Batavia's Graveyard (15 page)

As for Jacobsz and his mistress, they seem to have been united not only in their
dislike of Lucretia—the skipper smarting from rejection, the maid from the real or
imagined slights of her employer—but by their lustful natures. Ariaen was
“crazed anew” by his passion for the servant girl, while Zwaantie, so the
cook’s gossipy wife confided to Jeronimus as they approached the Cape, “was a
whore” who denied her lover nothing. If the under-merchant desired proof of this
allegation, it soon presented itself. Repairing to the officers’ privy in the stern
one day, he opened the door to find the skipper already there, making love to Zwaantie in
the awkward confines of the closet.

So the
Batavia
and her consorts neared the Cape of Good Hope. As Jan
Huygen van Linschoten had predicted in his
Reysgeschrift,
the first indication that
they were approaching land was the sight of Cape gannets—white birds with
black-tipped wings that the Dutch called “velvet sleeves”—wheeling and
calling around the convoy while it was still well out to sea. A day or two later, the
sailors began to notice mats of broken, trumpet-stemmed reeds floating in the water and
then the bones of dead cuttlefish bobbing on the waves. These were sure signs that the
Batavia
was within 30 miles of land.

They dropped anchor under Table Mountain on 14 April 1629, having been nearly six
months at sea. The Cape was quite unlike the coast at Sierra Leone. It was delightful
country, green and teeming with life. Since its discovery by Batholomeu Diaz in 1488, the
Tavern of the Ocean had become a port of refuge for almost every European vessel heading
east. English and Dutch, French, Portuguese and Danes all came to barter for supplies with
the Hottentots who farmed cattle in the hinterland.

Ships heading for the Coromandel Coast rarely put in at the Cape, but on board
the
Batavia
and the
Sardam,
the
Dordrecht,
the
Assendelft,
and
the little warship
Buren,
men readied the ships’ boats and carried the
scurvy-ridden and the sick ashore. Landing parties set up sailcloth tents for them along
the edge of the beach. Other seamen hunted sea lions and penguins along the beach, or
fished and gathered mussels from the rocks while they waited for the Hottentots’
arrival.

It was Pelsaert’s duty to negotiate for supplies of food. The natives of the
Cape had grown used to dealing with visitors from Europe. A mutually beneficial trade had
sprung up, for the Hottentots had oxen and sheep to sell, and the sailors iron hoops and
copper plates that could be fashioned into ornaments and spears. The rate of exchange
seemed laughably advantageous to the Dutch, who on one occasion bartered a copper bracelet
for a sheep, and on another received “three oxen and five sheep for a crooked knife,
a shovel, a short iron bolt, with a knife and some scraps of iron, worth altogether
perhaps four guilders in Holland.” But metal was hard to come by at the Cape, and for
their part the Hottentots seemed content that it was they who had the better of the
deals.

Neither party really understood the other. The Dutch thought the inhabitants of
the Cape primitive and ugly, and their journals contain numerous disparaging comments
concerning the near nakedness of the Hottentots and the foul smell of the animal fat they
rubbed into their bodies to insulate against the cold. The Africans found the Dutch greedy
and violent, and in the early years of the seventeenth century men on both sides died as a
result of this mutual mistrust.

Pelsaert’s greatest problem was communication. Europeans could not
understand a word of the extraordinary language of the bushmen, who talked by clicking
their tongues—“their speech is just as if one heard a number of angry turkeys,
little else but clucking and whistling,” one baffled merchant wrote—and when the
Hottentots eventually appeared the
commandeur
had to rely on mimicry and mime to
make his wishes known. Indeed, everything about the Cape “savages” seemed alien
to the Dutch, and they were utterly repulsed by the Hottentot diet. The locals liked their
meat uncooked, and their greatest delicacy, the Dutch observed, was the intestines of an
ox, which they “ate quite raw after shaking out most of the dung.”

It took Pelsaert some time to secure the necessary supplies, and his absences
ashore had consequences he could hardly have predicted. While Pelsaert was inland
bartering for sheep, Ariaen Jacobsz took a boat and embarked on an illicit pleasure trip
around the bay in the company of Zwaantie and his friend Jeronimus Cornelisz. Afterward
the little group rowed from ship to ship in the southern dusk, enjoying the hospitality of
the other vessels in the fleet until Jacobsz became thoroughly inebriated. The
skipper’s behavior deteriorated rapidly, and he began to lash out with his fists and
tongue. By the time the
commandeur
returned to the
Batavia,
several
complaints had already been lodged against him.

The episode reflected badly on Pelsaert and his flagship and greatly worried the
commandeur.
“They went ashore without my knowledge when I had gone in search of beasts,” he
recorded in his journal, “until the evening, when they sailed to the
Assendelft
where Ariaen behaved himself very pugnaciously, and at night time went to the ship
Buren,
where he behaved himself worse.” Jacobsz, the
commandeur
concluded, had been
“very beastly with words as well as deeds.”

The skipper’s behavior was a serious problem for Pelsaert. The drunkenness
and violence were bad enough, but the fact that Jacobsz had taken a boat without the
commandeur
’s
permission was worse. It was clear that the skipper would have to be disciplined if the
commandeur
was not to lose face, and early the next morning Pelsaert called Jacobsz into the Great
Cabin and “chided him over his arrogance and the deeds committed by him, saying that
if he did not refrain from his unheard-of behavior, [I] would take a hand; with more other
good admonishments.” This dressing-down, like Ariaen’s antics with Zwaantie,
could not be kept secret for long, and it was soon the talk of the
Batavia.
The
skipper had been humiliated, and his old antagonism for Francisco Pelsaert was
rekindled.

Jacobsz smoldered while his men slaughtered cattle on the beach and packed the
fresh meat into empty barrels. Down below, the carpenters and caulkers finished their
repairs and made things ready for the voyage across the Southern Ocean. They were ready to
weigh anchor by 22 April, having spent only eight days at the Tavern of the
Ocean—less than half the typical duration of a visit to the Cape.

The
Batavia
that sailed from Table Bay was not the ship that had left
Amsterdam the previous October. Ten of her men were dead and now she creaked with fatigue
and crawled with vermin. She was full of tired and squabbling passengers. But in this the
Batavia
was no different from the majority of East Indiamen that sought shelter at the Cape and
could count herself more fortunate than many. What made Pelsaert’s flagship unique
was not that there was unrest, but the exalted rank of those embroiled in the dispute. So
long as the
commandeur
and the skipper of a
retourschip
acted together,
rivalries and sexual jealousy among the crew could be dealt with easily enough. But once
the two most senior men on board took issue with each other, there was no one to restrain
them or their growing enmity.

Up on the quarterdeck, Jeronimus stood with his friend the skipper as Jacobsz
nursed his wounded pride. “By God,” muttered the old sailor, glancing at the
other vessels in the fleet, “if those ships were not lying there, I would treat that
miserly dog so that he could not come out of his cabin for fourteen days. And I would
quickly make myself master of the ship.”

This was dangerous talk. What the skipper threatened was mutiny, and if Pelsaert
had heard what was being said he would have been within his rights to have Jacobsz thrown
overboard or shot. But Jeronimus neither demurred nor went to tell the
commandeur.

The two men stood in silence for a while, and the skipper’s words hung in
the autumn air as Cornelisz considered them. At length the under-merchant spoke.

“And how would you manage that?” he asked.

4

Terra Australis Incognita

“I am for the devil.”

ARIAEN JACOBSZ

S
LOWLY, OVER SEVERAL DAYS, the bones of a plot emerged. Hunched together at the
rail as the
Batavia
plowed through the rough waters east of the Cape, the skipper
and the under-merchant planned a mutiny that would give them control of the ship. They
spoke of ways of subduing the majority of the crew, and the necessity of murdering those
who would not join them. They lingered in pleasurable debate as to Pelsaert’s fate
and thought of turning pirate and preying on the commerce of the Indian Ocean. They
dreamed of a comfortable retirement in some Spanish port, far beyond the reach of the VOC.
Above all, they talked because they needed one another.

It seems to have been Cornelisz who turned the skipper from a mere malcontent
into a mutineer. Ariaen Jacobsz was no longer young. Two decades at sea—and several
debilitating voyages to the East—had made the skipper tough, but the years had
drained him of his vigor. The six-month journey to the Cape had exhausted him. Though it
was common for the skippers of East Indiamen to find their supercargoes an irritant,
Jacobsz was no longer sure he had the energy to turn his mutinous thoughts into deeds.
Much as his hatred of Pelsaert gnawed him, left to himself he would probably have grunted
and chafed without ever taking action. Months later, Cornelisz would recall that as they
stood together at the stern, he heard his friend repeat a single sentence over and over
again: “If I were younger,” Jacobsz had muttered, “I would do something
else.” But with his friend the under-merchant beside him, Ariaen felt emboldened. The
very fact that Jeronimus could stand with him on the quarterdeck, coolly discussing the
prospect of violence, was a spur in itself.

In his journal, Pelsaert eventually came to realize this. “Jeronimus
Cornelissen,” he mused,

“having made himself a great friend and highly familiar with the skipper,
moulded their similar intelligence and feelings into one, the skipper being innate with
prideful conceit and Ambition, so that he could not endure the authority of any over him.
Moreover, he was mocking and contemptuous of all people. Further, he was inexperienced or
inept in getting on with people, in so far as it did not concern sea-faring. But
Jeronimus, on the contrary, was well-spoken and usually knew how to polish the Truth of
his lying words; he was far more sly and skilled in getting on with people  . . . So that
Jeronimus was the tongue of the skipper and served as pedagogue to insinuate into him what
he should answer if I wanted to speak to or admonish him.”

As for Cornelisz, he cared little what befell Francisco Pelsaert. He
encouraged the skipper’s fantasies simply because he knew he could not seize
Batavia
by himself. To do that he would need sailors, whose loyalty he did not command, and the
ability to navigate, which only Ariaen and his steersmen possessed. Granted the men and
the skills he needed, however, Jeronimus scented a prize greater than mere revenge. As he
well knew, the lumbering
Batavia
contained riches greater than any he could dream
of earning in the East.

Cornelisz had motives of his own for mutiny. As the owner of a failed business,
with an abandoned wife and a dead child, he had no particular desire to see the United
Provinces again. As a near-bankrupt seeking his fortune in the Indies, he was engaged in
an enterprise that left him not much more than a 50/50 chance of coming back alive even if
he was successful. And as a VOC officer with ready access to the Great Cabin in the stern,
he had seen the dozen chests of money there and knew they contained a fortune that would
allow anyone who seized it to spend what was left of his life in consummate luxury.
Furthermore, as someone of decidedly heretical beliefs, the under-merchant simply did not
experience the pangs of guilt and conscience that a pious Dutchman might have felt in
plotting rebellion and murder.

In this, as in so much else, Jeronimus Cornelisz was unique; it was unheard-of
for an officer of the VOC to mutiny. Skippers, too, were generally loyal. But Jeronimus
and Ariaen began to look for confederates among the crew, confident they would find men
enough to follow them. The soldiers and sailors of the Dutch East India Company were
always ready to revolt.

Harsh treatment, poor wages, and the terrible conditions on the voyage to Java
frequently combined to produce outbreaks of trouble on board VOC ships, although the
unrest generally fell well short of the sort of bloody uprising Cornelisz and Jacobsz had
begun to contemplate. Most mutinies were little more than shipboard protests, which flared
up rapidly and were over quickly. They were led by ordinary seamen—the ringleaders
were almost always foreigners, not Dutchmen—and usually took the form of a complaint
against conditions on board, or concerns about the seaworthiness of a tired old ship. They
rarely involved much violence and might more accurately be described as a form of strike.
^*17
Such mutinies were generally settled by concessions—perhaps by increasing rations or
an agreement to restrain excesses in discipline. Once the officers had recovered control
of the ship, it was normal to treat the majority of the rebels relatively leniently. One
or two ringleaders would almost certainly be executed, if they could be identified, but
most of those involved could at least hope to escape with their lives.

Full-fledged mutinies, led by a relatively small group of men who had actively
conspired to take over a ship, were extremely rare. They required careful planning, access
to weapons—which were generally kept under lock and key in the ship’s armory in
the stern—and the cooperation (whether it was given willingly or not) of an officer
who knew how to sail the ship. Even if all these conditions were met, such rebellions were
highly risky and invariably entailed serious consequences for those concerned. Either the
mutiny would be put down, in which case anyone actively involved would be condemned to
death, or it would succeed. In the latter case, the mutineers almost always felt compelled
to murder most of the officers and many of the men. They knew these actions could never be
forgiven and that the agents of Jan Company would pursue them for the rest of their
lives.

Jacobsz and Cornelisz must have realized this, but they also knew that such
things did occur. Half a dozen major mutinies had broken out in the fleets of the VOC
between 1602 and 1628, most recently in 1621 on a ship called the
Witte Beer
^*18
and most seriously in 1615 on board the
Meeuwtje
and the
Grote Maen.
^*19
The latter ships were part of a fleet sent to explore a westward route to the Indies via
Cape Horn. While they were still in the Atlantic, 14 men on the
Meeuwtje,
led by a
sailor and a carpenter, conspired to seize the ship, but word of the plot reached the ears
of the officers, and the two ringleaders were hung. The other dozen men were spared
because they had expressed remorse, and rather than being punished they were simply
dispersed among the other vessels of the fleet. Three months later there was a second
mutiny on board the
Meeuwtje.
The ringleaders of this affair were pitched overboard
and left to drown, but again the bulk of the mutineers were spared. This leniency on the
part of the vessel’s upper-merchant proved to be a serious mistake. Soon a storm
sprang up and the
Meeuwtje
disappeared. In time the VOC established that a third
mutiny had occurred. This one had been successful. The ship had been sailed to La Rochelle
and handed over to the French; only one of the mutineers, a man who made the mistake of
venturing back onto Dutch soil, was ever caught and punished.

The example of the
Meeuwtje
may have suggested to Jacobsz and Cornelisz
that it was possible to seize an East Indiaman and escape unscathed. But the skipper and
the under-merchant must also have realized that the lessons of the mutinies had been well
learned by their masters in the Netherlands. Leniency was no longer tolerated. Henceforth
all captured mutineers would be put to death immediately, or punished so severely that
they wished for it.

Discipline on board a
retourschip
was brutal at the best of times. The
frugal Dutch might punish minor crimes such as blasphemy and drunkenness with a system of
fines, but physical violence, or the threat of it, earned violent retribution. At the
slightest hint of insolence to an officer, a malefactor could be manacled hand and foot
and thrown into “hell”—a tiny cell in the forepart of the gun deck where
the wind whistled maddeningly through the slats. This prison was so small that it was
impossible either to stand or to lie down, but men could be left to rot there for weeks at
a time. Fighting with knives, a common activity that the Dutch called
snicker-snee,
was an even worse offense. Article XCI of the VOC regulations was explicit on this point.
“Anyone pulling a knife in anger,” it ordained, “shall be nailed to the
mast with a knife through his hand, and shall remain standing until he pulls his hand
off.” In practice this meant that the condemned man was led to the mast with his
weaker hand strapped behind his back. His working hand was then impaled to the mast, and
the victim had to choose between tearing it in half by pulling sharply downward, or easing
the hand slowly and agonizingly from side to side until the wound was so big it was
possible to pass the haft of the knife right through it. Whichever method he chose, he
would likely never work at sea again.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that after 1615 the most common
sentence for a rank-and-file mutineer was 200 lashes, enough to reduce a man’s back
to pulp, kill many who endured it, and scar the rest for life. In Dutch service, mutineers
were doused with seawater before their lashes were inflicted. This refinement ensured that
salt was driven into the wounds, which acted as a crude antiseptic but redoubled the agony
of the punishment. More serious cases were dealt with by dropping the mutineer from the
yardarm or keelhauling him.

The former sentence involved pinioning a man’s hands behind his back and
tying a long, stout rope around his wrists. Lead weights were secured to his feet and he
was then dropped 40 or 50 feet toward the sea, falling until the rope went taut. The
sudden deceleration inevitably dislocated the mutineer’s shoulders, and his wrists
and arms were often shattered, too. The man was then twice hauled back up to be dropped
again, a punishment that in his broken state was even more painful than the fall itself.
Having been dropped three times, the mutineer would then usually be lashed as
well.

Keelhauling, which was a Dutch invention, was generally regarded as an even more
severe punishment. Sentence was carried out by tying a man’s arms together above his
head and binding his legs. He was given a sponge to bite down on, and a long rope was then
passed under the keel of the moving ship and the ends secured to the sailor’s limbs
so he could be pulled from one side of the vessel to the other. When the idea was first
conceived, keelhauling almost always resulted in the death of the condemned man, who would
either be cut to pieces by the barnacles covering the bottom of the ship or decapitated as
he smashed into the hull. The ingenious Dutch found a solution to this problem, and soon
each VOC ship was supplied with a special full-body harness, made of lead and leather,
into which a man could be strapped. The harness was equipped with a flag on a long pole.
By adjusting the length of the ropes until the flag was a certain height above the water,
it was possible to ensure that the mutineer was dragged under the keel rather than across
it, and the lead harness protected him from any incidental contact. Keelhauling, too, was
generally repeated three times before the punishment was completed. Nevertheless, in an
era in which only one man in seven could swim, it was such a terrifying ordeal that the
full sentence was often not completed for fear that the victim would drown.

Soldiers and sailors desperate enough to risk such punishments would hardly balk
at killing the officers who would inflict them, and the men whom Cornelisz and Jacobsz
recruited to their plot were undoubtedly a rough lot. Significantly, however, they also
included a number of senior officers and experienced soldiers and sailors of the sort
required to run
Batavia
successfully.

A good deal of care would still have been required. Rumors traveled swiftly below
decks, and the slightest word to the upper-merchant might have proved fatal. But on a
retourschip
crewed by the dregs of the Amsterdam waterfront there were always malcontents and, between
them, the skipper and the under-merchant knew of several men who could be tempted by the
lure of easy money and spurred by hatred for the VOC. The first man Ariaen approached
appears to have been the bos’n’s mate, who was a cousin of the skipper and
presumably a man in whom Jacobsz had full confidence. The most important addition to the
ranks of the mutineers, however, was unquestionably the bos’n himself.

Jan Evertsz, the
Batavia
’s high boatswain and thus the most senior
officer—after Jacobsz and the three steersmen—on the ship, came from
Monnickendam, a small fishing port on the coast north of Amsterdam with a reputation for
producing a particularly brutal sort of sailor.
^*20
He was probably still in his twenties,
and it was his job to implement the orders of the skipper, with whom he necessarily had a
close relationship. Like other high boatswains, Evertsz most likely stood watches while at
sea and would have been on his way to becoming a skipper himself. “As the master is
to be abaft the mast,” one contemporary authority explained, “so the boatswain,
and all the common sailors, are to be afore the mast . . . . The boatswain is to see the
shrouds and other ropes set taut, the deep sea line and plummet [lead] in readiness
against their coming into soundings. In a fight he must see the flag and pendants put
forth, and call up every man to his labour and his office. And to conclude, his and his
mate’s work is never at an end, for it is impossible to repeat all the offices that
are put upon them.”