And yet, for every pleasure does there not come a price? Just over two weeks after leaving Tafelbaai, Zwaantje has that paramour’s conversation with Jacobsz that is as anathema to him as it has been to many generations of men before him. Alas, the young lass believes she is with child. Verdoemenis! Damnation! Despite such events being considered the sole responsibility of women, this is not what Jacobsz wants or, somehow, expects. What to do, what to do?
Ever a practical man, Jacobsz is not long in deciding on the appropriate course of action. That very evening, he invites Zwaantje to one of the few truly private places on the ship, a place that only he and a very few others have the authority to enter, so sensitive is it: the constapelskamer, gun room.
Jacobsz and Zwaantje have just entered when, hello, who else should be there but Jacobsz’s long-time friend and fellow mariner, the gunner Allert Jansz. Hail fellow well met, and Jacobsz brings from under his coat three bottles of the Commandeur’s finest wine for them all to share, almost as if he was expecting Allert to be there. The skipper now proceeds to ply the two with generous amounts of alcohol before announcing with regret that he has to leave to check on the watch upstairs and he might be away for as long as half an hour. With a meaningful glance to Allert Jansz – all yours, my worthy – he takes his leave. A generous woman, Zwaantje is as liberal with her favours as Allert Jansz is to avail himself of them, and, just as Jacobsz knew would be the case, it is not long before the two drunken souls are engaged in time’s enduring act.
‘Pregnant, did she say?’ muses the skipper staring far out to sea. ‘And whose child do you suppose it might be, then?’ He smiles without mirth, drawing deep on his golden brown meerschaum pipe.
13 May 1629, Indian Ocean
‘And then, of course, once we have control . . .’ Jacobsz is saying to Jeronimus, before stopping mid-sentence and staring open-mouthed over Jeronimus’s shoulder, almost as if he is seeing a ghost.
And in many ways he is.
For there, wavering on the quarterdeck, suddenly back from the dead, is Pelsaert, closely attended on one side by Lucretia and on the other by his only real friend on the ship, Salomon Deschamps. The Commandeur has a drawn look about him. It is clearly an effort for him to stay upright, let alone move his body at all – he can only do so by leaning heavily on his elegant wooden cane – and his previously fleshy face is now so haggard that his rather bulging eyes have begun to take on the aspect of a dead fish. He looks, in short, nothing less than cadaverous, as if he has just arisen from his coffin, with his pale white face getting its first bit of sun in four weeks.
But he is upright, and walking, and even talking to Lucretia and Deschamps, and the very fact that he is here is a clear indication that he is stronger today than yesterday, and will very likely be stronger again on the morrow. His crisis is past. (Even if he does turn rather green around the gills when Jacobsz lights up his pipe and starts puffing smoke.)
Jeronimus and Jacobsz once again have Pelsaert to contend with when it comes to getting control of the ship. They are running out of time, and Pelsaert’s return among them changes the entire dynamic of the operation. Had he died, as they were expecting, Jeronimus would have been the highest VOC official on board and Jacobsz entirely unchallenged in his authority over the ship. With that joint authority, taking control and plundering it would have been a far easier matter. But now that Pelsaert is on deck, the Commandeur once again has all the authority invested in him, and it will now have to be wrenched from him by force.
But how? At this point they total just 20 committed mutineers and have not bothered to continue recruiting in previous weeks, because it did not seem necessary. They have signed up all the men they can without venturing into the very risky territory of asking those who may or may not be interested. And while 20 mutineers is good, it is not nearly enough now to seize control of the ship.
The problem is that most of the sailors and soldiers simply aren’t unhappy enough with Commandeur Pelsaert. To most of them, he has been a relatively reasonable, if mostly ineffective, leader of the fleet. He has not mistreated any of those under his command, not abused his position and not called for the flogging or keel-hauling of any aboard, which might have generated a bit of hatred. If anything, he is simply irrelevant.
What is needed is to find something that will turn the whole ship’s crew firmly against him, something that will make them rise up as one in protest over some brutal injustice he has visited upon them all. But what? What single thing could they do to guarantee Pelsaert punishing the whole crew in an effort to get at just a few culprits?
After furtive discussion late at night in the Great Cabin, the skipper, Jeronimus and Jan Evertsz come up with a plan. At Jacobsz’s insistence, they decide to involve many men in a job that could easily be accomplished by just two – on the grounds that the more men involved, the wider the Commandeur will have to spread his net, and the higher the chances that the ship’s company will be roused against him. The men will be led by Evertsz and include the likes of Ryckert Woutersz and Allert Jansz.
14 May 1629, Indian Ocean
Zwaantje is making Lucretia uneasy, something of a habit of late. This is not because of what Lucretia’s former maid says, because they no longer speak, but because of the way she looks at her. Usually, Zwaantje would stare straight through her, or scowl, but on this day she has been positively beaming at her in a malicious kind of way. It is unnerving, almost as if she knows something that Lucretia does not.
Lucretia is troubled and can’t follow the ins and outs of Zwaantje’s relationship with Jacobsz. A fortnight ago, their ardour seemed to have cooled, yet a week ago they were back together more closely than ever. (Unbeknown to Lucretia, Zwaantje had discovered she wasn’t pregnant after all, and from that moment Jacobsz’s passion for her had instantly reignited.)
Regardless of the Zwaantje trouble, however, the wonderful news is that the Commandeur is back on his feet and appears to be rapidly getting better. There is even a chance he will appear at dinner this night, and for this reason Lucretia is intent on taking more care than usual with her make-up, which is an exacting process. For the foundation, she mixes together chalk, egg-white and vinegar, and then pastes the concoction over her face before smoothing it out with a small spatula. Now, she turns her attention to reddening her cheeks, which is achieved through application of her specially procured Spanish paper coated with red dye. She then applies cochineal to her lips to make them redder and copious dabs of perfume between her breasts from one of the many glass phials she keeps in her sea chest. Finally, she puts her dress on before heading to dinner, where she is immediately disappointed to see that Pelsaert is not there after all.
Zwaantje, however, is there, sitting in her customary position to the right of Jacobsz, and once more seeming gleeful for reasons best known to herself.
At dinner’s merciful conclusion, Lucretia decides to go straight back to her cabin and thus must momentarily head out onto the open deck, to gain the stairs that lead to her abode. As soon as she steps into the passageway on her way out, in a terrible instant she finds herself gripped from behind, with one filthy hand covering her mouth, preventing her from screaming, while a forearm has her hard across the throat.
Uselessly, she kicks out with her feet to try to break free, and she is dragged from the relative darkness of the passageway to the all but complete darkness of the night, as the wind roars and the swell mounts.
It is as if she is being attacked by a giant octopus that is all hands, hands that are now all over her body, tearing at her clothes, pawing at her womanhood. It is a nightmare without end. Through all the animal grunting going on around her, she manages to discern one intelligible phrase – ‘Hold her legs, lads’ – and even perhaps to recognise the voice. She tries to see, but in the darkness, in all the foetid fury of the assault, it is impossible to discern anything but avenging shadows.
The assault continues. When, momentarily, the hand is removed from her mouth, again she t
ries to scream, but out of the shattering night a closed fist hits her in the side of the head and she is immediately, perhaps mercifully, knocked into semiconsciousness. Then, according to a contemporary account, they proceed to ‘hang overboard by her feet the lady Van den Mylen and indecently maltreat her body’.
And now for the ultimate humiliation. After Lucretia is hauled back on board, a bucket is brought forward and each of the eight assailants is handed a rag. As the men half-gag at the unspeakable stench of it all, Lucretia is smeared from top to toe with a mixture of human waste and pitch, all over her face, her hair and her clothes.
A short time later, one of the officers on watch is doing his rounds when he hears – above the slap of the swell against the hull and the hum of the wind across the taut rigging – the barest whimper of a sound. At first, he thinks it must be one of the pigs that has been sick, and so ignores it, but then he hears it again. It sounds almost . . . human. Investigating, he cocks his ear to the wind and listens again. At the next whimper, he determines the direction it is coming from and walks towards it. There! Down at the base of the mizzen mast, he spies in the moonlight what at first appears to be a rumpled old pile of women’s clothes, but then he looks closer and sees there is a woman beneath them!
Uttering a small cry of surprise, he bounds forward and tries to help the woman to her feet, but it is hopeless and . . .
And what is that smell, that appalling stink coming from her? In an instant, he knows only too well. Though the woman’s clothes are torn all asunder, the rags that remain are besmirched with human waste, as is her face, hair and hands.
‘Men!’ he cries. ‘Over here! I need hulp, help!’
15 May 1629, Indian Ocean
On this day, just three weeks after leaving Tafelbaai, and still a little under two months from their final destination, the Batavia explodes at the terrible but exciting news – something has happened amid all the dreadful tedium! The first reports of the atrocious assault on Lucretia dart around the ship like a crazed rat in a maze, going from the officers on watch to the sailors on duty, and down to the cooks in the galley, who pass it on to the stewards in the mess, who tell the young aristocrat cadets having their breakfast, who tell the steersman and provost, who tell their wives, who reach for their fans and discuss it at such length that the cabin boys soon have every last detail and pass it on to the gunners, and so on as the news spreads right down through the sailors on the lower deck, and even to the soldiers down in the bowels of the ship.
All – at least those who did not plan or perpetrate it – are completely stunned by the calculated savagery of the act. While assaults on women on land are not uncommon, such crimes aboard a ship of this nature are something far worse, as they are an assault on the Company itself! The VOC has long prided itself on good order in all of its domains, from its warehouses to its ships to its markets to its headquarters, and this is an open attack on precisely that order, an open slap in the face. In its history, the VOC has never taken slaps in the face well and has usually reacted with cannon-fire. Everyone knows that the outraged Pelsaert will have to act.
There are no more interested observers than Jeronimus and Jacobsz, who look forward to seeing exactly what the Commandeur will do. The assault by eight men was the idea of Jacobsz, while Jeronimus thought the best thing was for one assailant to take a knife and to cut her facial muscles, rendering her ugly for life. Such is the response to the attack, with the whole ship like a volcano about to blow, that Jacobsz feels vindicated that his way was the right way. The only question is what exactly Pelsaert will do about it.
Their dearest wish is that he will order the provost to have soldiers arrest a large number of sailors, hopefully innocent ones, which will provide precisely the kind of environment they need. Such a move from Pelsaert would set the body of sailors against the soldiers, as well as against Pelsaert, and it would not be difficult to get the falsely accused, to begin with, to join the mutiny. After all, are innocent men really to be punished simply so Pelsaert can quell the anger of his adulterous whore, Lucretia? Who is to say she was actually assaulted, anyway? Perhaps she faked the whole thing, just to earn more of Pelsaert’s sympathy and care than she has acquired already!
Jan Evertsz manages to not only put such stories about the ship but also let it be known that if Pelsaert does try to punish anyone for this so-called attack on his slut, then Jacobsz himself will step in to protect those who stand accused – for the skipper simply will not stand by and see innocent men punished.
In preparation for this move, all of the mutineers are quietly armed with cutlasses and daggers to be secreted somewhere near at hand, ready to move at a moment’s notice. Once the word is given, the hatches to the soldiers’ deck will be nailed shut, Pelsaert will be carved up, and Jeronimus and Jacobsz, backed by Evertsz, Stonecutter and the men they bring with them, will have control of the ship and its treasure.
But Pelsaert, although furious to the point of apoplexy and well beyond, stays for the moment in his Great Cabin considering his position from all angles. One of those angles is that the whole disgraceful episode might well be viewed by the Company as a stain on his own name. Fleets with good Commandeurs make uneventful journeys, with all aboard respecting the peace. But not only has a high-born lady passenger of his fleet been attacked, it has happened on the flagship of the fleet, while he is on board! On a purely personal level, it is deeply embarrassing, and for the life of him Pelsaert cannot work out the true agenda of those who carried it out – though it will help immeasurably to find out who they are.
In long conversations with Lucretia in his cabin, again inflaming the rumours about the two of them, the only thing the good lady can affirm with Pelsaert is that one of the assailants’ voices she recognised as that of Jan Evertsz. Beyond that, she has no clue.
This creates an enormous problem. No fool, Pelsaert can sense the dangerous mood of the ship, even though he has no idea how far the plans for mutiny have proceeded. He knows Evertsz to be close to the skipper, and, as unearthly evil as it may be, the more he examines it the more he even suspects Jacobsz to be the author of the whole terrible attack. If he arrests the very popular Evertsz, he risks pushing the crew to open revolt. Yes, his duty to the Company is to maintain order, and the assault on Lucretia will have to be avenged. But, for the moment, his highest duty of all is to comport himself in a manner whereby the Batavia will continue on her appointed course and arrive before the portals of the citadel of Batavia on schedule, with all of her cargo intact.
For this is not just another voyage. This is an enormous ship with fully one-fifth of the net capital of the VOC in the East Indies lying in her holds. He is in overall command, and doing anything to heighten the risk of failing to complete the voyage is completely unthinkable.
At this time, the ship is in the open ocean, well removed from the safety that the citadel of Batavia would provide, where all the power and authority of the VOC could be brought to bear on these criminals. Better, Pelsaert decides, to wait until they are either at Batavia or at least much closer before arresting Evertsz, at which point Batavia’s torturer would be encouraged to engage in some of his finest work and extract from the high bosun exactly who his accomplices in the outrage were, starting with Jacobsz. In the meantime, thus, Pelsaert decides to do . . . precisely nothing.
Jeronimus and Jacobsz are flabbergasted. The assault on Lucretia has gone exactly as planned, yet Pelsaert has failed to act. What now? Should they launch the mutiny with just the men they have, or take the risk of recruiting more?
For the moment, they decide to bide their time. They still can’t believe that Pelsaert won’t make a move sooner or later, which will make their mutiny all the easier to organise. They will lie in wait until then. If Pelsaert does not make his move, surely they will make their own and fully launch the mutiny.
CHAPTER THREE
The Shine of the Moon o’er the Waves
I did not sleep, but watched out very well, for when I saw
the breakers in the distance I asked Hans the gunner, what can that be?
Skipper Ariaen Jacobsz
4 June 1629, Indian Ocean
For Jacobsz, while midnight is his favourite time for being in a bar onshore, offshore there is no doubt that this is the best time of the sailing day, and these are the best conditions imaginable. On this clear night, three hours before dawn, the Batavia – flagship of a proud and mighty Dutch fleet – has all of her sails completely filled with bounteous winds from the south-west, her three pine masts and bowsprit creaking happily under the strain of it all. On this, her maiden voyage, she arrows through the aquatic realm, the moonbeams shining brightly upon the delightful phosphorescence in her wake, the majestic train of this newly crowned queen.
By Jacobsz’s estimation, the ship is close to her maximum speed of about eight knots as she rides the swells, skidding down one wave and quickly climbing the next, her bulbous bow tucking the water beneath her like a duck’s breast. There is a purity to sailing like this, a mesmerising rhythm to it as the top of the mizzen mast slices graceful arcs through the night sky and the bow rises and falls on the swell. It all takes him back to his childhood, learning sailing at the hands of his father on the Zuyder Zee, a joyous exercise so far removed from all the adult complexities that come with making sailing one’s life. And the wonderful thing about being out in the open ocean like this – according to his calculations at noon the day before, they are about 600 miles off the coast of het Zuidland – is that they need have no fear about the speed they are travelling. A few days earlier, he turned the Batavia to port, to head towards the Sunda Strait far to their north, and they are now heading nor’ by nor’-east.
Still, notwithstanding the fact that Skipper Jacobsz is so confident of their safety that he does not even bother to have a man in the top, he knows he can never relax too much, as long experience has taught him to expect the unexpected when at sea. Standing on the quarterdeck just above Claas Gerritsz, the opperstuurman in control of the whip-staff, Jacobsz grows instantly alert when he sights what appears to be a slightly strange water configuration dead ahead, something different from everything he has seen in his last few hours on watch. He instantly knows: difference is danger.
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