary medicinal powers that it was considered a cure for nothing less than the plague – ‘No man should die who can afford cinnamon’ was a saying of the time – and it was also regarded as an aphrodisiac, as were cloves. The reputation of cloves was particularly widespread, with the Chinese believing that, as well as being the base of perfumes, cloves mixed with milk vastly improved the pleasures of sex.

  Other spices, such as nutmeg and mace – both derived from the same fruit – were valued for their medicinal qualities and as preserving agents. Most importantly, these spices, along with pepper, were prized for their extraordinary effect on the flavour of otherwise bland food. Even an amount sprinkled more sparsely than parsley could make a meal taste fit for a king, and the rich people of Europe were therefore prepared to pay a king’s ransom for it.

  Pepper wa
s so valuable it was sometimes referred to as ‘black gold’. And, while one could buy a small barrel of nutmeg weighing ten pounds in the East Indies for as little as the equivalent of a penny, in London that same amount was worth 50 shillings – 600 times its original price.

  Very few traders, other than those who conducted their business near the point of origin, actually knew where the spices came from. In order to preserve the commercial advantage of those in possession of the truth, the locations were kept a closely guarded secret – keeping the Europeans, in particular, wildly guessing.

  Some said they came from tiny, exotic islands far, far to the east, protected by a monster of ‘devilish possession’ that liked nothing better than attacking passing ships. Others talked of a faraway land peopled by warriors whose special delight was displaying the rotting heads of their victims upon the walls of their huts. Still others believed that spices came from, or near, the Garden of Eden, which was a real place located somewhere in Asia. The point that all these stories had in common was that the spices came from a place very far away and very dangerous to reach.

  The Portuguese were the first to truly locate and settle on the Spice Islands, or Moluccas. In early 1512, the Portuguese navigator António de Abreu led two ships there – specifically, to the Banda Islands – practically smelling their way for the last ten miles, as the delicious scent of nutmeg was carried to them across the waters. Their initial relations with the natives were friendly. For a pittance, they were able to fill their holds with both nutmeg and the cloves that came from the islands of Ternate and Tidore just over 300 miles to their north. They safely returned to Lisbon with their precious cargo, along with something equally valuable: charts directing their countrymen to the bounteous islands.

  And yet, a particularly significant breakthrough followed in the early 1590s, when two Dutch brothers, by the names of Cornelis and Frederick de Houtman, were sent by a consortium of nine Dutch merchants to Lisbon to begin trading relations and find out as much about the location of the Spice Islands as they could. With precisely the latter in mind, they stole the Portuguese’s closely protected seafaring charts and were imprisoned for their trouble.

  No matter. Once back in Amsterdam after three years in prison, Cornelis de Houtman managed to raise 300,000 guilders to build four ships designed specifically to get to the Spice Islands.

  After engaging a crew and purchasing merchandise for trade, the de Houtmans set sail on 2 April 1595 with the Amsterdam, Hollandia, Mauritius and Duyfken – all under Cornelis’s command – for the port of Bantam, situated in the Sunda Strait, on the western tip of Java.

  In many ways, it proved to be a disastrous trip, more to do with murder and pillage than with trade, but the bottom line – and that was the very line the Dutch merchants always looked to, regardless of human cost – was that when the surviving vessels got back to Amsterdam two years later, on 11 and 14 August 1597, missing two-thirds of their original crew but carrying some spice, all of Amsterdam was agog. The sale of those spices covered the 300,000 guilders invested, with a little left over.

  And so it began. In March 1599, a fleet of eight ships under Jacob van Neck reached the Spice Islands. Over the next six years, eight different companies dispatched a total of 65 ships spread over 15 fleets, most of which returned laden with lucrative spices – although, again, there proved to be a serious commercial problem. It was one thing to have broken the Portuguese monopoly at one end, but the trade could only be truly lucrative if the Dutch merchants could establish their own monopoly at the other end.

  There were simply too many merchants competing with each other, which drove up the price of spice in the East Indies and drove it so far down back in the Dutch Republic that it began to defeat the purpose of getting it in the first place.

  Could something not be done?

  To this point, Dutch merchants from six different Dutch towns had combined their resources to fund and then divide the profits from individual ventures, with this commercial union being dissolved the moment their cargo came back. But now, suddenly, a different idea, a revolutionary idea, took hold. Why not stay together? Why not form a ‘company’ of merchants that could establish a Dutch cartel over both the purchase and the sale of the spices? This would allow all investors in the said company to share both the risk, which would be minimised, and the profits, which would be maximised. Investors in the company could even have a certain number of ‘shares’ to register what proportion of the company they owned, shares that could rise or fall in value according to the profit being made.

  Right from the beginning, those investors in the shares were drawn from all walks of Dutch life, from wealthy merchants to labourers, housemaids and clergymen. Their names would go into a registry and they would get receipts acknowledging how much stock they had and what they had paid for it. Now, to help those who wished to buy or sell their parts in the company, there soon developed a lively trade in those receipts, where, effectively, the stock was exchanged – so lively that a whole separate institution was soon established, called a ‘stock exchange’.

  The truly revolutionary part, though, was that the members of the public who invested in the company would be able to receive regular dividends once the profits rolled in. And yet another new concept was that the company would effectively be ‘multinational’ – a business that would transcend many national borders. It would be an entirely different way of doing business.

  And so, following the lead of the English, who had formed their own East India Company two years earlier – even though the English had not embraced the full corporate model – on 20 March 1602 the Dutch formed the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), with the full force of the Dutch Government behind it.

  The VOC was granted by its government not only the sole right to Asian trade but also the right to engage in areas of activity usually reserved for the state: establishing colonies, coining monies, maintaining private armies and navies, fighting the enemies of the Republic, signing treaties with Asian potentates, building forts in the islands they were trading with and even subjugating entire populations. Not for nothing was it known as a state within a state. In fact, it was one destined to soon be more powerful than the state that had fathered it, as it had the entire world in which to expand.

  The leadership of the VOC, known as the Heeren XVII, the Lords XVII, directed everything from the shipbuilding activities in their six trading towns (Amsterdam, Middelburg, Hoorn, Deft, Rotterdam and Enkhuizen) to determining precisely where those ships would sail, who would man them and who they would trade with. Each ship proudly flew the company’s own flag from her stern, with the initial of the originating town worked into the company’s logo – the first logo of the first public company. Henceforth in Dutch national life, any reference to ‘the Company’, of course with a capital ‘C’, was ever and always a reference to the single most important institution in the country, the VOC.

  With such extraordinary profits on offer, wasted time was wasted money – and, as a secondary consideration, wasted lives. Many men could be expected to die in a gruelling year-long journey to the East Indies, and the majority of those deaths typically came in the last months. If a quicker way to travel could be found, there would be far less bother about always having to find new employees to replace the perished ones.

  A notable breakthrough came in 1611 when a brave captain with the VOC, Hendrick Brouwer, decided to try something new. Up until then, having passed the tip of South Africa heading east, one tightly adhered to the sight of land then bobbled roughly north-eastwards up along the east African coast, via Mombasa, meandered across the Arabian Sea to India, then on to Ceylon, before at last heading over to the East Indies via the Strait of Malacca.

  Brouwer had no patience for this ‘slow boat to China’ method, which required around 12 months’ sailing to get from Amsterdam to the East Indies, and wondered what winds might be out in the open ocean that – despite the risk of being well away from l
and – would make the trip quicker. Thus, having rounded the Cape of Good Hope, instead of navigating nor’ by nor’-east to keep the east coast of Africa off his port quarter, he headed east and . . .

  And he was soon near blown away by what he discovered. Once he was out into that open ocean, there proved to be a consistent enormous wind blowing from right behind him, a wind they called Westenwindengordel, west-wind-belt. Captain Brouwer and his crew were soon hurtling eastwards at a speed never before imagined possible. The Westenwindengordel, it was found, was at its strongest and most constant in the latitudes between 40 and 50 degrees south – a region that would become known as the Roaring Forties.

  Brouwer’s plan at this point was to keep close estimation of the distance travelled each day so he would be able to work out when he was due south of the East Indies, on a longitude some 4000 miles east of the Cape, at which point he intended to turn north towards the Sunda Strait.

  It all worked perfectly. Brouwer made his calculations, turned to the north at the right time and his ship arrived in Bantam a staggering six months earlier than predicted – what’s more, with a crew that was much healthier than normal. A new era in international maritime trade had begun.

  It was not always so easy, however, to calculate the right time for turning north, as a Dutch captain by the name of Dirk Hartog discovered while testing it in 1616. He left Texel – the island north-west of Amsterdam used as a roadstead for a lot of Dutch shipping – on 23 January in his ship the Eendracht on her maiden voyage, carrying ten money chests loaded with 80,000 reals, the silver Spanish coins also known as pieces of eight. They reached the Cape of Good Hope on 5 August and stayed there for just over three weeks, before heading out on Brouwer’s route.

  Now, likely because of the vagaries of the currents, Hartog turned his ship north at a later point than Brouwer had, and, while crossing the line of roughly 26 degrees south on 25 October 1616, he suddenly came upon ‘various islands, which were, however, found uninhabited’. After dropping anchor, Hartog was rowed ashore and briefly explored the main island, staying there for three days and naming it Eendrachtsland, after his ship.