To Die a Dry Death: The True Story of the Batavia Shipwreck

by Greta van Der Rol

  The door rattled.

  What now? The jailer wouldn’t want the bowl back yet, surely? The key rasped in the lock and the massive door creaked open. Dim light from the passage silhouetted the figure. “Come on, on your feet. You’re wanted.”

  Wanted for what? More questions? What else was left to say? A tendril of fear curled in his stomach. They’d killed Evertsz and for what? But he stood, happy to at least be out of the horrible cell for a time. He walked to the door, aware of curious eyes watching him from the corners.

  The soldier stood aside to let him pass, where a second trooper waited, sweating in his leather coat. Even here, behind the thick walls, the sluggish air was warm and damp. Blinking in even this unaccustomed light, Jacobsz let himself be guided to another arched doorway that led outside. By now used to dimness, the sunlight pierced his skull and he closed his eyes.

  “Come on, man.” The soldier shoved him with his rifle. “You don’t keep the councillor waiting.”

  Through watering eyes Jacobsz glimpsed a walled courtyard with plants and seats before he was pushed through another door into a passage. The soldiers knocked and a voice called, “Enter.”

  Back straight, jaw jutting, Jacobsz strode into the room, the soldiers flanking him, shoes clattering on polished floorboards.

  Light from the courtyard spilled through large windows onto a heavy desk in the centre of the room. Behind it sat Antonio Van Diemen, Councillor of India.

  “Leave us,” he said, flashing a glance between the soldiers and the door.

  Jacobsz stared down at him, an ugly man with a squared off goatee beard and a moustache. Papers lay on the desk before him.

  When the door was closed, Van Diemen spoke. “I have here the report of Chief Interrogator van den Heuvel.” His fingers flexed on the papers. “You consistently denied the charge of conspiring to run off with your ship, the Batavia even when subjected to… persuasion.”

  Yes, he had. They’d stretched him on the rack. It was in the report, yet the man seemed to want confirmation. “My Lord, as I said to your interrogators, why would I? I am a seaman as was my father before me. I have sailed for the Company for years and I was given command of the pride of the fleet, a brand new ship. And if it were so, if I wished to steal the ship, would I not have done so earlier, perhaps when I lost the other ships of the fleet?”

  “And yet all these people say you conspired?”

  “I can say no more than I have already said. I conspired with no one.”

  “And this lady? Lucretia Jansz? Do you deny lusting after her?”

  “Have you seen her?” A merest spark in Van Diemen’s eye. “Well, then. I have red blood in my veins.”

  “You know nothing of this attack on her?”

  “It is as I said.”

  “Yes, yes, I know you turned to her servant.” Off-hand, dismissive.

  “Whom I have come to love. She gave me, willingly, what I wanted. Why should I waste my time attacking her employer?”

  Van Diemen’s eyes never left his face. “Pelsaert claims you intended to use the attack on the Lady Lucretia to launch your move to steal the ship.”

  Jacobsz stared at the floorboards at his feet. This entire interview seemed pointless. “My Lord, I have answered all these questions. You have my answers under your hand.”

  “Humour me. Pelsaert’s claims.”

  “Pelsaert.” Jacobsz’s mouth twisted at the thought of the man. Weak, conniving, murderous, Spanish swine. “I could have killed the man a dozen times. How easy to lose a man overboard? He was sick for weeks. He kept in his cabin. If I plotted with Jeronimus, how easy to have the apothecary brew medicine that would hasten his end? Why did I bother to take him in the longboat? It makes no sense.” No sense at all. His muscles ached in remembered pain. His wrists and ankles still bore the welts of the rack.

  “I must agree.”

  Agree? But Van Diemen spoke further.

  “You deny responsibility in the wreck of your ship?” asked the councillor.

  That he couldn’t deny. He closed his eyes, remembering his conversation with the lookout. White water or moonlight on the waves? “I am a good sailor. If another man can measure longitude better than I, name him. And even so, these little islands did not appear on my charts.”

  “True. All true. Governor Coen saw the South Land himself, when he came here on Eendracht. And so did I on the Mauritius. No one denies your seamanship, Jacobsz.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “What do you want?”

  Thoughts clamoured through Jacobsz’s brain. Images, pictures of the port of Amsterdam, the women in the taverns, the markets, Zwaantie. Why ask these things? Was this some kind of trap? His muscles ached and he felt an unusual tremor of weakness. “I want to go home to Amsterdam. I want to sail. I want my girl.”

  “I have the right to hold you here, fling you in a cell to rot. You know that.”

  “Yes.” Jacobsz remembered the rat in his cell. That was how he felt now, like a rat facing a cat.

  Van Diemen sagged back into his chair, a slight smile creasing his cheeks. “But I have a ship without a skipper. He just died of one of these infernal diseases. The fleet sails in two days and I have no one with enough experience to take his place.”

  Hope flared. “You mean…?”

  Van Diemen thrust across the desk at him and he took a step back. “Make no mistake, Captain. Your behaviour is not and cannot be excused. The Gentlemen of the Council would expect me to insist on some retribution. Lord Governor Specx would insist on retribution. So you will disappear. You will go now to your ship, as Captain Jacob Gerritsz, with your wife Anneke. Do you understand me?”

  “I… I understand you. And I’m grateful.”

  A raised eyebrow. “I expect you are.”

  Gerritsz finished the liquor. He’d have a few more days until the ice melted enough for him to get his ship out of Amsterdam and back to Hoorn. Zwaantie… no, Anneke… would be waiting.

  An Author’s Journey

  You could say that this book about the Batavia is an immigrant’s tale. I was born in Amsterdam and migrated with my family to Perth in Western Australia when I was just four years old. I grew up as an Aussie kid, in the sun and the surf, and being Dutch only mattered at Sinter Claas or Christmas when mum made delicious Dutch treats involving pastry, cream and marzipan. Sure, we heard a little about the Dutch ‘explorers’ at school, when we learnt about Australia’s early history. Some of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) ships accidentally bumped into the unknown south land. Some, like Dirk Hartog and Vlamingh, were lucky enough to make the encounter in daylight and survived to tell the tale; some didn’t. We children were taken to the museum and were shown a case with a skeleton in it which (we were told) came from a murder victim who’d been on a ship called the Batavia. I must have been ten or eleven years old at the time. Apart from seeing a real skeleton, it didn’t mean much to me then or when, just a few years later, in 1963, the newspapers were full of the discovery of the Batavia wreck site, three hundred and thirty-four years after she was lost.

  And then years later I visited the WA Maritime Museum with overseas friends. I’d never been there before. Like many others, I missed what was in my own backyard until I had a reason to look. I saw Batavia’s keel, rebuilt from timbers recovered from the wreck site, in the museum’s basement, and the portico intended for the fort at Batavia, whose stones had been her ballast. Then we went upstairs to the gallery where the museum displayed recovered artefacts from all four of the known Dutch wrecks—Batavia, Vergulde Draeck, Zuytdorp and Zeewijk—on the WA coast. Jugs, plates, scrimshaw, pipes, buttons—all sorts of things ordinary people would have used. And I had an epiphany. I remember the feeling clearly, as though I was looking down a four-hundred-year time tunnel. I could have had a relative on one of those ships. Very easily.

  I developed something of an obsession, looking up and reading what I could. Every single one of those wrecks has a mystery about it, or a
story of enterprise and courage. I visited the Zuytdorp wreck site on the cliffs that bear her name—cliffs known and avoided by the Dutch mariners after 1629. The men in Batavia’s longboat would have eyed those towering heights with dismay as they sailed for Java. I’ve stood at both sites regarded as possible candidates for the place where Pelsaert marooned two of the Batavia’s miscreants, the first white men to have inhabited Australia. In Holland the Dutch rebuilt the famous ship. I’ve stood on her decks twice; in Holland at her berth in the Lelystad shipyard and again in Sydney when she visited for the Olympic Games. Seeing the footage of her sailing under the Sydney Harbour Bridge brought a tear to my eye. I knew one day I’d write her story.

  The basic historical facts are relatively well-known in Australia and Holland. If you’re reading this, I assume you’ve read the book. You can find more information at my website:

  http://gretavanderrol.net/books-2/historical-fiction/the-history/

  It’s a fascinating, dreadful tale of heroism and depravity, survival, rape and death. It is small wonder that many books have been written about the Batavia. I’m aware of four fictional versions, an opera and a host of historical accounts. I have been at pains to keep to the facts as they were recorded and by that I mean those which can be verified by the archaeological record or by corroborating evidence from Batavia. Where ‘To Die a Dry Death’ varies from the party line, as pronounced by Pelsaert, is in the motivation of the ship’s captain, Adriaen Jacobsz.

  Immersed as I was in the history of the Batavia, I’d read all the non-fiction historical records I could get my hands on, but for ‘To Die a Dry Death’ I used three books extensively. Every book about the Batavia is based on one main account of the events—Pelsaert’s journal. Francisco Pelsaert was an employee of the Dutch East India Company, the Upper Merchant in charge of the fleet of which the Batavia was the flagship. So while Adriaen Jacobsz, the ship’s captain, was in command of the ship he was beholden to Pelsaert. The relationship was most like that of an admiral and a captain—but with that all-important caveat that Pelsaert was not a sailor. After the Batavia was wrecked, Pelsaert, knowing he would be called to account, started a journal to record events. On his return to the Abrolhos islands to rescue the remaining survivors, he documented the trial of Cornelisz and his band of thugs.

  Apart from the journal, the only other known contemporary document is a letter written by Predikant Bastiaensz to his family. It is about the only source for what happened in the last few days when the thugs made their final attacks on the soldiers. A few later documents have emerged, stories no doubt told by survivors, but some of those are hard to believe.

  Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s Voyage to Disaster (UWA Press, 2006) contains a translation of Pelsaert’s journal, Bastiaensz’s letter and other documents she was able to procure from Holland and Jakarta, such as Coen’s orders to Pelsaert. As an aside, Drake-Brockman, an amateur historian, actually deduced the whereabouts of the wreck from reading the descriptions of locations in the journal and the predikant’s letter. Archaeologists had been looking on the wrong reef. The ship was finally found in 1963, in the same year her book was first published.

  Mike Dash’s wonderful book Batavia’s Graveyard (Phoenix, 2002) is a much more recent work written by a trained historian. The book provided details about life on the ship and life in the colonies. I found out what people ate, discovered the soldiers would have had to buy their own equipment and got a real feel for the rigid layering of society. Dash used records from the other Dutch wrecks to deduce what life might have been like for the survivors; what they might have eaten—and who would have eaten what. He also researched the backgrounds of the main players in the drama—Pelsaert, Cornelisz and Lucretia van der Mijlen in particular. For me, this was fantastic. I could start to see what I was dealing with and put the people into historical context. I augmented impressions with the paintings of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ where one can see clothing, food, interiors and seascapes – both in Holland and in the city of Batavia. The Dutch national gallery (the Rijksmuseum) proved to be a wonderful resource. I could see drawings of the fort, sketches of Batavia street life, paintings of the wealthy burghers and the meals they ate.

  My third main source was The First and Last Voyage of the Batavia by Philippe Godard (Abrolhos Publishing, 1993). Godard’s lavish coffee table book provided photographs and sketches of the Abrolhos islands and their wildlife, coloured pictures of paintings, the layout of the fort at Batavia, the marine archaeology of the wreck site and cross-sections of the ship itself. The author commissioned paintings of the main players, too. But I ignored them. No one knows what any of these people looked like, not even Pelsaert.

  Okay, so I had a pretty good idea of the recorded facts and the historical and visual context. But that’s not a novel, is it? Characters make novels.

  Always, always I went back to the journal to try to see into these people’s minds. Most historians support the notion described by Pelsaert in his journal—that not long after the ship left Table Bay Adriaen Jacobsz had plotted with Cornelisz to hijack the Batavia, kill Pelsaert and go pirating. Drake-Brockman supported that belief, so did Dash, although Godard (another amateur) had his doubts. But it seemed strange to me for many, many reasons, not least because there is no record of Jacobsz having been executed. Had Jacobsz been guilty, this would have been a case of mutiny against the Company—punishable by a rather gruesome death. Other questions arise; why wait for so long before stealing the ship? If the plan was to murder Pelsaert what better time to do it than when the man was lying ill in his bunk for weeks on end after they left Table Bay? Cornelisz was an apothecary; he could easily have concocted a medicine that would kill. Dash addressed some of these questions but I remain unconvinced by his arguments.

  My picture of Pelsaert soon became one of a man trying to salvage his own reputation. Reading the early part of the journal, where Pelsaert describes the initial wreck, I raised an eyebrow as Pelsaert used ‘I’, implying he gave orders that would have been given by the captain. The same thing happened during the longboat’s journey as Pelsaert claimed credit for things I felt were beyond his knowledge. Jacobsz deserved the credit and received none. It was also important to remember the man for whom Pelsaert was writing this journal—the formidable Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Governor of the Indies. A harsh and puritanical man, he was unimpressed (to say the least) at the loss of a ship and its cargo. One could expect Pelsaert to be at pains to present his own actions in the best possible light.

  In contrast, my picture of the captain was of a tough, strong, capable man. A hard drinker, a womaniser sure enough; but a true leader, somebody these hardened seamen would follow. One has only to read between the lines; Jacobsz got the longboat to Batavia against all odds, not Pelsaert. Zwaantie, the young woman who won Jacobsz’s affection, is depicted in the journal as a tart. But again, some of the evidence for that conjecture comes from Cornelisz. I think the mere fact that Jacobsz took Zwaantie with him in the longboat indicates a little more than a casual fling.

  As I discuss in my article Getting into the Mind of a Psychopath (http://gretavanderrol.net/2012/02/25/getting-inside-the-mind-of-a-psychopath/) Cornelisz was silver-tongued, charismatic, an accomplished liar who would say anything to save himself. The main evidence for the existence of a piracy plot involving Jacobsz comes from Cornelisz. Corroborating testimony is given by some of his henchmen, but others claimed they knew nothing about a plot until after the wreck. Remember, too, that statements were extracted through torture. I began to wonder if I could build a case that Cornelisz deliberately wove a tale of a plot to seduce his followers. He needed sailors to pull off his plan to capture a rescue ship when it arrived and he was a merchant, not a seaman. What better way to add validity to his scheme than to imply that the popular captain had approved of and supported the move? Pelsaert and Jacobsz had a history, going back to previous voyages. The two men despised each other, a fact well known to all. That Jacobsz would participate in a move to over
throw Pelsaert was certainly plausible. For his part, Pelsaert jumped at the notion of a plot which would incriminate Jacobsz even more.

  The other two main characters in the story, Lucretia and Wiebbe Hayes, are merely bit players in the journal. In accordance with Dutch judicial practice of the time, no evidence is presented from either of them, although it is hard to imagine they would not have discussed events with Pelsaert. Dash and Drake-Brockman gave me the wherewithal to paint Lucretia as a real woman, a grieving mother going off to join her husband in a far-off land. Combine that with the perilous situation of a high-born lady left with a mob of louts and it’s easy enough to imagine how difficult it would be for her. I took the opportunity to use her as the eyes of the victims, if you like, interpreting events on Batavia’s Graveyard from her point of view.

  Dash also gave me a start with Hayes, probably a junior son of a fairly well-born family. From there, the unwritten story emerges in the journal. A leader who could pull together a disparate bunch of men and forge them into a group that could threaten armed thugs.

  One final, vital consideration when writing a book like this is to remember that people didn’t think the same way we do about many issues. In seventeenth century Holland life was cheap and brutal. Children often died before reaching their teens, justice was rough and harsh. Executions were entertainment. Heaven and hell, angels and demons, and sea monsters were all as real to them as the local football team is to us. I had to take care not to foist modern-day behavior on my characters—especially the women.

  Of course I made some things up. It’s a novel, after all. As well, the journal leaves holes where the hows and wherefores were not important for the task at hand—to document events. For Pelsaert it was enough to state that Cornelisz’s spy delivered his letter to the French soldiers on the High Island, but I needed to show how. Or why Cornelisz hesitated for a month before approaching Hayes and his group after his initial defeat?