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

by Mike Dash

  From then on, to fall ill on Batavia’s Graveyard was to receive a death sentence. First Jan Hendricxsz and Allert Janssen slit the throat of Jan Pinten, the island’s only English soldier, while he lay in bed; then a sick cabin boy went the same way. A few days later, De Vries and Janssen conspired to end the life of Hendrick Claasz, a carpenter. These killings also took place by night. The only invalids to be spared were associates of the mutineers: Hans Frederick, who had already helped to kill one man and may have been one of Hendricxsz’s associates, and Olivier van Welderen, who was Gsbert’s elder brother.

  Having disposed of the sick, Jeronimus turned his attention back to the stronger survivors. On the evening of 12 July the under-merchant sent his favorite killer, Hendricxsz, out to rid him of Passchier van den Ende, a gunner, and Jacop Hendricxen Drayer,*31 who was a carpenter. These men were to be confronted by the old allegation that they had stolen something from the stores.

  It was, it seems, a typically blustery Abrolhos night, for the shrieking of the wind and the snap and crack of canvas walls masked the sound of Hendricxsz’s approach. Van den Ende and Drayer only realized he was there when the flaps of their tent were suddenly thrown back and the German soldier emerged from the darkness like a vengeful angel, flanked by Zevanck, Van Os, and Lucas Gellisz.

  The sailors realized at once that their lives were forfeit:

  “[Jan] went into their tent and asked Passchier if he had any goods hidden there . . . . He answered weepingly, ‘No,’ and begged that he might be allowed to say his prayers, because he thought that it would cost him his life. But Zevanck said, ‘Get on with it.’ Thus Jan Hendricxsz threw him to the ground and cut his throat.

  “The other one, Jacop Hendricxen Drayer, begged bitterly for his life, whereupon Zevanck and the others went to Jeronimus and said that Jacop was a good carpenter and should he not be spared. But Jeronimus answered, ‘Not at all, he is only a turner and furthermore he is half-lame. He must also go. He might become a babbler now or later.’ ”

  With that, the murderers returned to Drayer’s tent. Remarkably, the hapless turner was still there, waiting for them. Perhaps his injured leg made it useless for him to attempt to flee; perhaps he genuinely hoped for mercy. If so, one glance into Hendricxsz’s blank eyes would have informed him of his error.

  Disposing of a crippled man should not have taken long, but for all his disability, Drayer proved almost impossible to kill. Hendricxsz pushed him to the ground, and Van Os sat astride the turner’s hips while his friend stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. The dancing flame of Zevanck’s lantern set a shadow play of murder flickering against the canvas walls, but even with the benefit of light the German could not find Jacop’s heart. First one knife hit a rib and snapped in two, then a second broke uselessly in half. Hendricxsz seized another pair of daggers and drove them deep into his victim’s neck, but anger had made him careless and his thrusts missed Drayer’s windpipe, arteries, and veins. The two knives sliced through muscle and struck bone; their blades splintered on the turner’s spinal column and the mutineer found himself holding another pair of useless hafts. Jacop was still alive, and Hendricxsz, breathing heavily, had to thrust slippery fingers into the spreading pool of blood beneath the body, fumbling for a sliver of broken knife with which to slit his victim’s throat.

  For Jeronimus’s mutineers, the glut of killings in the first half of July substantially improved conditions on Batavia’s Graveyard. By the 14th of the month, they had disposed of almost 50 men, women, and children, almost a third of whom had been too ill to put up any sort of fight. These deaths had reduced the population of Batavia’s Graveyard to about 90 people, of whom almost half were either active mutineers or hangers-on who had pledged loyalty to Cornelisz in the hope of saving their own lives.

  By now, the mutineers’ chief enemy was boredom. The Batavia journals tell us almost nothing about how they passed the time from day to day. Some were set to catching fish and birds; others, evidently, must have mounted guard, watching the campsite and the boats. We know they sometimes fashioned makeshift weapons such as morning stars—lethal clubs manufactured from strips of lead that had been bent in half, studded with long iron nails and threaded through with a short length of rope so that they could be swung at the heads of future victims—and that Jeronimus occasionally invited a few men to his tent. There, amid overflowing bales of trade goods and company stores purloined from the wreck, the under-merchant plied his followers with wine and showed off their most prized possession—Pelsaert’s case of valuables, which had been landed on Traitors’ Island and abandoned there when the commandeur left in the overloaded longboat.

  Inside the case were four bags of jewels, worth nearly 60,000 guilders, which the merchant would allow his men to run through their fingers, and a large agate cameo, almost a foot from end to end, which Pelsaert was taking to India at the request of an Amsterdam jeweler called Gaspar Boudaen. The cameo had been carved in the Eastern Roman Empire early in the fourth century, possibly on the orders of Constantine the Great; it depicted a classical scene, and the commandeur believed that it would find favor at the Mogul court. Boudaen had mounted it within a golden frame studded with precious stones, creating a piece so rare and valuable that even the Gentlemen XVII had not been permitted to inspect it before it was loaded onto the Batavia. Pelsaert had anticipated selling the jewel at a profit of perhaps 50 percent; the VOC was to receive more than a quarter of its value as commission, but in all likelihood the commandeur had also arranged to keep a portion of the sale price for himself. The cameo had thus been central to his hopes of earning a fortune trading luxuries and “toys” with the Great Mogul, and now it assumed an equally important place in Jeronimus’s plans.

  While he watched his men caress the agate, the under-merchant spoke seductively of the wealth that they could earn from piracy. The mutineers were captivated by the stories that their leader spun. They were, said Andries Jonas, later, willing to do Cornelisz’s bidding, “for they were led into thinking that they would all be rich for life.”

  While the under-merchant’s men lay back and dreamed of wealth and luxury, life for the remaining loyalists became a waking nightmare. They all existed in a constant state of fear. Trapped on a tiny island with a group of ruthless murderers, there was little they could do to save themselves. They were thousands of miles from everything they knew and just as far from help. They were unarmed, with nowhere to hide and no way to escape. Life on Batavia’s Graveyard thus became a matter of waiting for one’s turn to die.

  The apparently arbitrary nature of the killings only made things worse, for it was impossible to know who would be the mutineers’ next victim. The under-merchant’s followers had grown accustomed to murder and needed little excuse, or none, to kill again. Standing out in any way—being too loud or too quiet, or failing in some task—could only hasten the inevitable moment when Zevanck or Jan Hendricxsz would appear, ready with some trumped-up charge and brandishing a sword.

  Days in the Abrolhos were bad enough—but the nights were worse. Most of the murders took place after dark, when the islands seem to bulge with wind and even the endless thunder of the surf is drowned out by the calls of terns and mutton birds,*32 whose endless keening sounds exactly like the screams of human babies. By mid-July the moon had waned, so that the only illumination came from stars pulsing feebly from behind the scudding clouds, and the survivors had grown wary of approaching lights. Once the bobbing firefly of a watchman’s lantern, threading its way through the little settlement, had been a symbol of security. Now it could, and often did, mean death. Lying in their makeshift beds, shifting uneasily on the tilting plates of fan coral that littered the ground, the loyalists caught their breath whenever lamps approached. They waited for the sickly yellow glow to pass their tents and leave them alive, knowing all the while that one day it would not.

  In the mornings, when Jeronimus arose, he could look west across the half-mile of deep water that separated him from Seals’ Island and
see the figures of the men and women he had landed there moving about their own camp, almost opposite his own. He had left them unmolested for the best part of a month, while never doubting they should go the way of Pieter Jansz’s men eventually. By the middle of July, with the provost and the sick safely out of the way, he felt ready to attack.

  There were still 45 survivors on the cay. Without supplies from Batavia’s Graveyard they would have struggled to find sufficient food and water to feed themselves, and many of them must have been ill and exhausted. Their leaders—Cornelis Jansz, a young assistant from Amsterdam, and Gabriel Jacobszoon, the corporal—had no more than 10 or 12 men under their command. The other members of the party were either boys (perhaps two dozen of them) or women with young children.

  It is not clear how much these people knew of Cornelisz’s activities, but the murders of 9 July would have been clearly visible to anyone watching from the other side of the deep-water channel, and if Jansz and Jacobszoon really had no contact with the small boats that now ventured out to fish, they must have wondered why. It seems that the assistant and the corporal at least guessed what Jeronimus was planning, for they, like the provost’s men, had begun to construct rafts. Three or four were being assembled on the west side of their island, out of sight of Batavia’s Graveyard. The boats were just about complete when, on 15 July, the under-merchant’s men appeared, paddling a yawl across the channel separating the islands, heading directly for their campsite.

  Jeronimus, who was growing rapidly in confidence, had sent no more than seven of his men to tackle the people of Seals’ Island. Zevanck and Van Huyssen were to lead the attack; with them went Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, Cornelis Pietersz, and a Swiss cadet called Hans Jacob Heijlweck. The last member of the party was the surgeon, Jansz, who had thus far played no part in any killings. It seems likely that Jeronimus ordered him to go, and that Jansz felt it wise to demonstrate his loyalty by obeying.

  Cornelisz had issued precise instructions—“Kill most of the people,” he had said, “children as well as some men, and leave alive for the time being only the women who are there”—and for once Zevanck showed no interest in creating any pretext for his crimes. This time there were no accusations of treachery, no mention of any stolen goods. The mutineers had been issued with swords, daggers, and morning stars. They landed, drew their weapons, and attacked.

  Van Os was among the first to leap ashore. “Lenert, immediately after he arrived, has stabbed one boy right through the body, and another through his buttock, and also Jacop de Vos, tailor, right through his side,” one account of this episode explains, “and as soon as they have come there Jan Hendricxsz has stabbed to death five cabin boys and two men.” The other mutineers split up, chasing and cutting down their unarmed opponents throughout the camp. Some of the men, including the corporal, had wives and families to protect, and they were probably among the first to die. The rest made for the rafts or hid. Eight men, including Cornelis Jansz, reached the boats and managed to escape, eventually finding their way to the High Land to the north. Several of the surviving cabin boys hid themselves among bushes in the middle of the island. The rest took to their heels and ran, heading north along the mile-long cay so nimbly that the murderers could not keep up.

  Zevanck tackled this problem with his usual brutality. The mutineers had captured one of the cabin servants during their initial assault—he was Abraham Gerritsz of Amsterdam, the young deserter whom Pelsaert had rescued from Sierra Leone. Now he was dragged in front of the assistant. “Boy,” Zevanck explained, “you must help lustily to kill, or be in a fix yourself.” Gerritsz proved “very willing” to comply, though he perhaps obeyed more out of fear than real blood lust; in any case, he soon managed to catch another child of about his age, 15. The fleeing youth was wrestled to the ground, and, after a short struggle, Gerritsz pinned him down and killed him with a knife. The remainder of the boys—15 in all—could not be found, and eventually the mutineers gave up the search and turned their attention back to the camp.

  The initial attack had left at least four men and six boys dead. Half a dozen more were badly wounded and now lay sprawled on the coral, no longer able to defend themselves. Zevanck and his friends dragged these men into the sea and held their heads under the water until they drowned. Four pregnant women—one of them Laurentia Thomas, the corporal’s wife—were found among the tents but spared in compliance with Jeronimus’s orders; and once the under-merchant’s men had satisfied themselves that there were no other rafts on which the few survivors could escape, the remaining youths were also left to be dealt with another day. The mutineers returned to Batavia’s Graveyard pleased with their day’s work, having reduced the population of the nearby cay by nearly half. The boy Gerritsz went with them, another recruit to the under-merchant’s cause.

  Jeronimus wasted little time in resolving the problem of the fleeing cabin boys. A few days later he dispatched a second party to Seals’ Island, on this occasion waiting until after dark to be certain of catching the surviving members of the corporal’s party in their tents. Once again the mutineers were led by David Zevanck, but this time there were eight of them, including Mattys Beer, Gsbert van Welderen, and a youth from the small town of Bommel named Jan Pelgrom. The killers landed close to the camp without being seen and crept silently toward the tents, spreading out as they went so as to be able to enter each of them simultaneously. Then, at the assistant’s signal, they attacked.

  One of Zevanck’s men that night was Andries Jonas, the old soldier from Luyck:*33

  “On the 18 July, Andries Jonas has been ordered by Jeronimus to go, together with David Zevanck and another [six] men, with the little yawl to Seals’ Island, in order to kill there the remaining four women and about 15 boys who had not been killed on the previous murder of 15 July.

  “Therefore Zevanck has asked whether he had a knife; Andries Jonas answered that he had a knife but it was not very sharp. Whereupon Zevanck handed him his own knife, saying, ‘Cut the throats of the women.’

  “So willingly, without objection, Andries has gone to Mayken Soers, who was heavily pregnant, has taken her by the hand and led her a little to one side and said to her, ‘Mayken, love, you must die,’ and thrown her underfoot and cut her throat; that being done, he saw that Jan van Bommel was trying to kill Janneken Gist (the wife of Jan Hendricx from The Hague); therefore he went to help . . . and stabbed Janneken to death with his knife; the other two women were killed by the others.”

  While this was going on, Van Welderen and Beer had crept into the tents with three or four of the other mutineers and caught the surviving cabin boys asleep. The mutineers set upon the youths with daggers and clubs, bludgeoning and stabbing them where they lay. A dozen of the boys were killed outright, or mortally wounded and dragged down to the sea to drown, but three managed to escape. Dodging their assailants’ blows, they ran into the darkness and disappeared along the ridge.

  These boys survived until 24 July, when they foolishly emerged within sight of Batavia’s Graveyard. Cornelisz noticed them, and sent Stone-Cutter Pietersz with three men to flush them from their hiding places. This time the youths did not escape; the lance corporal captured them alive and herded them into his yawl. On the way back to Batavia’s Graveyard, on the under-merchant’s orders, he and Isbrant Isbrantsz forced one of the boys to throw his two companions overboard. The survivor, a child named Claes Harmansz, was spared. Like Gerritsz, he became a mutineer.

  Jeronimus’s actions in the latter half of July 1629 suggest a man driven to commit ever more perverse atrocities by a burning need for novelty and stimulation. The under-merchant apparently felt jaded by the endless murders he had ordered, and—like some Roman tyrant—sought out fresh diversions to assuage his boredom. It was not as if he really needed more followers; his position on Batavia’s Graveyard was by now unassailable, and he was never to rely upon Andries De Vries or even Andries Liebent in the way he trusted Jan Hendricxsz or Mattys Beer. Rather, he seems to have taken
special pleasure in exploiting weakness and corrupting youth.

  De Vries, Liebent and the surgeon Jansz had already been forced to slaughter companions and friends in order to save themselves. Now Jeronimus and his men had forced Claes Harmansz, Isbrant Isbrantsz, and Abraham Gerritsz to become killers too. The under-merchant was, perhaps, intrigued by the changes that came over his followers once he had turned them into murderers; he seems to have found the conflicting emotions of guilt and exultation a fascinating study. And though he had always distanced himself from the violence that had engulfed the archipelago, he now seems to have become obsessed with the idea of experiencing the same sensations for himself.

  Evidence for this contention can be found in an incident that occurred a few days after the first killings on Seals’ Island. For several nights Cornelisz and his companions had had their sleep disturbed by the endless wailings of a baby, the child of a girl from the lower deck named Mayken Cardoes. Mayken had saved her infant from the wreck and nursed it devotedly, even breast-feeding when the water on the island had run out and she herself was close to dying of thirst. But for all her frantic efforts the infant proved impossible to quiet, and she was unable to prevent it from awakening the merchant and his friends.

  For Jeronimus, the crying baby seemed the perfect subject for his planned experiment, and he resolved to murder it. It was typical of Cornelisz that he chose to kill with poison—an apothecary’s weapon, and something he, alone of all the people in the Abrolhos, was able to prepare—and equally telling that he preferred to proceed by stealth. Mayken was brought before him and asked for details of the baby’s illness. One can readily imagine her accepting the under-merchant’s offer to concoct a medicine to soothe it.

  The poison that Jeronimus produced, using materials that had been salvaged from the wreck, was an old alchemical compound called mercurium sublimatum. Cornelisz administered it on 20 July and watched with interest to observe its effect. He must have been disappointed to discover that though the potion quickly silenced the child’s crying, it failed to kill it altogether, merely inducing a sort of coma “so that it could neither live nor die.”