Batavia's Graveyard (14 page)

Nevertheless, the biggest irritants on the voyage were undoubtedly the insects
that swarmed through every crevice of the ship. Lice were a plague from which even the
most senior of those on board were not immune. They lived and multiplied in clothing and
could cause terrible epidemics of typhus. Many an East Indiaman lost a quarter or a third
of her crew to the disease, and though the
Batavia
seems to have escaped its
ravages, no doubt the lice would have infested every article of clothing on board the
ship. Even Creesje and Cornelisz were required to join the other passengers and crew and
delouse themselves each week on a special “louse-deck” by the latrines in the
bows. Determined hunting would have afforded them some relief, but as numerous
contemporary letters and memoirs attest, such measures were only temporarily
effective.

Nor were lice the only insects on board. Bedbugs lurked in the bunks and sleeping
mats, and new ships such as the
Batavia
could be quickly overrun with cockroaches.
The few days that Pelsaert’s fleet spent at Sierra Leone would have been time enough
to allow a few big African insects to find their way down below, where they would have
multiplied with astonishing rapidity. The captain of one Danish East Indiaman was so
maddened by the plague of scuttling vermin on board his ship that he offered his sailors a
tot of brandy for every thousand cockroaches they killed. Within days, the crushed bodies
of 38,250 insects had been presented for his inspection.

Tormented by the vermin and the heat, some Dutchmen were driven insane. By the
late 1620s, the VOC had already become well acquainted with a variety of mental illnesses
caused by the long passage east. Depression was not uncommon in the early weeks of any
voyage, as those on board realized the magnitude of the ordeal they faced, and in some
cases it was so severe that the victims refused to talk or even eat. Becalmed in the
oppressive airs of the equator, others went mad as they waited long, excruciating
days—sometimes weeks—for winds that never came. The archives of the East India
Company contain many records of men who jumped overboard to end this suffering.

Even so, most voyagers enjoyed some good times, too. Surviving accounts tell of
swimming in calm weather, skipping games and storytelling on sultry evenings. When the
opportunity arose, there were wild celebrations of signal events such as the
skipper’s birthday.
Predikanten
such as Gijsbert Bastiaensz frowned on the
unrestrained revelry that traditionally marked the crossing of the equator, but not even
the VOC could ban the singing of bawdy sea shanties or the smoking of tobacco in long,
thin Gouda pipes. The danger of fire being very great, however—in the years before
the invention of matches, pipes were lit with red-hot coals fetched with tongs from a
glowing brazier—smoking was permitted only before the mast, and then only during
daylight hours.

It was not until March 1629 that, south of the doldrums at last, Pelsaert’s
fleet picked up the northeast trade winds that took the ships on toward the coast of South
America, and then the Brazil current, which swept east to the Cape of Good Hope. But now,
just as the voyage was becoming bearable again, debilitating illness struck.

The little convoy had entered the scurvy belt, an area of the South Atlantic that
stretched from the Tropic of Capricorn all the way to the Cape. In the 1620s (and for
another 200 years), scurvy was a menace on every lengthy ocean voyage, generally
manifesting itself three to four months after a ship had left port. The first cases
usually occurred among the most malnourished members of the crew, and it was only when a
vessel was becalmed and drifted slowly across the ocean for months on end that the
officers suffered with the men, but the symptoms of the disease were unique and all too
familiar to veterans of the Indies trade such as Jacobsz and Pelsaert. They included
painful and swollen legs, fetid breath, and spongy, bleeding gums. After a while, the
victim’s mouth became so swollen and rotten with gangrene that his teeth would fall
out one by one. Eventually—after about a month of suffering—he would die an
agonizing death.

Cases of scurvy occurred on almost every voyage to the Indies; a
retourschip
usually lost 20 or 30 men to the disease, generally between the equator and the Cape.
Sometimes the death toll was far worse. On the
Eerste Schipvaart
of 1595, more than
half the men in the fleet were dead of scurvy by the time the ships reached Madagascar.
When the handful of survivors finally reached Texel two years later, there were not enough
fit men left on board one of the ships to lower her anchors.

Little progress had been made in treating the disease by the time the
Batavia
sailed three decades later. Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, which is found
in fresh food and particularly in fruit and fruit juice—supplies of which had usually
run out by the time a ship reached the equator. But this fact was unknown in 1628, and
doctors differed as to what caused the illness and how it should be treated. Foul air
below decks was often blamed for the disease, as was a surfeit of salt meat. Wine was a
popular, if ineffective, remedy. Perhaps surprisingly, the vitamin-rich juices of lemons
and limes—which were to be recognized, late in the next century, as a preventative
and cure—were already known to be effective in combating scurvy, although no one
fully understood why. They were prescribed as a remedy by a number of naval surgeons, and
quantities were carried aboard some ships, particularly those of the rival English East
India Company. But this cure was only one among many tried by the VOC, and its unique
efficacy was not recognized in the seventeenth century. In consequence the
Batavia
lost nearly a dozen seamen to scurvy on the passage between Sierra Leone and the
Cape.

The dead men were buried at sea. There was not enough wood for coffins, so the
deceased were sewn up inside spare pieces of sailcloth and, after a short burial service,
tipped into the sea. A dead sailor’s mess-mates would try to make sure that his body
was well weighted with sand or lead, in the hope that it would sink too quickly for the
sharks that were by now a common sight around the
Batavia
to tear it
apart.

Even in the seventeenth century, sharks enjoyed an evil reputation for ferocity,
and Dutch sailors sometimes told stories of fish that had been caught and cut open to
reveal the severed legs or arms of recently deceased shipmates in their bellies. Seamen
viewed all sharks as man-eaters and would go to considerable trouble to hook them on their
lines. Sometimes a captured fish would be killed and put to good use on board—the
rough, sandpapery skin was used to sharpen knives, heart and liver became ingredients for
the surgeon’s nostrums, and the brains were turned into a special paste that was
thought to ease the agony of childbirth. But on other occasions, the men of a
retourschip
would exact revenge for all the sailors who had died between the jaws of a shark. It was
considered fine sport to torture a captured monster by gouging out its eyes and cutting
off its fins. Then an empty barrel would be tied to the mutilated animal’s tail and
the shark would be returned to the Atlantic. Unable to see or swim or dive, the wounded
fish would thrash wildly in gouts of its own blood, endlessly circling and smashing into
the sides of the ship until it either died of exhaustion or was eaten by its fellow
predators.

Cruel sports such as this were among the few permitted outlets for the baser
instincts of the men. Violence and disputes were severely punished, and the total lack of
privacy made any form of sexual activity all but impossible for those who lived before the
mast. On the great majority of East Indiamen this problem was exacerbated by the fact that
there were no more than a handful of women on board—and most of those were either
married or prepubescent. A few of the men (though not, it seems, too many) were active
sodomites, but the penalties for being caught engaging in a homosexual relationship were
draconian; if the
commandeur
decreed it, the lovers could be sewn, together, into a
sailcloth shroud and thrown alive into the ocean. The great majority of such affairs were
thus conducted not among the men of the lower deck but between officers and common
sailors, since the officers alone had access to private cabins and the status to coerce
their partners (some of whom, at least, were unwilling) into silence.

The
Batavia,
however, carried an unusual number of female passengers.
There were at least 22 women on the ship, and although most were married and were
traveling to the Indies with their husbands, a few were to all intents and purposes
unattached. This was a little peculiar, as the VOC had already learned from bitter
experience that to allow unmarried women to sail alongside several hundred young
men—all tight-packed together with little to occupy them for anything up to nine
months—inevitably led to trouble.

As early as 1610 the Company’s first attempts to procure wives for its
lonely merchants in the Indies had ended in humiliation when Governor-General Pieter Both
was dispatched to Java with 36 “spinsters” who turned out to be prostitutes. A
few years later Both’s successor, Jan Coen, abandoned the attempts he had been making
to purchase slave girls in the East and had the orphanages of the Netherlands scoured for
young Dutch women instead. “You, Sirs,” Coen lectured the Gentlemen XVII in his
uniquely blunt style, “would only send us the scum of the land, [and] people here
will sell us none but scum either . . . . Send us young girls, and we shall hope that
things will go better.” These “company daughters” were packed off to the
Batavia
and provided with food and clothing on the voyage east on the understanding that they
would marry when they got there. Most were between 12 and 20 and sailed with only a single
chaperone to look after groups of up to several dozen girls. Unsurprisingly, even the
plainest of the “daughters” attracted the unwelcome attentions of the crew long
before the coast of Java appeared over the horizon.

By 1628 Jan Company had learned from these mistakes. It was now rare for any
women, other than the wives and daughters of its most senior merchants, to be granted
permission to sail out to the Indies. But for some reason the VOC’s proscriptions
appear to have been flouted on the
Batavia.
It is probable that some of the women
who found their way on board, including a group of half a dozen sailors’ wives, were
actually stowaways. Certainly councillor Jacques Specx, who commanded the larger half of
that year’s Christmas fleet, uncovered a host of whores and common-law spouses on the
ships in his flotilla, writing home from the Bay of Biscay: “We want for nothing save
honest maids and housewives in place of the filthy strumpets and street wailers who have
been found (may God amend it) in all the ships. They are so numerous and so awful that I
am ashamed to say any more about it.” Pelsaert appears to have checked his ships less
scrupulously than Specx. Any stowaways on the
Batavia
managed to remain hidden
until it was too late to send them back.

Among the unchaperoned women on Pelsaert’s ship were the alluring Lucretia
Jans and Zwaantie Hendricx, her traveling companion and maid. They made an unlikely
couple: Creesje patrician and aloof, her servant Zwaantie earthy and available. Whether
Zwaantie had been Lucretia’s maid in Amsterdam is not known; it has been suggested
that she was hired—and hired in haste—solely to accompany Creesje on the voyage
east. The contention is unprovable, but it fits the facts, for these two women were uneasy
companions, and the ill feeling that sprang up between them was to be the cause of
considerable trouble on board the
Batavia.

The problems began shortly after the ship sailed from Sierra Leone. During the
crossing of the North Atlantic Ariaen Jacobsz had become infatuated with Creesje Jans. The
skipper, who had left a wife at home in Durgerdam, somehow persuaded himself that he could
attract Lucretia, who was not only married, but several degrees his superior in social
status. He quickly learned otherwise. Creesje rejected his initial advances, but
apparently she did so gently, for they remained for a while on friendly terms. But as the
Batavia
set course for the
wagenspoor,
and Creesje continued to resist, her relationship
with Jacobsz began to deteriorate.

Jeronimus saw what Pelsaert and the rest had missed. As the
Batavia
left
the African coast in her wake, he tackled Ariaen in private. “I chided him,” the
under-merchant later recalled, “and asked what he intended with that woman. The
skipper answered that because she was fair, he desired to tempt her to his will, and to
make her willing with gold or other means.”

Jacobsz’s bribes appear to have been as unwelcome to Creesje as his earlier
advances, and this time she must have told him so in blunter terms. Abruptly the skipper
broke off the pursuit. But long before the ship approached the Cape, the irrepressible
Ariaen had picked up another scent. This time the object of his affections was Zwaantie,
and this time he was successful.

It never was explained whether the
Batavia
’s skipper seduced the maid
because he desired her or simply to spite her mistress. Whatever the reason, the
burgeoning relationship between Ariaen and Zwaantie placed Lucretia in a delicate
position. It was impossible to keep secrets on board ship, and Jacobsz’s scandalous
dalliance with the maid was soon a public humiliation for Creesje; but she could hardly
avoid the skipper all the way to the Indies, and while they remained at sea he could make
her life less than pleasant if he chose. Furthermore, it was unthinkable for a woman of
her station to travel without a servant, but there was no obvious replacement for Zwaantie
on board the
Batavia.
Creesje had little choice but to make the best of the
situation.