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

by Mike Dash

  In the first years of the VOC, the Company’s sailors had largely kept to the sea lanes established by the Portuguese. From the Cape of Good Hope, these ran north along the African coast to Madagascar, and then northeast across the Indian Ocean to the Indies. There were, however, significant problems with this route. The heat was frequently unbearable, the Portuguese unfriendly, and there were numerous shoals and shallows to negotiate along the way. Furthermore, once north of the Cape, contrary winds and currents made the voyage extremely slow; journeys of up to 16 months were not uncommon. Frequent hurricanes also occurred, which caused the loss of many ships. The Dutch persisted with the Portuguese route, unsatisfactory as it clearly was, only because they knew of no alternative.

  Then, in 1610, a senior VOC official named Henrik Brouwer discovered an alternate passage far to the south of the established sea lanes. Heading south rather than north from the Cape of Good Hope until he reached the northern limits of the Roaring Forties, he found a belt of strong, consistent westerlies that hurried his ships toward the Indies. When Brouwer estimated that he had reached the longitude of the Sunda Strait, which divides Java and Sumatra, he had his ships turn north and reached the port of Bantam only five months and 24 days after leaving the United Provinces. He had cut about 2,000 miles from the journey, outflanked the Portuguese, more than halved the time taken to complete the outward voyage, and arrived in Java with a healthy crew to boot.

  The Gentlemen XVII were suitably impressed. Faster voyages meant increased profits, and from 1616 all Dutch ships were enjoined to follow the “fairway” Brouwer had discovered. So long as the VOC’s skippers kept an accurate reckoning of their position, it was undoubtedly a far superior route. But the strong winds and fast currents of the Southern Ocean made it all too easy to underestimate how far east a ship had sailed. When this occurred, the vessel would miss the turn to the north and find herself sailing dangerously close to the barren coast of Western Australia.

  There were several near disasters. In 1616 the East Indiaman Eendracht*25 unexpectedly encountered the South-Land after an unusually fast passage from the Cape, and sailed north along the coast for a few hundred miles. The charts her officers drew were incorporated into the VOC’s rutters, which henceforth indicated the existence of a small portion of the Australian shore, called Eendrachtsland; but it was by no means certain at the time whether this new coast was the South-Land or some smaller island. In any case, communication with Europe was so slow that news of the discovery took a long time to reach the ears of many skippers and when, two years later, another ship—the Zeewolf*26—chanced on what was almost certainly the North West Cape, her skipper was considerably alarmed “as we have never heard of this discovery, and the chart shows nothing but open ocean at this place.”

  The Eendracht and the Zeewolf were fortunate to come on the coast in daylight and light weather. A clumsy, square-rigged East Indiaman encountering land by night or with a strong wind at her back could easily find herself ashore long before she could turn away. Only a few months before the Batavia arrived in Australian waters, another Dutch ship, Vianen,*27 had actually run aground on a sandbank off the northwest coast, and her skipper had to jettison a valuable cargo of copper and pepper to float her off.

  In such circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that a ship would come to grief somewhere on the Australian coast sooner rather than later. In the event, the English East India Company—which in 1621 ordered its ships to follow the new Dutch route without really understanding its dangers or having access to even the fragmentary charts that the VOC possessed—was the first to lose a vessel. The ship in question was the East Indiaman Tryall, which sailed from Plymouth under the command of one John Brookes and struck an undiscovered shoal somewhere off the North West Cape shortly before midnight on 25 May 1623.

  It might almost have been a dress rehearsal for the loss of the Batavia. As the Tryall filled with water, Brookes took the sounding lead and found less than 20 feet of water under the stern. Realizing that his ship could not be saved, he spent the next two hours loading as many of his employer’s “spangles” as he could into a skiff. At four in the morning, “like a Judas running,” in the words of his own first mate, Thomas Bright, the captain of the Tryall “lowered himself privately into the boat with only nine men and his boy, and stood for the Straits of Sunda that instant without care.” He was only just in time to save himself. Half an hour later, the ship broke up under the pounding of the surf, and although Bright managed to launch the longboat and save another 36 members of the crew, almost a hundred sailors were left to drown.

  Brookes and Bright separately succeeded in reaching Java, where the first mate wrote a disgusted letter accusing his captain of stealing Company property and abandoning his men. For his part, Brookes composed a comprehensively mendacious report, claiming to have followed the established Dutch route to the Indies when he had in fact been sailing several hundred miles to the east of the accepted sea lanes. His error not only led directly to the loss of his ship; it also provided an early warning of the unknown dangers of the South-Land coast that Jan Company would have done well to heed.

  The extreme difficulty that both the VOC and the English East India Company had in determining the position of their ships had its root in the most intractable navigational problem of the day: the impossibility of finding longitude at sea. Latitude, the measure of a ship’s distance from the equator, can easily be determined by measuring the angle that the sun makes with the horizon at its zenith. Calculating longitude is much more difficult. The prime meridian is a purely artificial creation in any case—in the 1620s the Dutch measured longitude west and east from the tallest peak on Tenerife—but, wherever it is said to lie, the sun passes directly overhead once each 24 hours on its way to lighting the whole 360 degrees of the globe in the course of a single day. In one hour, therefore, it traverses 15 degrees of longitude, and it follows that a ship’s position can be determined by comparing the time in a known location (such as a home port) with the local time at sea. This feat became possible only with the invention of dependable chronometers in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1629, Ariaen Jacobsz and his men tracked the passage of time with hourglasses, which were not remotely accurate enough for navigation.

  Unable to determine their longitude precisely, Dutch sailors resorted to dead reckoning. They calculated their position from the color of the water, the appearance of seaweed, and birds circling overhead. Far out to sea, the only way of plotting progress on a chart was to estimate the distance run since the last landfall. The Dutch did this with a ship’s log—which in the seventeenth century meant tossing what was literally a chip of wood into the sea from the bows and timing it as it bobbed between two notches on the gunwale. From this they calculated their speed, and thus their approximate position.

  The log was hardly a precision tool; the only way to time its progress along the side was to use a 30-second hourglass or a human pulse, and in any case it could not indicate the prevailing currents. Plotting a ship’s position correctly was thus all but impossible. Errors of 500 miles or more were commonplace, and it is in retrospect surprising that Dutch navigators did not find themselves cast up on the Australian coast more often than they did.

  As they neared the end of their long journey, then, Jacobsz and his steersmen were trusting in dead reckoning and intuition to keep Batavia clear of the South-Land’s shores. The charts available on the ship were of at best limited use to them; the most up-to-date available, drawn in the summer of 1628, showed only broken fragments of the coast and the scattering of islands that the Dutch had occasionally encountered up to 60 miles off shore. Probably the skipper hardly bothered to consult them; in the early days of June he still believed he would not sight Terra Australis for another week or so.

  In fact, a deadly obstacle now lay in the Batavia’s path. In 1619 the upper-merchant Frederick de Houtman—the brother of the man who had led the Eerste Schipvaart east in 1595—had stumbled on and lent
his name to Houtman’s Abrolhos, the low-lying chain of reefs and islands that formed the principal obstacle to Dutch ships heading north along the Australian coast. He had been sailing from the Cape to Java in the East Indiaman Dordrecht (the same ship, groaning with age, was now a part of Pelsaert’s fleet) when he unexpectedly “came upon the south-land Beach” only six weeks out of Table Bay. Veering west and out to sea, the Dordrecht sailed north for 10 more days until De Houtman chanced on the islands of the Abrolhos where his charts indicated there should be only open sea. The surrounding reefs were plainly dangerous, and he did not survey them, merely sketching in their presence on his charts. The same islands were sighted by the Tortelduif*28 in 1624, but the skipper of that ship told few men what he had seen.

  No other retourschip chanced on the Abrolhos before 1629, so Ariaen Jacobsz would have known nothing but the fact of their existence. No maps existed to tell him there were three groups of islands, stretched out south to north. No rutter recorded that even the largest of them was so low that the archipelago could not be seen from any distance, nor that it sprawled across almost a full degree of latitude, directly in the path of the Batavia. No instinct told Jacobsz that he should shorten sail by night and proceed cautiously by day.

  When the ship struck, she therefore did so at full speed.

  5

  The Tiger

  “Everything that has been done is not my fault.”

  JERONIMUS CORNELISZ

  IT WAS AS THOUGH THEY HAD BEEN CAST up on the edges of the world. Even today, on sullen afternoons, the islands of the Abrolhos are monochrome and listless—so drab they seem to suck the color from the sky. It is as if the archipelago lies somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, and the steel-tinged light suffusing it has filtered through a hundred feet of water. Deprived of sun, the sparse vegetation turns the color of old parchment; the clouds are dull and specked with quartz; even the sea is grey. The only thing alive there is the wind.

  The gales blow endlessly throughout the southern winter, tearing up from the Roaring Forties and billowing so hard that they bend the low scrub double. Wind cracks and rattles canvas and whistles in the gaps between the coral. From May until July, the islands are swept repeatedly by storms, which rage for up to 10 days at a time, pile up surf against the reefs, and smash anything in their path, sending spray 30 or 40 feet into the air. The winds can rise to hurricane force—as much as 80 miles per hour, enough to ground the islands’ seabirds and knock the breath from any man who walks into them. They are made unbearable by the fact that there is virtually no shelter anywhere in the Abrolhos. On Batavia’s Graveyard, only a slight depression on the northeast shore affords any protection from this elemental fury.

  The climate in the islands, which can be stifling in summer, is generally mild throughout the winter, which is the rainy season. The monthly rainfall from June until August is roughly four inches, but from September this figure drops to less than half an inch a month. Even when it rains, moreover, the water hardly ever pools on the ground in the Abrolhos. It trickles through the coral and back into the sea, leaving all but a handful of the 200 islets in the group quite dry and lifeless.

  Batavia’s Graveyard, which lies in the northernmost part of the archipelago, is like this. It is a barren strip of coral rubble, 500 yards long, less than 300 yards across, and roughly triangular in shape. Its widest part stretches almost north to south along the edge of the deep-water passage discovered by Ariaen Jacobsz on the morning of the wreck; from there, the island tapers rapidly and almost to a point as it runs southeast. It is low and flat and featureless and can be crossed from side to side in less than 3 minutes, or circumnavigated in a little under 20. There are no hills, no trees, no caves, and little undergrowth; the highest point is only six feet above sea level; and though there are two small beaches on the western side, and some sand has found its way inland, this soil is nowhere more than two feet deep. Most of the ground is nothing more than shingle, slick in places with deposits of guano and treacherous to walk on. Although it is home to thousands of seabirds and several colonies of sea lions, Batavia’s Graveyard has no pools or wells, and thus no native land animals. It is dead, desolate, and utterly unwelcoming.

  When the first of the Batavia’s men came ashore in the archipelago, they found no sign of any human habitation. The Abrolhos were too far from the Australian coast, almost 50 miles, to have been visited by Aborigines; nor had any Europeans landed there prior to 1629. Nevertheless, nearly 300 of the 322 people who were on board the retourschip when she ran aground had survived the stranding of the ship—a remarkably high proportion in the circumstances—and by the evening of 5 June, the ragged beginnings of a settlement had been established in the islands.

  By now it was nearly two days since their ship had run onto the reef, but the survivors were still split into three groups. The majority, about 180 men, women, and children, had been put ashore on Batavia’s Graveyard. A further 70 men, including Jeronimus Cornelisz, remained stranded on the wreck, and the skipper had based 50 sailors and both the boats on his little islet close to the wreck. Ariaen’s party included not only Pelsaert but all of the Batavia’s senior officers. Between them, they controlled most of the food and water and all of the charts and navigational instruments that had been salvaged from the ship.

  These dispositions were no accident. Jacobsz had displayed a good deal of bravery in the aftermath of the wreck, risking his life repeatedly to save the people on the ship. But he also understood with perfect clarity that none of them would ever see the Netherlands again if the boats could not reach Java to fetch help. He and his officers had the skills to sail them there; the people on Batavia’s Graveyard did not. In his own mind, therefore, Ariaen felt justified in doing what he could to improve his own chances of survival.

  The survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard thus found themselves with neither leadership nor adequate supplies. The great majority—at least 100—were common soldiers and sailors of the VOC, and another score were either petty officers or idlers such as coopers, carpenters, and smiths. Creesje Jans was there, with about 20 other women, almost all of whom were wives of members of the crew; and of the remaining 50, more than half were youths and children. Most of these were cabin boys aged 14 or 15, but several were even younger than that, and one or two were babes in arms who had actually been born on board Batavia. Fewer than two dozen members of the group were officers, and, of these, seven were inexperienced VOC assistants who would have been only in their early twenties, and 11 merely Company cadets.

  All this left at best half a dozen men to control and lead more than 170 frightened, cold, and hungry people, perhaps a quarter of whom were foreigners with an imperfect grasp of Dutch. To make matters worse, this tiny handful of officers could no longer rely on fear of the VOC to back up their orders. Authority was now a matter of persuasion, compromise, and cooperation—something none of them would have experienced before.

  The caliber of the men on the island left a great deal to be desired. The only officer of any rank was Frans Jansz, the surgeon, whose popularity among the crew was no substitute for his inexperience of command. Nevertheless, in the first few days after the wreck, it would appear to have been Jansz who began to organize the survivors and who set about establishing a council to lead them, as was required by the customs of the VOC.

  Jan Company was run by councils and committees. The Gentlemen XVII controlled the business as a whole, and each chamber had its own board of directors. In Java, even the governor-general worked through the Council of the Indies, and the highest authority in any VOC flotilla was not the fleet president, acting alone, but the Brede Raad, or Broad Council. While the ships were at sea, every upper-merchant and skipper in the squadron was entitled to a seat on this council, which dealt not only with any questions of broad strategy but also with criminal offenses. Because it was commonplace for the vessels of a fleet to become separated on their way out to the Indies, however, each retourschip also had its own ship’s council,
with a normal membership of five. This council would typically consist of the skipper and the upper-merchant together with the vessel’s under-merchant, upper-steersman, and high boatswain, but the raad that was now set up on Batavia’s Graveyard was, necessarily, very different.

  In all likelihood, the surgeon’s main supports would have been the predikant and the one real figure of authority on the island—the provost, Pieter Jansz. It had been the latter’s task to administer discipline on board ship, although his authority derived largely from the skipper and he actually ranked somewhere below the cooper and the carpenter in the Batavia’s hierarchy. It might be conjectured that the remaining members of the council would have been a petty officer, representing the sailors on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Salomon Deschamps, Pelsaert’s clerk, who was the most senior VOC employee actually on the island. This group would probably have turned to Gabriel Jacobszoon, the corporal of the 70 or more soldiers in the survivors’ party, for assistance; his men were a natural counterbalance to the sailors on the island. But even with the corporal’s support, the council lacked natural authority and probably struggled to keep order in the face of any real opposition from the men.

  The need for such a body had been starkly demonstrated during the first day on Batavia’s Graveyard. At first the survivors’ chief emotions must have been relief, curiosity about their new environment, and considerable uncertainty as to what they should do next; but it would have taken only a short time to explore the island, and by the afternoon of 5 June the first pangs of hunger and thirst had unquestionably driven at least a few people to take what they needed from their limited supplies.