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

by Mike Dash

  Unlike Evertsz, the skipper does not seem to have been put to the torture. Perhaps he was protected by his rank; perhaps the governor-general and his council were simply less convinced of his guilt than they were of the high boatswain’s. In truth, however, there was really no need to rely on Pelsaert’s accusations in this case. It was beyond dispute that Jacobsz bore responsibility for the faulty navigation that had piled the Batavia onto a reef; and as the officer of the watch on the night in question he had been doubly responsible for the disaster. Whether or not he had had anything to do with what had happened to Creesje Jans, the skipper could be held indefinitely just for hazarding his ship.

  The Sardam cleared Batavia on 15 July, a Sunday. The crew had set out one day before the date ordered by Coen, so anxious was the commandeur to be on his way.

  Three of the men who had sailed north with Pelsaert were with him on the jacht. Two were steersmen, Claes Gerritsz and Jacob Jansz Hollert; their navigational skills would be needed to help relocate the Abrolhos, whose position at this time was still most uncertain. The third was the Batavia’s upper-trumpeter, Claes Jansz Hooft. The trumpeter was on the Sardam for an altogether different reason. He had left his wife, Tryntgien Fredericx, on Batavia’s Graveyard and must have been desperately anxious to rescue her.

  The voyage from the islands to Batavia had taken 30 days, and even though the jacht would be sailing against the prevailing winds, she was a fast ship and Pelsaert probably hoped to reach the wreck site around the middle of August. By then it would be 10 weeks since his ship had gone aground, and the commandeur must have recognized that the people he had abandoned on Batavia’s Graveyard could only have survived by finding water. He knew, however, that heavy rain had fallen in the area three days after he had left—memories of the violent gale of 10 June would have been all too vivid for the people in the longboat—and he no doubt hoped to discover some, if not all, of the remaining passengers and crew alive.

  The Sardam made reasonable time. The ship was south of Java by 17 July, and three weeks later, on 10 August, they reached latitude 27 degrees 54 minutes and found themselves less than 50 miles from Batavia’s Graveyard, which lies at 28 degrees 28 minutes south. What followed was more than a month of intense frustration. In the chaos that ensued after the loss of the Batavia, Ariaen Jacobsz and his steersmen had obtained no more than rough bearings for the wreck site. Calculating latitude required a navigator to “shoot the sun.” Persistent bad weather in the Abrolhos had made this very difficult, and the position given by the skipper was no more than an estimate. In consequence, Pelsaert knew only that the Batavia lay at about 28 degrees south, and since he had almost no idea of the wreck’s true longitude, it followed that the best way of finding the Batavia was to zigzag east along Jacobsz’s estimated line of latitude until the Abrolhos were sighted. The skipper had, however, miscalculated by about a third of a degree, placing the retourschip and the islands around 30 miles north of their true position. In most circumstances this would not have been an error of any moment, but when it came to searching for a few lumps of low-lying coral amid the endless swells of the eastern Indian Ocean it was a significant mistake. Pelsaert and the crew of the Sardam spent the last two weeks of August and the first half of September cruising fruitlessly to and fro some way to the north of Houtman’s Abrolhos.

  It was not until 13 September that they at last chanced on the most northerly part of the archipelago. They were then no more than 17 miles from the wreck site, but the weather soon closed in and the Sardam had to spend another two days lying at anchor, riding out the storm. On 15 September the winds had abated somewhat, but the jacht made no more than six miles into a strong southeasterly and it was not until the evening of 16 September that Pelsaert at last sighted Hayes’s islands on the horizon. Night was falling and the sailors were all too aware that there were reefs about, so they anchored for the evening and got under way again at dawn. Soon the Sardam was only a few miles from the islands, her men lining the decks and climbing into the rigging to look for signs of life. At last, at about 10 in the morning, they found it: “smoke on a long island west of the Wreck, [and] also on another small island close by.” Pelsaert could hardly contain his joy.

  There was still someone alive on Batavia’s Graveyard.

  7

  “Who Wants to Be Stabbed to Death?”

  “What a godless life is that which has been lived here.”

  FRANCISCO PELSAERT

  GIJSBERT BASTIAENSZ SETTLED HIMSELF DOWN on the sand and stared disconsolately out to sea. It was now August in the archipelago, and the mutineers had kept him hard at work since the murder of his family some weeks earlier. The predikant was employed as the island’s boatman, launching the mutineers’ flotilla in the morning and hauling the skiffs and rafts back onto the little beach when their crews returned from a day’s fishing. For the remainder of the day he was merely required to remain near the landing place, and for the most part he spent those hours on the strand, seeking consolation in his Bible.

  Gijsbert had not been allowed to mourn his murdered family. The day after his wife and children had been killed, the mutineers had found him “weeping very much,” and ordered him to stop. “Said that I ought not to do so,” the preacher noted. “Said, that does not matter; be silent, or you go the same way.” Nor did Bastiaensz receive, in Jeronimus’s kingdom, the respect and special treatment normally accorded to a minister. He not only worked, as everybody had to work, but ate the same meager rations as the other people on Batavia’s Graveyard. And, like them, the predikant heard Zevanck and the others freely discuss who they would kill next and how, and he feared daily for his life:

  “Every day it was, ‘What shall we do with that Man?’ The one would decapitate me, the other poison me, which would have been a sweeter death; a third said, ‘Let him live a little longer, we might make use of him to persuade the folk on the other Land to come over to us.’ . . . And so, briefly, this being the most important thing, my Daughter and I, we both went along as an Ox in front of the Axe. Every night I said to her, you have to look tomorrow morning, whether I have been murdered . . . and I told her what she had to do if she found me slaughtered; and that also we must be prepared to meet God.”

  Gijsbert was rarely allowed to preach. Religious affairs in the Abrolhos were now in the under-merchant’s hands, and—having made himself the ruler of the island—Jeronimus felt free to drop his old pretense of piety. To his followers, he openly espoused the heretical beliefs that had once been furtively discussed at Geraldo Thibault’s fencing club, so that “daily [they] heard that there was neither devil nor Hell, and that these were only fables.” In the place of these old certainties, Jeronimus preached the heterodox doctrines of the Spiritual Libertines, which he used to justify his actions and assuage the guilty consciences of his men.

  “He tried to maintain . . . that all he did, whether it was good or bad (as judged by others), God gave the same into his heart. For God, as he said, was perfect in virtue and goodness, so was not able to send into the heart of men anything bad, because there was no evil or badness in Himself; saying that all he had done was sent into his heart by God; and still more such gruesome opinions.”

  Even this summary of the apothecary’s views, written—as it was—after the fact by someone who scarcely began to comprehend such heresies, only scratches at the surface of Cornelisz’s beliefs. As a Libertine, Jeronimus held to a theology based on the central tenets of the Free Spirit as they had been set down in the fourteenth century. One of these beliefs, as written in a medieval manuscript, was that “nothing is sin except what is thought of as sin.” Another explained that “one can be so united with God that whatever one may do one cannot sin.”

  What the other mutineers made of Cornelisz’s ideas it is difficult to say. The majority of them were barely educated men, and they could not have been expected to grasp the subtleties of the Libertine philosophy. But the general thrust of the apothecary’s thought was easy enough to unders
tand; and his men had every reason to accept it, since it promised to absolve them from wrongdoing. Some of them evidently did embrace the new theology; it is certainly possible to hear garbled echoes of Jeronimus’s thinking in the pronouncements of his men. Still, the under-merchant was no prophet. There is no sign that Cornelisz much cared whether he made converts, and, as we have seen, his own grasp of the Free Spirit’s doctrine was incomplete. Though it seems likely that Jeronimus did think of himself as a Libertine, he also used the philosophy to further his own ends.

  One of the under-merchant’s aims was to strengthen his own position by removing his followers from contact with the one authority in the islands that might have had the power to restrain them: the Dutch Reformed Church. By silencing the predikant, Cornelisz shielded the mutineers from the fear of criticism and divine retribution; and by introducing his men to a new theology he in effect began to create a new society in the Abrolhos—one in which his followers owed personal loyalty to him and were bound together not only by their crimes, but also by their rejection of conventional authority.

  Once Cornelisz had assumed control of Batavia’s Graveyard, the mutineers were urged to reject the rules and laws that had until then restricted them. They were incited to blaspheme and swear—which was strictly prohibited by VOC regulations—and absolved from the requirement to attend religious services. Above all, they were encouraged to ridicule the predikant. On the one occasion that Bastiaensz did call on the men to pray, one mutineer shot back that they would rather sing; and when the minister beseeched God to take all those on the island “under His wings,” he looked up to find Jeronimus’s men capering about behind his tiny congregation. The mutineers were flapping the bloody, severed flippers of dead sea lions above their heads and sneering at his piety. “No need,” they hooted, “we are already under them.”

  Jeronimus’s methods did help to bind him and his men together; nevertheless, it is clear that the under-merchant did not entirely trust the mutineers. Surrounded as he was by heavily armed soldiers, Cornelisz must have been painfully aware that he owed his position not to any military prowess—indeed, his actions all suggest that he himself was a physical coward—but to his unusually clever tongue; and he may have doubted he was strong enough to resist a real challenge to his authority. So, on 12 July, he required all two dozen of his followers to sign an “Oath of trust,” swearing loyalty to each other; and he also took oaths separately “from the Men he wanted to save, that they should be obedient to him in every way in whatever he should order them.” A second oath, sworn on 20 August, reinforced these vows. This one was signed by 36 people, including the predikant. By then the mutineers’ ranks had been swollen by fear.

  It did not take long for a hierarchy to emerge among Jeronimus’s men. In theory they were equal, “assisting each other in brotherly affection for the common welfare,” but in fact Stone-Cutter Pietersz, the lance corporal, became the under-merchant’s second-in-command. Pietersz’s elevation no doubt owed a good deal to his influence among the soldiers, but since he was far junior to Cornelisz in rank, and a relatively colorless personality to boot, it was likely also because Jeronimus found him easy to manipulate. The corporal was certainly less of a potential threat than David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen, who were both self-confident, if junior, members of the officer class. Zevanck had not only led but orchestrated many of the killings on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Jeronimus had struggled to control Van Huyssen’s hotheadedness on the ship. The apothecary may have thought it wise to keep both men somewhat at arm’s length and invest more authority in the malleable Pietersz.

  Cornelisz and the corporal set themselves apart from the other mutineers in several ways. They determined who would live or die, but they themselves did not kill, leaving Zevanck and Van Huyssen to carry out their orders. They were the only men to adopt new titles—Jeronimus renouncing the rank of under-merchant for that of “captain-general” of the islands, and Pietersz promoting himself all the way to “lieutenant-general”—and wasted no time in creating liveries to match their grandiose new ranks. Cornelisz, who had already requisitioned Pelsaert’s clothing, led the way, transforming the commandeur’s existing finery into a series of comic-opera uniforms. “He gave free rein to his pride and devilish arrogance,” the Batavia journals observed:

  “The goods of the Company which they fished up . . . were very shamefully misused by making them into clothes embroidered with as much passementerie*39 as possible, [and Cornelisz] set the example . . . by changing daily into different clothes, silk stockings, garters with gold lace, and by putting on suchlike adornments belonging to other persons. Moreover, to all his Followers whom he could best trust, and who were most willing to murder, he gave clothes made from red laken*40 sewn with two or more bands of passementeries. And created a new mode of Cassock, believing that such evil vain pleasure as this could last for ever.”

  The other mutineers soon followed suit, each man outfitting himself according to his status. The old Company ranks still counted for something on the island—assistants and cadets seem to have been treated more respectfully than ordinary soldiers and sailors—but even among the rank and file, some mutineers were more equal than others. The men the captain-general depended on most, and summoned most frequently, were the tried and tested killers who could be relied on to tackle and subdue full-grown men. This murderous elite included Jan Hendricxsz, Gsbert van Welderen, Mattys Beer, and Lenert van Os. The likes of Andries Jonas, whose victims were mostly pregnant women and young boys, enjoyed a lesser status, and the dozen or so men who signed Jeronimus’s oaths, but never took part in the killing, were no doubt looked down on by their murderous cohorts.

  The elite mutineers seem to have enjoyed their work. Men such as David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen had been of minor consequence on board the Batavia; now they reveled in their status as men of consequence, possessed of the power of life and death. Others, including Jan Hendricxsz—who butchered between 17 and 20 people—and Lenert van Os—who slaughtered a dozen—were efficient killers, seemingly unburdened by conscience, who enjoyed moving among Cornelisz’s inner circle. Nevertheless, killing, in itself, was not the prime motive of the rank and file. These men murdered because the alternative was to become one of the victims, and because the favor of the captain-general meant improved rations and access to the island’s women.

  There had not been many more than 20 females on the Batavia when she had left the Netherlands, and most of those were already dead—drowned, killed by thirst after the ship was wrecked, or cut down in the massacre on the rafts or on Seals’ Island. The mutineers had ruthlessly exterminated those too old or too pregnant to interest them. The handful of young women who remained were gathered on Batavia’s Graveyard, where Jeronimus and his men took their pick.

  There were seven of them in all. Creesje Jans and Judick the preacher’s daughter were the only women from the stern. The others came from the lower deck: Anneken Bosschieters, the sisters Tryntgien and Zussie Fredricx, Anneken Hardens and Marretgie Louys, all of whom were probably married to soldiers or sailors among the crew. Tryntgien’s husband had found himself with Pelsaert on the longboat, and Anneken Bosschieters’s had gone with Wiebbe Hayes, leaving them without protectors. Hardens’s husband, Hans, was a soldier and a minor mutineer, and it is a mystery why he did not act to stop her from being corralled with the others. But he did not, and the women from the lower deck were set aside “for common service,” which meant simply that they were available to any of the mutineers who wished to rape them.

  Jeronimus’s men were not entirely indiscriminate. Some of the officers behaved relatively well, and Coenraat van Huyssen, in particular, seems to have remained faithful to his fiancée, Judick. But many of the mutineers were less punctilious. It was normal for the women kept for “common service” to have had relations with two or three of the mutineers at least, and those who had been with only one man were envied. “My Daughter has been with Van Huyssen about five weeks,” no
ted Bastiaensz. “He has protected her very well, so that no disaster has befallen her, other than that she had to remain with him; the other Women were very jealous of her, because they thought that too much honour was accorded her.”

  Of all the seven women, Creesje Jans was by far the most desirable, and Jeronimus claimed her as his own. Almost as soon as he took power in the island, the captain-general had Lucretia taken to his tent, where rather than assaulting her he made every effort to seduce her. For nearly two weeks, he wrote her sonnets, poured her wine—tried everything, in fact, to persuade her that he was not a monster. Cornelisz’s remarkable behavior suggests that he wanted to possess her not just physically but mentally—and that he also possessed a great capacity for self-delusion, for she resisted stubbornly, just as she had resisted Ariaen Jacobsz, and eventually Jeronimus gave up his attempts at gallantry. The story of what happened next somehow reached the ears of others on the island:

  “In the end [Jeronimus] complained to David Zevanck that he could not accomplish his ends either with kindness or anger. Zevanck answered: ‘And don’t you know how to manage that? I’ll soon make her do it.’ He had then gone into the tent and said to Lucretia: ‘I hear complaints about you.’ ‘On what account?’ she asked. ‘Because you do not comply with the Captain’s wishes in kindness; now, however, you will have to make up your mind. Either you will go the same way as Wybrecht Claasen, or else you must do that for which we have kept the women.’ Through this threat Lucretia had to consent that day, and thus he had her as his concubine.”

  Creesje therefore yielded in the end; but she did so unwillingly. Like the women kept for common service, the girl had acted to save her life, and as long as the captain-general was happy she at least assured herself of decent food and drink, and protection of a sort. The rest of the survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard—the menfolk and the boys—enjoyed no such assurance. Hungry, thirsty, ill, they lived in constant terror of their lives. Now that a good deal of the killing had been done, the mutineers’ existence on the island was increasingly routine, and they began to look for fresh diversions; attracting the attention of any of Cornelisz’s henchmen was unwise, and a few mutineers, perhaps unstable to begin with, became deranged.