Batavia (25 page)

The boat’s company are far from passive throughout. Most are bailing, some are wailing, a few are doing both. Whichever it is, all are constantly shifting their weight from one side to the other, trying to keep the boat as level as possible against the many forces constantly trying to tilt it and cast them all into the raging ocean. And still the terrible storm has only just begun. As darkness falls, the wind picks up, the rain gushes down and the waves rise, and in that darkness it is only by the flashes of lightning that Jacobsz is able to see from where the next wave is coming. They are in constant danger of tipping over.

By midnight, the situation seems hopeless. They have taken on so much water that the boat is sitting even lower in the ocean, has become sluggish to steer and is growing ever more susceptible to just one big wave crashing over its lip, engulfing it and finishing them off. In this situation, Jacobsz is in total command while Pelsaert is no more than a common bailer and sometime wailer, and it is Jacobsz who gives the order without reference to him, ‘
Snij de sloep los!
Cut loose the yawl! Throw over the bread! Make room for the bailing and
bend your backs, you dogs!’

For all of their journey from the Abrolhos, they have been towing the yawl – in hope of using it to get to a difficult shore – but now that they are in a life-or-death situation the yawl is filling with water, slowing them and tipping them towards the death side of the equation. With one stroke of his knife, a flash of a slash in the lightning, Jan Evertsz cuts the yawl free and it is instantly gone in the howling night.

As to the casks of bread and barrels of water, however, that is a far more extreme measure to take. To throw over their only source of food – apart from the odd fish that may be caught – when their journey has barely begun is a great risk. And yet it is all about having unfettered space to bail and also to get rid of some of their weight so the boat can sit higher in the water to avoid the crashing waves. As the boat is carrying only people and a few minimal supplies, and the load
has
to be lightened, one or t’other has to go. In an instant, thus, ten caskets of bread are flung into the stormy waters, as are five barrels of water, lifting the boat a little and making it easier for all on board to use their buckets and pannikins to keep bailing. Just two small barrels of water are kept.

By now, the constant drenching rain is an even greater threat than the waves in sinking them, the only good thing being that – as the Abrolhos are just some 100 miles behind them – it will be a godsend to the poor wretches they have left behind.

Meantime, they keep bailing through the night and into the next day, dying a thousand deaths as every large wave threatens them anew and the longboat is tossed about, rising and plunging, skidding sideways off one wave and nearly being engulfed by the next, little more than flotsam upon the merciless seas.

Somehow, though, they make it through long enough, may the Lord be praised, for the storm to begin to dissipate. As the wind changes to west by sou’-west, they are able to turn to the north once more. Though the seas remain high, they are not as perilous as before, and the exhausted crew and company settle.

10 June 1629, Batavia’s Graveyard

The rain! The blessed rain!

Back on the Abrolhos, the heavens have opened up overnight, just in time to avoid major catastrophe. For many, on the point of expiry, it is all they can do to roll their faces skywards and open their mouths, in most cases leading to instant revival. All are delighted, but perhaps none more so than the
Predikant
, who takes it as proof of the power of his prayers, as he publicly expresses his gratitude to the benevolent God who has saved them all. His face upturned to the heavens, his hands spread wide once more, he intones over and over again, ‘Oh, blessed
Vader
, Father, thou gracious generosity be blessed, may we be forever
dankbaar
, thankful, for your benevolence and may you continue to hear our prayers. Oh, blessed
Vader
, thou gracious generosity be blessed . . .’

God is with them on this island after all! While most of the
Predikant’s
family are gathered tightly around him as he prays, many others among the survivors now spread out and are all but dancing, their faces ghoulish in the flashes of lightning, their teeth bared and their mouths open to the heavens as they gulp down every precious drop and glory in the feel of the fresh rain drenching the rest of their bodies.

However, not all those on Batavia’s Graveyard are so wanton in their joy. Over at the soldiers’ encampment, Wiebbe Hayes is simply busy. In the preceding days, in hopeful anticipation of rain, he worked out a system of suspending a large section of salvaged sail between eight posts and putting a stone in the middle to weigh it down. Via a small hole made next to that stone, they could fill their water barrels by placing them underneath the sail when it rained, using the contraption as a funnel.

And it is working. Under Wiebbe Hayes’s guidance, the soldiers in his immediate group carefully ensure that every drop of rain that falls on the canvas is running into empty barrels, and when each of those barrels is full they quickly replace it with a new one,
without spilling any of the precious water
. It is exacting work, which nevertheless has to be done. Their time for celebration will not come until the precious rain has stopped falling – at which point, they know, the only puddles of water that will be left will be tiny ones on the odd rocky surface, while the rain falling on the sand will be immediately absorbed, leaving no trace. For the moment, though the rain begins to dissipate a little, the storm itself, with all its thunder, lightning and howling winds, continues to rage.

11 June 1629, Batavia’s Graveyard

Others, as it turns out, are having more problems with alcohol than with water.

In Ryckert Woutersz’s whole life, he has never had the access to alcohol that he does now. A barrel of wine that washes up on the shore of Batavia’s Graveyard is quickly retrieved by himself and two of his shipmates, and then secreted – and all three of them continue to drink enough to keep themselves in a stupor. Woutersz’s two shipmates fall into a drunken slumber, but Woutersz is not like that. When drunk, his tongue loosens, making him say things that, when sober, he would have kept as the closely guarded secrets they were meant to be.

‘Waar is Ariaen Jacobsz?’
he is heard to slur on the night after the rainstorm, as he staggers around the encampment. ‘It was all right for him to lead the mutiny we had planned when all was going well, to take down that dog Pelsaert, but once we hit the
rif
,
waar is hij?
Gone with Pelsaert in the boat to save his own hide, leaving the rest of us here to die!’

Unfortunately for Woutersz, he has said this within the earshot and cold stare of Coenraat van Huyssen, his fellow Mutineer. Van Huyssen does not take kindly to the open discussion of a plot that, in normal times, would see them all on the gallows. Yes, these are not normal times, but if the wreck’s survivors are to be rescued and those times return, the disclosure of the plot would lead to their deaths. As to Jacobsz and Pelsaert, Coenraat van Huyssen has some sympathy for the view that they are dogs, but nothing can change the fact that they remain the best, and in fact the only, chance of the ship’s company being rescued. As quietly as he can, thus, he hisses to Woutersz to hold his tongue, lest he have it ripped out.

11 June 1629, in the longboat

Had they looked hard at the landform just on their starboard quarter in the late-afternoon light, it is just possible that, way up high, the people in the longboat would have seen a curiously dull glint winking at them through the trees. Unbeknown to them, they are passing the island that Dirk Hartog and his men from the
Eendracht
landed on 13 years earlier, where he had left the pewter plate nailed to a post. And perhaps if they had not had their fill of rain just a short time earlier, they might have landed on the same island and found the plate, but, as it is, Jacobsz decides to push on.

12 June 1629, aboard the
Batavia

Back on the
Batavia
, just after dusk, the entire port side of the ship – the one most exposed to the continuous battering of the waves – bursts open, and the sea hungrily hurtles in, roaring from chamber to chamber through all of the
Batavia
’s now fully uncovered innards, relentlessly tugging at her ribs and carrying away anything and everything not securely attached. The detritus, including boxes, barrels, rats and no fewer than 30 men,
spews out into the ocean
.

Most of the men drown, though some manage to grab on to driftwood and do indeed float to Batavia’s Graveyard. Jeronimus himself only survives because he is on the highest part of the ship at the time, right on the upper poop deck, but it grants him only temporary reprieve. For, around and about him, the ship continues to break up, every wave washing through the shattered carcass of the vessel and carrying progressively more before it. Jeronimus’s only means of staying safe is to keep climbing higher and higher onto the only parts of the ship still above water, but soon enough it is clear that even that is coming to an end. For, before long, all that is left is the ship’s
bowsprit marsse
, the mast-like timber that rises just above the horizontal and extends right out to the front of the ship. With great trepidation, Jeronimus climbs onto it, and wonders what to do next . . .

14 June 1629, in the longboat

His face now burned red by the searing sun, with never an ounce of shade for relief that the night itself has not provided, Ariaen Jacobsz puts down his mariner’s astrolabe just a couple of minutes after noon and quickly does his calculations. By his reckoning, they are now at the latitude of 24 degrees south. They have travelled further in the last day than he expected, with what has been a favourable wind.
The rocks now seem redder than before
, ‘entirely red stone hewn off without a foreshore’, indicating a small change of the landscape – any change is welcome after the banality they have seen – and a lot of those rocks have fallen into huge piles at the base of the still forbidding cliffs. The previous gentle breeze of the morning has now given way to a dreadful calm, meaning, to Jacobsz’s disgust, that the sail now has no more wind in it than a piglet’s fart. In such a latitude of lassitude, the longboat is at the mercy of the strong current that, against their desire, keeps pulling them too far away from the shore.

As they continue to meander along, following the coast nor’ by nor’-east, the lack of even the tiniest of sea breezes has made the heat even more intolerable, as the sun seems to simply stop high in the sky. The air is even filled with the acrid fumes of the tar that has been used to caulk the cracks in their boat, which is starting to melt. All up, while being driven onto the fallen rocks is a major danger for them, still it is not the most threatening one. That worst danger comes from above. And below. Both ways, the sun is, bit by bit, sucking the life out of all of them, as surely as a parasite sucks blood, weakening them and sapping their resolve with every passing hour. Those rays that don’t get you on the way down compensate by getting you on the way back, thrown at you from a hundred angles off the moving feast of mirrors that is the sea at any time of day.

When the sea is at its calmest, as it is now, it is as though their little boat is making its way north on one huge liquid mirror, with the sun managing to throw upon them all its firepower without fracture – they are literally roasting, turning redder by the minute as their exposed skin begins to peel, offering up the layers beneath for further cooking. Yes, their water was replenished two days earlier with the rain, but it still has to be severely rationed – two cups a day – against the possibility that it might not rain again for some time.

If in the first two days there was much groaning and wailing at this infernal fire, by this time, their sixth day at sea, that groaning has mercifully subsided – not because everyone has decided to make the best of it but because almost no one has the strength left for the wailing.

Except the baby. A constant sound through so much of their journey has been the pained cries of the infant. And on this day, as the baby’s wails are the only noise that accompanies the gentle lapping of the waves and the throbbing of the sun, it is Ariaen Jacobsz himself who at last voices the feelings of everyone in the boat: could the mother of the child please find a way
laat het godverdomme ophouden
, to make it stop, Goddamn it! How could such a tiny thing, weakened as it is, possibly make so much noise for so long?

In response, the mother of the unfortunate child begins herself to wail, and Jacobsz is just about to turn his fire upon her when, from up near the bow of the boat, Jan Evertsz cries out, ‘
Rook!
Smoke!’

As one, the entire boat looks to the front on the starboard side to where Evertsz is eagerly pointing to a thin plume coming from far on the northern horizon – at the point where the visible coast and the sea intersect. It is clearly coming from just one source, a single fire, so tightly does the column rise on this oppressively still day, and it can only mean one thing. Where there is smoke, there is fire; where there is fire, there are humans; and where there are humans, there is
water
!

A muted but optimistic buzz takes over the boat, as they all will their vessel forward. Within two hours of sailing, they are offshore of the point from which the smoke is coming only about a musket-shot or two inland.

If there are humans nearby, it seems unlikely that they are even a remotely maritime people, as the cliffs on the shore at this point seem every bit as forbidding as the rest of
het Zuidland’s
towering coast. There is no beach, no river, no smiling people coming out to meet the longboats in canoes proffering pineapples or the like, and certainly no bare-breasted dusky maidens as some had vainly hoped for . . . just that one thin plume of smoke a small way inland from the forbidding cliffs.