Batavia's Graveyard (16 page)

The high boatswain’s tasks thus required him to be a first-rate seaman. With
few exceptions, boatswains were men of long experience who had been promoted from the
ranks, and their rough manners and coarse humor made them uncomfortable companions for the
passengers in the stern. As the man charged with keeping order among the crew, Evertsz
must have been brutal and decisive. As the man in day-to-day command of the ship’s
180 sailors, he was also well placed to pick out troublemakers. He was the ideal recruit
to the mutineers’ cause.

It seems to have been the skipper who sounded out Evertsz, and Evertsz who found
other mutineers to join them. Among their number were Allert Janssen, of Assendelft—a
companion of Jacobsz’s who had already killed one man in the Dutch Republic—and
Ryckert Woutersz, a loudmouthed gunner from Harlingen. Sensibly, the skipper and the high
boatswain kept the names of these recruits to themselves, and even the other mutineers did
not know exactly who was implicated in the plot. It is thus difficult to ascertain how
many sailors were involved. There may have been as few as half a dozen of them at
first.

One of the most unusual features of the plot on Pelsaert’s ship was the way
in which its tentacles extended into every part of the vessel. Most mutinies were the work
of a small, tight-knit group of sailors, but the rebellion planned on the
Batavia
encompassed merchants, cadets, and soldiers, too. It is possible to discern the devious
hand of the under-merchant in this unprecedented development. Jeronimus was an articulate
man possessed of great powers of persuasion. Those he so charmed came in the end to see
him as a “seducer of men,” and he would certainly have had a good deal of
influence among the VOC assistants on the ship. Given the traditional antipathy between
the soldiers and the sailors of Jan Company, it was possibly his job to sound out the men
down on the orlop, too.

Coenraat van Huyssen, the army cadet from Gelderland, may have been
Cornelisz’s chosen instrument. Impetuous, hotheaded, with a lust for violence, Van
Huyssen and his compatriot Gsbert van Welderen were in the vanguard of the mutineers’
party from the beginning. The young
jonkers
^*21
soon took to sleeping with their
weapons in their hammocks, and Van Huyssen boasted to the others that he would be
“amongst the first who jumped with a sword into the Cabin, in order to throw the
commandeur
overboard.” Perhaps through him, the mutineers soon made the acquaintance of
“Stone-Cutter” Pietersz, the lance corporal from Am-sterdam whose influence over
the troops on board was roughly equivalent to the sway that Evertsz held over the sailors.
Like the high boatswain, Pietersz was an important addition to the ranks of the mutineers.
His role was probably to suggest the names of soldiers he could trust and to identify
those whose loyalty to the Company was such that they would have to be disposed of when
the mutiny was done.

Between them, the under-merchant, the high boatswain, and the corporal formed a
uniquely dangerous triumvirate. With the skipper at their side, their influence extended
to every corner of the ship, and the power they wielded was such that—even had word
of the mutiny got out—the bravest man on board would have hesitated to denounce them
to the
commandeur.
Together, they had every prospect of success.

To seize the ship, the
Batavia
’s rebels first had to separate their
vessel from her consorts, and thus from all possibility of aid. This was the principal
lesson of the repeated mutinies on board the
Meeuwtje,
which had only finally
succeeded when the ship had become detached from her fleet. In the
Batavia
’s
case it was easily accomplished; soon after the convoy left Table Bay, Jacobsz took
advantage of the variable winds south of the Cape to drift slowly away from the other
ships in the convoy. It was all too common, in the days when the VOC sent ships of wildly
differing quality to the East, for the vessels of a fleet to become detached from one
another in this way, and even though the
Batavia
had kept company with the little
warship
Buren,
the old
Dordrecht,
the
Assendelft,
and
Sardam
all the way from Holland, no one seems to have suspected anything was wrong.

Next, and far more problematically, the under-merchant and the skipper had to
recruit a large enough body of men to enable them to take control of the
Batavia
.
On the
Meeuwtje,
which was a smaller vessel, a core of 13 rebellious sailors had
been identified, but, given the eventual disappearance of the vessel, others must have
remained undetected. On other East Indiamen, groups of up to 60 malcontents conspired to
seize their ships. In their first month back at sea, Jacobsz and Cornelisz persuaded
somewhere between 8 and 18 men to join them
.
Ranged against 300 neutrals and
company loyalists, this was nowhere near enough to guarantee success. Further action was
required.

While the skipper and the under-merchant pondered what to do, and the
Batavia
nosed her way southward into the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean, Pelsaert himself
offered an apparent solution to their problem. A day or two after they had sailed from the
Cape, the
commandeur
fell dangerously ill.

The nature of Francisco Pelsaert’s malady is nowhere specified, but it kept
him in his bunk for weeks and came so close to killing him that his recovery was not
expected. His illness appears to have been a fever of some sort, possibly malaria
contracted during his time in India. Had the upper-merchant succumbed, Cornelisz and
Jacobsz could have taken control of the ship by right, without the need for mutiny.
So—unknown to all but a handful of the passengers and crew—throughout late April
and early May 1629 the fate of the ship lay in the hands of one of the most important of
all the members of the
Batavia
’s crew. He was named Frans Jansz and he came
from the old North Quarter port of Hoorn.

Jansz was the
Batavia
’s surgeon. His practice was conducted from the
tiny dispensary on the gun deck, which was scarcely more than five feet square, and his
only tools were a set of surgeon’s saws, a small apothecary’s chest,
and—because all seventeenth-century surgeons doubled as barbers—a handful of
razors and some bowls. With these scant resources, and the assistance of an under-barber,
Aris Jansz, he was responsible for the health of all 320 people on the ship.

Of all the officers on board
Batavia,
Frans Jansz was probably the most
popular among the passengers and crew. In the course of a typical journey from the
Netherlands to Java, almost 1 in 10 of a
retourschip
’s crew would die, and a
much larger number would fall ill and require treatment. If the proportion of the sick and
the dead exceeded certain ratios, the ship would become unmanageable and might be lost
together with its crew. Jansz, then, was the chief hope not only of Francisco Pelsaert,
but of all those on the
Batavia
who wished to reach the Indies without undue
drama.

It is not possible to say whether or not the
Batavia
’s surgeon was
worthy of the trust that the ship’s crew placed in him, but the likelihood is that he
was not. The Gentlemen XVII always experienced great difficulty in attracting competent
medical men. The dangers of the journey east were such that no successful physicians or
apothecaries could possibly be induced to go to Java. Even reputable barber-surgeons were
hard to come by. Unlike merchants, surgeons had relatively few opportunities to profit in
the East, and since they endured similar risks, the standard of those who could be lured
to serve at sea was often very low.

On a good many East Indiamen, indeed, the problem of obtaining decent treatment
was exacerbated by the dangers of the job. Shut up in their dispensaries below decks and
constantly exposed to sick and dying men, the mortality rate among sea surgeons was far
higher than it was among surgeons on land. Though most
retourschepen
did carry at
least two barbers, it was far from uncommon for both men to expire in the course of a
voyage, and if that happened, an untutored sailor would be pressed into service as a
make-do surgeon. Men who found themselves in such a situation had no idea how to bleed a
patient or amputate a shattered limb. They were simply expected to get on with
it.

On ships such as the
Batavia
where the barbers did survive, the quality of
care could occasionally be good. Seventeenth-century surgeons had one inestimable
advantage over the physicians and the apothecaries who were their nominal superiors: they
were practical men, and learned their trade from experience.
^*22
Freed from reliance on the
false principles of the physicians, surgeons were generally effective in setting broken
bones and treating the normal run of shipboard injuries. Some were undeniably
conscientious men, who did all they could for the sailors in their care, and a few had
passed special “Sea Exams” that qualified them to deal with the full range of
shipboard injuries—“fractures, dislocations, shot-wounds, concussions, burns,
gangrenes, etc.”

Jan Loxe, a sea surgeon who sailed later in the seventeenth century, left notes
that indicate the unpleasant nature and likely extent of Jansz’s work. “First
thing in the morning,” he wrote in his journal,

“we must prepare the medicines that have to be taken internally and give
each patient his dose. Next, we must scarify, clean and dress the filthy, stinking wounds,
and bandage them and the ulcerations. Then we must bandage the stiff and benumbed limbs of
the scorbutic patients. At midday we must fetch and dish out the food for sometimes 40,
50, or even 60 people, and the same again in the evening; and what is more, we are kept up
half the night as well in attending to patients who suffer a relapse, and so
forth.”

Stamina, then, was one requirement for a surgeon. Another was great
strength—enough to hold down a conscious, screaming man while amputating a shattered
limb without the benefit of anesthetic. But Jansz, and sea surgeons like him, were also
required to have a working knowledge of Cornelisz’s art, and it was to the
apothecary’s chest, packed by the Gentlemen XVII’s own pharmacist in Amsterdam,
that Frans Jansz would have turned in order to treat Pelsaert.

A typical sea surgeon’s apothecary’s chest opened to reveal three
drawers, each minutely subdivided into small rectangular compartments and packed with the
products of the contemporary pharmacy: approximately 200 different preparations in all. In
treating Pelsaert, Jansz may well have turned to theriac, which was often administered to
patients suffering from malaria two hours before a paroxysm was anticipated in order to
strengthen them for the coming ordeal. Mithridatium—a 2,000-year-old antidote,
originally from Persia, which was supposed to neutralize venom and cure almost any
disease—was another well-known treatment. Elsewhere in the chest other drawers
contained “Egyptian ointment,” a sterilizing balm made from alum, copper, and
mercury; the sovereign remedy of mummy; and a variety of oils and syrups fortified with
fruits and spices, as well as cinnamon water, camphor, aloes, myrrh, and extract of
rhubarb.
^*23
As a contemporary English book,
The Surgeon’s Mate,
explained, the
provision of so many medicines was hardly excessive, “for although there may seeme
many particulars, yet there wanteth at the least forty more.”

For 20 long days, the surgeon dosed and purged the
commandeur,
trying a
variety of treatments in an attempt to cure his illness. And as the
Batavia
surged
onward through the boiling waters of the Roaring Forties at the bottom of the world, the
upper-merchant’s fever slowly ebbed away. Whether his recovery was attributable to
Jansz’s ministrations or, more likely, to a robust constitution, it is impossible to
say. Whatever the reason, three weeks after he had taken to his bunk, and to the
consternation of the mutineers, Francisco Pelsaert reappeared on deck.