Batavia's Graveyard (17 page)

Ariaen Jacobsz had been enjoying himself in the upper-merchant’s absence.
For almost a month he had been the undisputed master of the ship, and his self-confidence
had increased proportionately. He had faced down those who sneered at his dalliance with
the servant Zwaantie Hendricx, and publicly acknowledged the girl as his companion.
Indeed, so enamored was he of her blowsy favors that he vowed (as Pelsaert later heard)
“without taking any thought of his honour or the reputation of his office, that if
anyone made even a sour face to the foresaid Zwaantie, he would not leave it
unrevenged.”

Jacobsz made a powerful protector, and it is not surprising Zwaantie
“readily accepted the caresses of the skipper with great willingness and refused him
nothing, whatsoever he desired.” Nevertheless, Ariaen remained either unable or
unwilling to commit himself fully to her; south of the Cape, when their frequent couplings
led Hendricx to suspect she had conceived, the skipper shied away and asked her to spend
an evening with his friend Allert Janssen. He got the pair of them drunk and left Zwaantie
alone with Janssen, “who has done his will with her, because [Jacobsz] thought that
she was pregnant and that she should wed Allert.”

The serving girl seems not to have minded this, and the skipper soon missed
having her in his bed when it transpired the pregnancy was a false alarm. Within days they
were together once again. But something must have changed in their relationship, for
Ariaen now took to making dangerous promises to Zwaantie. Convinced Pelsaert was as good
as dead, the records of the voyage relate, “he took from her the name and yoke of
servant, and promised that she should see the destruction of her Mistress and others, and
that he wanted to make her a great Lady.” Pelsaert’s recovery was thus a setback
for the skipper and for Zwaantie. In consequence, Jacobsz resigned himself to action,
shrugging: “I am still for the Devil; if I go to the Indies then I have come to shame
in any case.”

It was now 13 May, and so confident had Jeronimus been that the
commandeur
would die that for the best part of a month he and Ariaen had not bothered to seek out
further mutineers among the crew. Pelsaert’s unexpected recovery forced a rapid
reassessment of their plans. If they were to be successful now, Cornelisz and Jacobsz
needed to more than double the number of men they could rely on when the moment came to
mutiny. Apparently, the two malcontents had already approached their own most trusted
acquaintances, and those of Jan Evertsz and Jacop Pietersz, too. To sound out others, in
whom they had less confidence, would be to take a considerable risk. A better way of
proceeding, they now decided, would be to rouse the whole crew against the
commandeur.

They selected as their instrument the unattainable Lucretia Jans. She was, they
knew, as desired by Pelsaert as she had been by the skipper. By arranging for her to be
attacked by masked members of the crew, they expected to provoke the upper-merchant into
punitive retaliation; and by concealing the identity of her assailants, they hoped that
any measures that were taken would be manifestly unfair to the majority of the men on
board. Thus, they thought, a larger number of the crew could be persuaded to support their
mutiny.

“The skipper and Jeronimus,” Pelsaert later recorded in his
journal,

“in the presence and with the knowledge of Zwaantie, decided after long
debates and discourses, what dishonour they could do the foresaid Lady, which would be
most shameful to her and would be supposed the worst by the
commandeur.
In order
therefore that confusion might be sought through her and through the punishment of those
who took a hand in it, Jeronimus proposed that she should be given a cut over both cheeks
with a knife, which could be done by one person, and few would perceive that they had been
the instigators of it. The skipper was of another mind, that it would be better that many
should have a hand in it, then the
commandeur
could not punish the many, or there
would be a big outcry, and if the
commandeur
should let it go unnoticed, then there
was time enough to give her cuts on the cheeks.”

This strange plot, which is unique in all the annals of the sea, was hurriedly
conceived within a day of Pelsaert’s emergence from his cabin. It must have owed a
good deal to Jacobsz’s desire to revenge himself upon the woman who had spurned him
off the coast of Africa. The skipper’s hand, and Zwaantie’s too, can certainly
be discerned in the selection of Jan Evertsz as the man to assault Creesje, and also in
the bizarre and humiliating way in which the high boatswain carried out his
task.

The plotters decided to seize Lucretia as she left the merchant’s table to
return to her own cabin on the evening of 14 May. It would be pitch-dark by then, and many
of the crew would already be asleep. Swiftly, Evertsz set about recruiting men willing to
take part in the assault. Some, and perhaps all, of the group that he approached were
established mutineers. There were eight of them in all, including Allert Janssen and
Ryckert Woutersz, all lounging on the
Batavia
’s foredeck in the early
afternoon. The most senior was the quartermaster, Harman Nannings. The youngest was
Cornelis Janssen, the 18-year-old Haarlem sailor known to all as “Bean”; though
still little more than a boy, his “innate and incankered corruptness” made it
natural for Evertsz to think of him. All but one of the others were gunners, and thus
probably friends of Woutersz and Allert Janssen. “Men,” Evertsz told them,
“there is an assault on our hands. Will you help to give the prince a pleasant
outing?”
^*24

There was a good deal of enthusiasm for the “trick” that was to be
played on Creesje. Only one member of the group, an Alkmaar man named Cornelis Dircxsz,
declined to have anything to do with the idea, and he did nothing to prevent the attack.
Plainly, Evertsz felt sure that none of his sailors would dare betray him. His confidence
was not misplaced.

With the high boatswain at their head they were eight strong, and much more than
a match for one young woman taken by surprise. It was already late when Creesje left the
Great Cabin after dinner. She stood silhouetted for a moment against the lanterns that
swayed back and forth over the table, and they could see that it was her as the door swung
shut. There was a momentary rustle in the darkness; she gasped and started, then she was
being forced onto the deck. Hostile eyes glinted from behind cloaks drawn tightly over
faces. As she sprawled on her back, uncomprehending, helpless, they seized her by the legs
and dragged her across the deck into an unfrequented corner of the gallery. She felt her
skirts lifted, and rough hands groping underneath. Other fingers spread a sticky, stinking
mess across her face. There were no cuts; she did not scream; the assault lasted only
seconds and then she was alone and huddled, shaking, against the rail. Her dress was
filthy, and her face and legs and genitals had been thickly smeared with tar and
dung.

Word of the attack on Creesje Jans spread rapidly throughout the ship. It was by
far the most sensational event that had occurred since their stranding on the Walcheren
Banks and must have been the principal topic of conversation on board for many days. The
commandeur
himself, as Jacobszoon and Corneliszoon had anticipated, took the news “very
violently and to the highest degree.” Pelsaert was no policeman, but he investigated
the assault as thoroughly as he was able, and Evertsz was soon back at work, spreading
rumors:

“This had been the true aim which they thought to have brought off: to let
it be spread by the High Boatswain that the people would be punished or brought to grief
for the sake of Women or Whores, which the skipper would never permit to happen, so long
as he lived.”

Yet to the chagrin of the conspirators, Pelsaert actually took no action that
might render him disagreeable to the crew.

The upper-merchant’s restraint can only have one explanation. It was quickly
evident that while Creesje herself had no idea who the majority of her assailants might
have been, she had recognized Jan Evertsz, and unsupported though her testimony was,
Pelsaert could have had the high boatswain arrested and punished on this evidence alone.
He failed to do so, partly because he was still ill, but also because he had at last begun
to glimpse the nature of the forces ranged against him. The merchant “especially
suspected,” the
Batavia
’s journal observed, “from many Circumstances
of which he had become aware during his illness, that the skipper had been the Author of
it.” If so, he no doubt also recognized the risk he himself might run by ordering the
arrest of both Evertsz and Ariaen Jacobsz—two of his highest-ranking
sailors.

The skipper remained sanguine, unaware that he himself was now suspected. He was
certain that the
commandeur
was merely biding his time. Once the
Batavia
neared Java—and the support of the Dutch authorities there—Pelsaert would surely
act, arresting suspects and clapping them in chains. This development could still be the
signal for a mutiny.

By now, the plot was fairly well developed. Led by Jacobsz, a small group of
dependable men would rise up in the small hours of the morning, when the great majority of
those on board were asleep. They would batter their way into the
commandeur
’s
cabin, seize Pelsaert and toss him into the sea, while the main body of mutineers broke
out their concealed weapons and nailed down the hatches to the orlop deck to prevent the
soldiers intervening. Once it became clear that the rebels had control of the
Batavia,
fear and greed would make it a simple matter to recruit the 120 or so sailors and gunners
needed to run the ship. In the absence of any spare boats, or a convenient island on which
to maroon them, the rest of those on board—200 or so loyal officers, useless
passengers, and unwanted men—would have to follow the
commandeur
over the
side.

The remainder of the plot was equally straightforward. With a powerful new ship
at their disposal, the mutineers would turn to piracy. Putting in to Mauritius or
Madagascar for supplies, they would prey on the rich commerce of the Indian Ocean for a
year or two, until they had accumulated sufficient loot to make every man on board
wealthy. When that had been achieved, they would settle down to enjoy their money well out
of the reach of the VOC.

So the skipper and the under-merchant sat back and waited for Pelsaert’s
reprisals. The
commandeur
would act, Ariaen predicted, when
Batavia
sighted
the Australian coast.

For the men of the
retourschip,
the great red continent was little more
than a void on the charts they carried. “Terra Australis Incognita,” they called
it: “the unknown South-Land.” Even in 1629, its very existence was based more on
supposition than on fact. Early geographers, such as the Greco-Egyptian Ptolemy, writing
in a.d. 140, had imagined a world divided into four gigantic continents. Europe, and what
was known of Africa and Asia, was believed to occupy the northeast portion of the globe.
This massive land mass seemed to require a counterbalance. From the earliest days,
therefore, world maps showed a giant continent south of the equator, girdling the Earth
and in many cases joining South America and Africa to China.

As the Portuguese and Spaniards pressed southward in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, it gradually became apparent that the South-Land could not be as big as had
been supposed. Ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn without sighting it and
sailed northwest across the Pacific and east through the Indian Ocean without finding any
trace of the mysterious continent. By the time the VOC was founded, almost the only place
left to look was the great blank that still lay south of the Indies and west of the
Americas.

Contemporary globes and maps continued to indicate the presence of Terra
Australis in this area. Over the years, elements of fantasy had crept into descriptions of
the South-Land, and in the sixteenth century faulty interpretation of the works of Marco
Polo led to the addition of three nonexistent provinces to maps of the southern continent.
The most important of the three was Beach, which appeared on many charts with the alluring
label
provincia aurifera,
“gold-bearing land”; sailors often referred to
the whole South-Land by this name. The other imaginary provinces were Maletur (
scatens
aromatibus,
a region overflowing with spices) and Lucach, which was said as late as
1601 to have received an embassy from Java. The existence of these provinces was an
article of faith for most Europeans; in 1545 the Spaniards had actually appointed a
governor of the nonexistent Beach—a certain Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, who was one of
the conquistadors of Chile. Even the more pragmatic Dutch did not entirely disbelieve, for
their ships had occasionally stumbled unexpectedly across a coast that they believed must
be part of Terra Australis.