Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny

by Mike Dash

  Pelsaert’s plan was to send large quantities of special silver plate to India. These goods, which he called “toys,” would be carefully commissioned to suit the local tastes identified in his remonstrantie and could be relied upon to impress the Moguls with the power of the VOC. Items of silverware could be given as gifts, sold at the imperial court, or exchanged for spice. The toys would make a memorable impression and might also win favor and new trading privileges for the Dutch.

  Impressed by Pelsaert’s detailed knowledge of Indian affairs, the Gentlemen XVII agreed to commission plate to the upper-merchant’s specifications. In doing so they took a considerable risk, for the final cost of the consignment of silver was almost 60,000 guilders. But so great was the VOC’s new confidence in Pelsaert that he now received not just a new and better contract, but instructions to accompany his toys back to India.

  By late summer, then, Pelsaert found himself restored to favor. He would sail to Surat with his silver plate, the Gentlemen XVII decreed, traveling via the East Indies. The main autumn fleet was due to leave home waters late in October 1628 under the command of Jacques Specx of the Hollandia—a member of the Council of the Indies and one of the most senior and experienced traders in the VOC. It was expected to include several retourschepen of the largest kind, including the brand-new Batavia.

  Though still being completed at the Peperwerf, Batavia already had a skipper. Ariaen Jacobsz’s safe handling of the Dordrecht had so impressed the directors of Jan Company that they had chosen him, of all their sailors, to command the new ship on her maiden voyage. She had an under-merchant, too, in the untried, untested Jeronimus Cornelisz. All that she now required was an upper-merchant of ability and wide experience. One candidate seemed particularly suitable.

  Francisco Pelsaert joined them just before they sailed.

  3

  The Tavern of the Ocean

  “Now and then persons of strange opinion come here.”

  JACQUES SPECX

  A GREAT FLEET WAS ASSEMBLING NEAR THE ISLAND OF TEXEL. Nearly a dozen huge East Indiamen lay at anchor in the Moscovian Roads while the sea around them swarmed with small boats full of sailors and barges packed with ballast for the holds. The Batavia was there, with several other large retourschepen moored close by—the Dordrecht, ’s Gravenhage,*13 Nieuw Hoorn, and Hollandia. A group of smaller vessels, fluyten and jachten, had anchored close inshore. The whole fleet was alive with preparations for the long voyage east.

  It was now late October 1628. Autumn was the busiest time of year for the VOC; weather conditions in the Atlantic favored a fast passage to the Indies for ships that left the Netherlands before Christmas, recruitment became easier as Holland’s summer sailors became desperate for work, and ships reached the Indies at the perfect time to load fresh crops of spices. Before they could depart, however, each vessel had to take on board not only a cargo and a crew, but all the supplies required to sustain her for up to a year at sea. Into her 160-foot length the Batavia now had to pack 340 people with all their personal possessions, many tons of equipment, and materiel for the garrisons of the East.

  Up from the barges came several thousand barrels of supplies, then sailors’ sea chests by the hundred. Wood for the galley stove and ammunition for the guns were stowed below, and the deck was festooned with coils of rope and cable. Over the sides swarmed a multitude of ill-dressed sailors, whom Jan Evertsz and his men drove to work with curses and knotted lengths of rope. Next came the soldiers—a handful of young company cadets and noncommissioned officers leading a hundred undernourished men off to five years of garrison duty in the Indies—and finally, when the work of loading had been done, Jeronimus Cornelisz and the merchants of the VOC.

  In all probability, the Frisian apothecary had never before stepped aboard a ship the size of the Batavia. Like most landsmen, his initial impressions of an East Indiaman were most likely wonder at her great size and alarm at the apparent frenzy up on deck. There are accounts, written by awestruck German soldiers, that testify to the remarkable impression a fully rigged retourschip made on those who came alongside her for the first time; “true castles,” they were sometimes called, which seemed enormous when approached from sea level in a boat. Looking up as they came alongside, many merchants felt quite dwarfed by the sheer wooden walls that towered out of the water all around them and by the massive masts and yards soaring almost 200 feet into the air above their heads.

  The chaos up on deck must have been even more disconcerting—the planking strewn with a disordered mass of gear, and ragged sailors rushing to and fro in response to orders the landsmen did not even understand. The constant motion of the anchored ship—which rolled incessantly in the choppy autumn sea—was very far from pleasant, but, dimly through their discomfort, Cornelisz and his colleagues would have been aware they were now committed to the voyage, and to whatever consequences might flow from it.

  In the midst of all this bustle and confusion, the chief comfort to the novice tradesmen would undoubtedly have been the thought that they would not be expected to share quarters with the rabble milling around them. The most luxurious berths in the Batavia’s stern were always given over to the merchants of the VOC, and the area abaft the mainmast would become the exclusive preserve of the ship’s officers, the merchants, and their servants. This arrangement at least ensured them some privacy and reduced the prospect of discomfort, since the ship pitched and yawed less violently by the stern. In the course of a nine-month voyage, such incidental mercies came to mean a lot.

  The best quarters of all went to the most senior men aboard. Francisco Pelsaert and Ariaen Jacobsz shared the privilege of using what was known as the Great Cabin on the level of the upper deck. It was by far the largest room on the ship and easily the best lit, as it alone was fitted with lattice windows rather than portholes. Its centerpiece was a long table capable of seating 15 or 20 people, and it was here that Pelsaert and his clerks transacted their daily business while at sea and the senior officers and merchants ate their meals. The rest of the officers’ quarters were located elsewhere in the stern. Jeronimus and half a dozen other distinguished passengers were shown to a warren of little cabins on the deck above, where the quarters were smaller and more spartan; the more junior officers and the Company clerks shared a large communal cabin just below the steersman’s station. When it came to accommodation, the VOC had spared considerable expense. The private quarters were quite unheated, only marginally better ventilated than the rest of the ship, and less than the span of a woman’s arms in breadth—but at least they offered the luxury of bunks instead of sleeping mats, sufficient room to put a writing desk and chair, and cabin boys to fetch and carry meals and empty chamber pots.

  The allocation of these cabins was determined by rank and precedence. The best would have gone to Jeronimus, the under-merchant, who was after Pelsaert the most senior representative of Jan Company on board. Ariaen Jacobsz’s second-in-command, the upper-steersman Claes Gerritsz, would have had another, and in normal circumstances the Batavia’s two under-steersmen (whose rank was roughly equivalent to a modern-day lieutenant’s), the provost (who was responsible for discipline on board), and the most senior of the VOC assistants might also have expected cabins of their own.

  On this voyage, however, the Batavia was carrying two high-ranking passengers whose presence upset the normal rules of precedence. One was a Calvinist predikant, or minister, named Gijsbert Bastiaensz, a citizen of the ancient town of Dordrecht who was sailing to the Indies with his wife, a maid, and seven children. The other was Lucretia Jansdochter, an unusually beautiful and highborn woman who came from Amsterdam and was traveling to join her husband in the East. Both would have been allocated cabins near Jeronimus’s. In the close confines of the stern, the three of them could hardly help but become acquainted.

  It is not difficult to guess whose company Cornelisz would have most enjoyed. Creesje (she was generally known by her diminutive) was not only youthful and attractive; she came from a famil
y of merchants and thus commanded a social status equal to Jeronimus’s own. Gijsbert Bastiaensz, on the other hand, was in many ways Cornelisz’s opposite. He came from the most southern part of the province of Holland; he was 52 years old; and he was a strict, straightforward Calvinist with very little formal education. His scant surviving writings betray no hint of wit or intellectual curiosity; there was no room in his theology for the exotic speculations that the under-merchant entertained, and had Jeronimus dared to explain his true beliefs, the predikant would certainly have been scandalized by them. As it was, Cornelisz kept his own counsel on the subject and wisely chose to charm the preacher rather than confront him.

  Gijsbert Bastiaensz was later to confess that he had entirely failed to recognize the undertows that lurked beneath Jeronimus’s superficial decency. This failure was hardly surprising. The predikant was an honest and straightforward sort, of little intuition and less experience, whose horizons had until quite recently been limited to his calling and his church. Dordrecht was noted for its uncomplicated orthodoxy. A minister from such a town would hardly have encountered a creature quite like Cornelisz before.

  Bastiaensz, it seems, was a typical example of the Indies predikant. Because the Reformed Church was quite devoid of missionary zeal—the doctrine of predestination implied there was little point in converting heathens—it was never easy to persuade ministers to serve in the east. The few who went were seldom members of the Calvinist elite. They were, rather, “hedge-preachers”: artisans whose religious views were frequently naive, and who, while preaching economy and restraint, were often in financial difficulties themselves.

  The predikant of the Batavia was all these things and more. Gijsbert Bastiaensz was a member of the working classes of the Dutch Republic, who made a living with his hands and attended to church business when he could. He had little formal education. But—like Jeronimus Cornelisz—he was a man on the verge of ruin, forced by the threat of bankruptcy to seek redemption in the east.

  The minister’s early life had been comfortable enough. His father, Bastiaen Gijsbrechtsz, had been a miller, and Gijsbert followed him into what appears to have been a well-established family business. In February 1604 he was married to Maria Schepens, the daughter of a Dordrecht wine merchant, and—as was common at the time—the couple produced a large family. There were eight children in all, four boys and four girls, and no fewer than seven survived infancy. The fact that so many of the children lived, and that their father was able to provide for them, suggests that—for the first two decades of the century at least—Bastiaensz controlled a profitable mill.

  By the time that he was 30, the miller had become an elder of the Reformed Church of Dordrecht. Between 1607 and 1629, Gijsbert Bastiaensz served no fewer than five two-year terms on the town’s church council, a proud record that suggests he was among the best-respected (and most strictly orthodox) churchmen in the town. Further proof of this contention can be found in the voluminous legal records of Dordrecht, where the predikant appears as an arbitrator, an executor, and a witness who stood surety in a number of legal cases. All of these were solemn duties assumed only by those whom the public trusted—men of unimpeachable integrity.

  For all that, the mill that the predikant owned and ran for a quarter of a century was not a very grand one. He relied for his living on a rosmolen (a horse-powered mill) rather than one of the newer and more efficient windmills then becoming widespread in the Netherlands. During the severe depression of the 1620s, the owners of rosmolens often struggled to make a living, while millers who ground corn more quickly and more cheaply using windmills prospered. Gijsbert Bastiaensz was one of many who could not compete. Between 1618—when he appears in the town records as a landowner with his own mill and 12 rented acres of grazing for his horses—and 1628, the predikant’s financial position disintegrated. At around the time that Jeronimus was transferring all his worldly goods to the merchant Vogel, Bastiaensz was signing his home and mill over to his own creditors.

  His good name and his faith were of no help now, and there were no church livings to be had in Dordrecht. With eight mouths to feed, the predikant applied to be a preacher in the Indies. He was in Amsterdam by the second week of September, became an employee of the VOC at the beginning of the following month, and found himself on board Batavia a few weeks later. His wife and children, who had lived in Dordrecht all their lives, had been uprooted with him. The eldest boy was 22 years old and the youngest only 7; too young, no doubt, to understand how little chance there was the whole family would return alive.

  In another cabin in the stern, Creesje Jans sat amid the handful of personal possessions she had been permitted to bring on board. She was 27 years old and had been married to a VOC under-merchant named Boudewijn van der Mijlen for nearly a decade, but her decision to join him in the Indies requires some explanation. Van der Mijlen had sailed for the East without her, apparently in 1625 or 1626, and it was most unusual for an under-merchant’s wife to follow later and alone. In Lucretia Jans’s case, however, the archives of her native Amsterdam provide a ready explanation for her presence on board the Batavia. Creesje was an orphan whose three infant children had all died, one by one. By 1628 she had no reason to stay in the United Provinces. Boudewijn, wherever he might be, was all that she had left.

  Creesje had never known her father, a cloth merchant who died before she was born. When she was two years old, her mother Steffanie had remarried and her stepfather, a naval captain named Dirk Krijnen, had moved the family first to the Leliestraat, in a fashionable and wealthy quarter of Amsterdam, and eventually to the Herenstraat—then, as now, one of the more expensive and prestigious addresses in the city. Creesje’s mother died in 1613, when her daughter was only 11 years old, and the girl became a ward of the Orphan’s Court, while continuing, it seems, to live with her stepfather; sister, Sara; and a stepsister, Weijntgen Dircx. Within a few years, however, Krijnen too was dead, a loss that may have helped to propel Lucretia into her early union with Boudewijn van der Mijlen.

  The bride was 18 on her wedding day. According to the marriage register, Creesje’s husband was a diamond polisher who lived in Amsterdam but came from the town of Woerden. The couple’s three children—a boy named Hans and two girls, Lijsbet and Stefani—were born between 1622 and 1625, but none lived to reach the age of six. Such misfortune was exceptional, for even in the seventeenth century child mortality generally ran at no more than one infant in every two, and it is possible that the children may have succumbed to some epidemic. There is, however, no evidence of this; nor is much known of Boudewijn’s business affairs. All that can be said is that he, too, most likely suffered badly in the recession of the 1620s. Certainly no successful diamond merchant would voluntarily join the VOC only to be sent, as Van der Mijlen was, to Arakan—a stinking, disease-ridden river port in Burma—to deal in slaves for the greater glory of Jan Company.

  Boudewijn had received orders to sail for Arakan in the autumn of 1627, when he was living in Batavia, and it took so long—up to a year—for letters to travel from there to the Netherlands that Creesje was surely unaware her husband would not be in Java when she arrived. It seems equally improbable that her voyage was planned 12 months or more in advance, and that he knew she would be leaving the Republic. Most likely the last of Creesje’s children died some time in 1628 and she, weighed down with grief, made the more or less impulsive decision to rejoin her husband, sending perhaps a letter in advance and settling her remaining affairs in time to secure a berth on the Batavia. She took with her no more than a few belongings and a lady’s maid. Like Cornelisz and Bastiaensz, Creesje Jans had little reason to look back.

  So much for the passengers in the stern. Like all East Indiamen, the Batavia was a segregated ship, in which the accommodation got more spartan as one moved toward the bow. Those of middling rank, particularly the “idlers” (specialists such as the surgeons, sailmakers, carpenters, and cooks who were not expected to stand watch and work by night) lived
down on the gun deck, though they too had the privilege of relatively spacious berths in the forecastle or the stern. The sailors and soldiers who made up more than two-thirds of the crew, on the other hand, were crammed into the space “before the mast,” and it was a serious offense for any of them to appear aft unless their duties called them there.

  This strict segregation served several purposes. It reinforced status and emphasized the divisions that existed on board between soldiers and sailors, officers and men. But it was also a practical measure. Seamen and troops were placed on separate decks because long experience had shown that they did not get along and would fight if they were billeted together. Ordinary seamen were to stay before the mast to minimize the ever-present threat of mutiny, and the entrance to the officers’ quarters in the stern was fortified for the same reason.

  The soldiers came off worst from these arrangements. Their quarters were two decks down on the orlop—what the Dutch called the “cow-deck”—where the roof beams were so low it was impossible to stand upright, and which was so close to the waterline that it was equipped with neither vents nor portholes to provide a minimum of air and light. The orlop was actually part of the hold, and on return journeys it became a spice store. Uncomfortable though it was, it was not unknown for the troops to remain confined to this dark and airless deck for all but two 30-minute periods each day, when they were brought up under escort to taste fresh air and use the latrines.