Batavia's Graveyard (18 page)

In the first years of the VOC, the Company’s sailors had largely kept to the
sea lanes established by the Portuguese. From the Cape of Good Hope, these ran north along
the African coast to Madagascar, and then northeast across the Indian Ocean to the Indies.
There were, however, significant problems with this route. The heat was frequently
unbearable, the Portuguese unfriendly, and there were numerous shoals and shallows to
negotiate along the way. Furthermore, once north of the Cape, contrary winds and currents
made the voyage extremely slow; journeys of up to 16 months were not uncommon. Frequent
hurricanes also occurred, which caused the loss of many ships. The Dutch persisted with
the Portuguese route, unsatisfactory as it clearly was, only because they knew of no
alternative.

Then, in 1610, a senior VOC official named Henrik Brouwer discovered an alternate
passage far to the south of the established sea lanes. Heading south rather than north
from the Cape of Good Hope until he reached the northern limits of the Roaring Forties, he
found a belt of strong, consistent westerlies that hurried his ships toward the Indies.
When Brouwer estimated that he had reached the longitude of the Sunda Strait, which
divides Java and Sumatra, he had his ships turn north and reached the port of Bantam only
five months and 24 days after leaving the United Provinces. He had cut about 2,000 miles
from the journey, outflanked the Portuguese, more than halved the time taken to complete
the outward voyage, and arrived in Java with a healthy crew to boot.

The Gentlemen XVII were suitably impressed. Faster voyages meant increased
profits, and from 1616 all Dutch ships were enjoined to follow the “fairway”
Brouwer had discovered. So long as the VOC’s skippers kept an accurate reckoning of
their position, it was undoubtedly a far superior route. But the strong winds and fast
currents of the Southern Ocean made it all too easy to underestimate how far east a ship
had sailed. When this occurred, the vessel would miss the turn to the north and find
herself sailing dangerously close to the barren coast of Western Australia.

There were several near disasters. In 1616 the East Indiaman
Eendracht
^*25
unexpectedly encountered the South-Land after an unusually fast passage from the Cape, and
sailed north along the coast for a few hundred miles. The charts her officers drew were
incorporated into the VOC’s rutters, which henceforth indicated the existence of a
small portion of the Australian shore, called Eendrachtsland; but it was by no means
certain at the time whether this new coast was the South-Land or some smaller island. In
any case, communication with Europe was so slow that news of the discovery took a long
time to reach the ears of many skippers and when, two years later, another ship—the
Zeewolf
^*26
—chanced
on what was almost certainly the North West Cape, her skipper was considerably alarmed
“as we have never heard of this discovery, and the chart shows nothing but open ocean
at this place.”

The
Eendracht
and the
Zeewolf
were fortunate to come on the coast
in daylight and light weather. A clumsy, square-rigged East Indiaman encountering land by
night or with a strong wind at her back could easily find herself ashore long before she
could turn away. Only a few months before the
Batavia
arrived in Australian waters,
another Dutch ship,
Vianen,
^*27
had actually run aground on a sandbank off the
northwest coast, and her skipper had to jettison a valuable cargo of copper and pepper to
float her off.

In such circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that a ship would come to grief
somewhere on the Australian coast sooner rather than later. In the event, the English East
India Company—which in 1621 ordered its ships to follow the new Dutch route without
really understanding its dangers or having access to even the fragmentary charts that the
VOC possessed—was the first to lose a vessel. The ship in question was the East
Indiaman
Tryall,
which sailed from Plymouth under the command of one John Brookes
and struck an undiscovered shoal somewhere off the North West Cape shortly before midnight
on 25 May 1623.

It might almost have been a dress rehearsal for the loss of the
Batavia.
As the
Tryall
filled with water, Brookes took the sounding lead and found less than
20 feet of water under the stern. Realizing that his ship could not be saved, he spent the
next two hours loading as many of his employer’s “spangles” as he could
into a skiff. At four in the morning, “like a Judas running,” in the words of
his own first mate, Thomas Bright, the captain of the
Tryall
“lowered himself
privately into the boat with only nine men and his boy, and stood for the Straits of Sunda
that instant without care.” He was only just in time to save himself. Half an hour
later, the ship broke up under the pounding of the surf, and although Bright managed to
launch the longboat and save another 36 members of the crew, almost a hundred sailors were
left to drown.

Brookes and Bright separately succeeded in reaching Java, where the first mate
wrote a disgusted letter accusing his captain of stealing Company property and abandoning
his men. For his part, Brookes composed a comprehensively mendacious report, claiming to
have followed the established Dutch route to the Indies when he had in fact been sailing
several hundred miles to the east of the accepted sea lanes. His error not only led
directly to the loss of his ship; it also provided an early warning of the unknown dangers
of the South-Land coast that Jan Company would have done well to heed.

The extreme difficulty that both the VOC and the English East India Company had
in determining the position of their ships had its root in the most intractable
navigational problem of the day: the impossibility of finding longitude at sea. Latitude,
the measure of a ship’s distance from the equator, can easily be determined by
measuring the angle that the sun makes with the horizon at its zenith. Calculating
longitude is much more difficult. The prime meridian is a purely artificial creation in
any case—in the 1620s the Dutch measured longitude west and east from the tallest
peak on Tenerife—but, wherever it is said to lie, the sun passes directly overhead
once each 24 hours on its way to lighting the whole 360 degrees of the globe in the course
of a single day. In one hour, therefore, it traverses 15 degrees of longitude, and it
follows that a ship’s position can be determined by comparing the time in a known
location (such as a home port) with the local time at sea. This feat became possible only
with the invention of dependable chronometers in the second half of the eighteenth
century. In 1629, Ariaen Jacobsz and his men tracked the passage of time with hourglasses,
which were not remotely accurate enough for navigation.

Unable to determine their longitude precisely, Dutch sailors resorted to dead
reckoning. They calculated their position from the color of the water, the appearance of
seaweed, and birds circling overhead. Far out to sea, the only way of plotting progress on
a chart was to estimate the distance run since the last landfall. The Dutch did this with
a ship’s log—which in the seventeenth century meant tossing what was literally a
chip of wood into the sea from the bows and timing it as it bobbed between two notches on
the gunwale. From this they calculated their speed, and thus their approximate
position.

The log was hardly a precision tool; the only way to time its progress along the
side was to use a 30-second hourglass or a human pulse, and in any case it could not
indicate the prevailing currents. Plotting a ship’s position correctly was thus all
but impossible. Errors of 500 miles or more were commonplace, and it is in retrospect
surprising that Dutch navigators did not find themselves cast up on the Australian coast
more often than they did.

As they neared the end of their long journey, then, Jacobsz and his steersmen
were trusting in dead reckoning and intuition to keep
Batavia
clear of the
South-Land’s shores. The charts available on the ship were of at best limited use to
them; the most up-to-date available, drawn in the summer of 1628, showed only broken
fragments of the coast and the scattering of islands that the Dutch had occasionally
encountered up to 60 miles off shore. Probably the skipper hardly bothered to consult
them; in the early days of June he still believed he would not sight Terra Australis for
another week or so.

In fact, a deadly obstacle now lay in the
Batavia
’s path. In 1619 the
upper-merchant Frederick de Houtman—the brother of the man who had led the
Eerste
Schipvaart
east in 1595—had stumbled on and lent his name to Houtman’s
Abrolhos, the low-lying chain of reefs and islands that formed the principal obstacle to
Dutch ships heading north along the Australian coast. He had been sailing from the Cape to
Java in the East Indiaman
Dordrecht
(the same ship, groaning with age, was now a
part of Pelsaert’s fleet) when he unexpectedly “came upon the south-land
Beach” only six weeks out of Table Bay. Veering west and out to sea, the
Dordrecht
sailed north for 10 more days until De Houtman chanced on the islands of the Abrolhos
where his charts indicated there should be only open sea. The surrounding reefs were
plainly dangerous, and he did not survey them, merely sketching in their presence on his
charts. The same islands were sighted by the
Tortelduif
^*28
in 1624, but the skipper
of that ship told few men what he had seen.

No other
retourschip
chanced on the Abrolhos before 1629, so Ariaen
Jacobsz would have known nothing but the fact of their existence. No maps existed to tell
him there were three groups of islands, stretched out south to north. No rutter recorded
that even the largest of them was so low that the archipelago could not be seen from any
distance, nor that it sprawled across almost a full degree of latitude, directly in the
path of the
Batavia.
No instinct told Jacobsz that he should shorten sail by night
and proceed cautiously by day.

When the ship struck, she therefore did so at full speed.

5

The Tiger

“Everything that has been done is not my fault.”

JERONIMUS CORNELISZ

I
T WAS AS THOUGH THEY HAD BEEN CAST up on the edges of the world. Even today,
on sullen afternoons, the islands of the Abrolhos are monochrome and listless—so drab
they seem to suck the color from the sky. It is as if the archipelago lies somewhere at
the bottom of the ocean, and the steel-tinged light suffusing it has filtered through a
hundred feet of water. Deprived of sun, the sparse vegetation turns the color of old
parchment; the clouds are dull and specked with quartz; even the sea is grey. The only
thing alive there is the wind.

The gales blow endlessly throughout the southern winter, tearing up from the
Roaring Forties and billowing so hard that they bend the low scrub double. Wind cracks and
rattles canvas and whistles in the gaps between the coral. From May until July, the
islands are swept repeatedly by storms, which rage for up to 10 days at a time, pile up
surf against the reefs, and smash anything in their path, sending spray 30 or 40 feet into
the air. The winds can rise to hurricane force—as much as 80 miles per hour, enough
to ground the islands’ seabirds and knock the breath from any man who walks into
them. They are made unbearable by the fact that there is virtually no shelter anywhere in
the Abrolhos. On Batavia’s Graveyard, only a slight depression on the northeast shore
affords any protection from this elemental fury.

The climate in the islands, which can be stifling in summer, is generally mild
throughout the winter, which is the rainy season. The monthly rainfall from June until
August is roughly four inches, but from September this figure drops to less than half an
inch a month. Even when it rains, moreover, the water hardly ever pools on the ground in
the Abrolhos. It trickles through the coral and back into the sea, leaving all but a
handful of the 200 islets in the group quite dry and lifeless.

Batavia’s Graveyard, which lies in the northernmost part of the archipelago,
is like this. It is a barren strip of coral rubble, 500 yards long, less than 300 yards
across, and roughly triangular in shape. Its widest part stretches almost north to south
along the edge of the deep-water passage discovered by Ariaen Jacobsz on the morning of
the wreck; from there, the island tapers rapidly and almost to a point as it runs
southeast. It is low and flat and featureless and can be crossed from side to side in less
than 3 minutes, or circumnavigated in a little under 20. There are no hills, no trees, no
caves, and little undergrowth; the highest point is only six feet above sea level; and
though there are two small beaches on the western side, and some sand has found its way
inland, this soil is nowhere more than two feet deep. Most of the ground is nothing more
than shingle, slick in places with deposits of guano and treacherous to walk on. Although
it is home to thousands of seabirds and several colonies of sea lions, Batavia’s
Graveyard has no pools or wells, and thus no native land animals. It is dead, desolate,
and utterly unwelcoming.

When the first of the
Batavia
’s men came ashore in the archipelago,
they found no sign of any human habitation. The Abrolhos were too far from the Australian
coast, almost 50 miles, to have been visited by Aborigines; nor had any Europeans landed
there prior to 1629. Nevertheless, nearly 300 of the 322 people who were on board the
retourschip
when she ran aground had survived the stranding of the ship—a remarkably high
proportion in the circumstances—and by the evening of 5 June, the ragged beginnings
of a settlement had been established in the islands.

By now it was nearly two days since their ship had run onto the reef, but the
survivors were still split into three groups. The majority, about 180 men, women, and
children, had been put ashore on Batavia’s Graveyard. A further 70 men, including
Jeronimus Cornelisz, remained stranded on the wreck, and the skipper had based 50 sailors
and both the boats on his little islet close to the wreck. Ariaen’s party included
not only Pelsaert but all of the
Batavia
’s senior officers. Between them, they
controlled most of the food and water and all of the charts and navigational instruments
that had been salvaged from the ship.

These dispositions were no accident. Jacobsz had displayed a good deal of bravery
in the aftermath of the wreck, risking his life repeatedly to save the people on the ship.
But he also understood with perfect clarity that none of them would ever see the
Netherlands again if the boats could not reach Java to fetch help. He and his officers had
the skills to sail them there; the people on Batavia’s Graveyard did not. In his own
mind, therefore, Ariaen felt justified in doing what he could to improve his own chances
of survival.

The survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard thus found themselves with neither
leadership nor adequate supplies. The great majority—at least 100—were common
soldiers and sailors of the VOC, and another score were either petty officers or idlers
such as coopers, carpenters, and smiths. Creesje Jans was there, with about 20 other
women, almost all of whom were wives of members of the crew; and of the remaining 50, more
than half were youths and children. Most of these were cabin boys aged 14 or 15, but
several were even younger than that, and one or two were babes in arms who had actually
been born on board
Batavia.
Fewer than two dozen members of the group were
officers, and, of these, seven were inexperienced VOC assistants who would have been only
in their early twenties, and 11 merely Company cadets.

All this left at best half a dozen men to control and lead more than 170
frightened, cold, and hungry people, perhaps a quarter of whom were foreigners with an
imperfect grasp of Dutch. To make matters worse, this tiny handful of officers could no
longer rely on fear of the VOC to back up their orders. Authority was now a matter of
persuasion, compromise, and cooperation—something none of them would have experienced
before.

The caliber of the men on the island left a great deal to be desired. The only
officer of any rank was Frans Jansz, the surgeon, whose popularity among the crew was no
substitute for his inexperience of command. Nevertheless, in the first few days after the
wreck, it would appear to have been Jansz who began to organize the survivors and who set
about establishing a council to lead them, as was required by the customs of the
VOC.

Jan Company was run by councils and committees. The Gentlemen XVII controlled the
business as a whole, and each chamber had its own board of directors. In Java, even the
governor-general worked through the Council of the Indies, and the highest authority in
any VOC flotilla was not the fleet president, acting alone, but the
Brede Raad,
or
Broad Council. While the ships were at sea, every upper-merchant and skipper in the
squadron was entitled to a seat on this council, which dealt not only with any questions
of broad strategy but also with criminal offenses. Because it was commonplace for the
vessels of a fleet to become separated on their way out to the Indies, however, each
retourschip
also had its own ship’s council, with a normal membership of five. This council would
typically consist of the skipper and the upper-merchant together with the vessel’s
under-merchant, upper-steersman, and high boatswain, but the
raad
that was now set
up on Batavia’s Graveyard was, necessarily, very different.

In all likelihood, the surgeon’s main supports would have been the
predikant
and the one real figure of authority on the island—the provost, Pieter Jansz. It had
been the latter’s task to administer discipline on board ship, although his authority
derived largely from the skipper and he actually ranked somewhere below the cooper and the
carpenter in the
Batavia
’s hierarchy. It might be conjectured that the
remaining members of the council would have been a petty officer, representing the sailors
on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Salomon Deschamps, Pelsaert’s clerk, who was the
most senior VOC employee actually on the island. This group would probably have turned to
Gabriel Jacobszoon, the corporal of the 70 or more soldiers in the survivors’ party,
for assistance; his men were a natural counterbalance to the sailors on the island. But
even with the corporal’s support, the council lacked natural authority and probably
struggled to keep order in the face of any real opposition from the men.

The need for such a body had been starkly demonstrated during the first day on
Batavia’s Graveyard. At first the survivors’ chief emotions must have been
relief, curiosity about their new environment, and considerable uncertainty as to what
they should do next; but it would have taken only a short time to explore the island, and
by the afternoon of 5 June the first pangs of hunger and thirst had unquestionably driven
at least a few people to take what they needed from their limited supplies.

In some respects this was a natural reaction; the survivors knew that there was
more food and water on the wreck and did not realize that foul weather, and the rioting
soldiers and sailors still on board, had prevented Pelsaert and Jacobsz from salvaging
more barrels from the stores. Nevertheless, once it became clear that some people were
helping themselves to the barrels on the island, others would have hurried to secure a
fair share for themselves. Already the once-disorganized mass of people on the island had
begun to coalesce into small groups, half a dozen to a dozen strong, bound by some sort of
common tie—soldiers, sailors, families, men who came from the same town, and others
who had messed together on the ship. Emboldened by their numbers, these groups, it would
appear, demanded what they wanted from the stockpile. A good deal of the food and most, if
not all, the water, was thus consumed within 24 hours of the survivors’ arrival on
Batavia’s Graveyard.

By evening on the second day, 6 June, the people on the island had begun to
realize their mistake. There had been no more rain; a thorough search of the whole island
had revealed no wells; and Pelsaert’s one attempt to bring more water had failed in
circumstances that suggested there would be no others. The survivors were already
suffering from thirst but, without boats, they had no means of leaving Batavia’s
Graveyard to search for water. All 180 of them were trapped on an arid prison—one
that, without another rainstorm, would quickly kill them.

As the drought continued into a third day, and then a fourth, the survivors’
agonies became intense. Without water, their bodies swiftly became dehydrated; after a day
or so, saliva thickened into an unpleasant paste, and soon after that their mouths ceased
to produce it altogether. Thereafter the symptoms only became worse: tongues hardened and
swelled; eyelids cracked; the eyes themselves wept tears of blood. Throats became so dry
that even breathing seemed difficult.

Ten of the people on the island died. The old and young would have been the first
to weaken, but after four or five days without water all of the survivors would have been
affected to a considerable degree. They clung to life by adopting the strategies that
shipwrecked men and castaways have always turned to. Most, from the
predikant
down,
drank their own urine; a few threw aside their caution and gulped seawater; a third group
chewed incessantly on lead pellets in the vain hope that they could generate enough saliva
to afford at least some relief. It is very likely, though the sources do not mention it,
that they also killed seabirds and sea lions in order to drink their blood.

None of these methods of relieving thirst are particularly effective. Drinking
one’s “own water,” as Gijsbert Bastiaensz put it, would have helped the
survivors to reduce the risk of dehydration, but urine contains so many salts that it is
worse than useless for quenching thirst. So too is seawater, and though it can be safely
drunk in small quantities, one and a half pints—which contains the equivalent of an
adult male’s daily requirement of salt—is the most that should be consumed in a
single day. But the
Batavia
’s survivors had no way of knowing this. So potent
is the folklore on the subject, which insists that drinking seawater leads invariably to
madness, that they, like most shipwrecked sailors, no doubt refused it until they were
already so dehydrated that it would have done them much more harm than good.

After three or four days without water, sheer desperation forced the people on
the island to try to get fresh supplies from the wreck. There was not yet enough driftwood
to build a raft, but the
predikant
’s servant-girl, whose name was Wybrecht
Claasen, was a strong swimmer, and she volunteered to try to reach the ship without one.
The
Batavia
was almost a mile away, but it was possible to wade across at least
part of the shallows, and after two attempts the girl contrived to reach the reef. She
hauled herself onto a rock within hailing distance of the ship, calling for a rope, and
the people on the wreck hurled over a line. Claasen tied the rope around her waist and was
hauled on board through the breakers—“not without great danger to her
life,” as one of those watching from the island observed.

Remarkably, the maid did manage to return safely to Batavia’s Graveyard. It
does not seem possible that she brought much water with her, but even a small amount would
have helped to revive them and, in any case, her exploit was important from a purely moral
point of view. It was the first real triumph the survivors had enjoyed since they had
reached the island, and an important sign that they could take matters into their own
hands, rather than waiting passively for death. In that respect, at least, the worst of
their ordeal was now over.

Nevertheless, many more of the
Batavia
’s passengers and crew would
have died of thirst within another day or so had it not been for a squall that mercifully
struck the island on the fifth day, 9 June. In no more than an hour or two, the survivors
collected so much fresh water in pieces of sailcloth spread out on the coral that they
more than replenished their supplies. The rain continued through the night, and though it
never fell more than intermittently thereafter, from then on there was always just enough
to provide a modest ration for them all.