Batavia's Graveyard (2 page)

The blustery southwesterly was whipping up the seas around them and the moon had
almost set, but they set to work to try to save the ship. The most urgent need was to
reduce the stress on the hull. Seamen were sent clambering up the masts to furl the
Batavia
’s
8,900 square feet of canvas, while down on the gun deck the ship’s high boatswain
^*2
and his men ran back and forth, urging the rest of the crew to lighten the ship by
throwing overboard almost anything that could be moved. They carried tarred rope
“starters” to lash the back of any man who shirked his duty, but there was
little need to use them. Every sailor on the ship knew that without this urgent action he
might not live to see daylight.

The
Batavia
’s gunners seized axes and swung at the cables that lashed
their cannons to the deck. Freed from their constraints, the massive bronze and iron
pieces—weighing around 2,200 pounds each—were maneuvered out through the ports
and into the sea, lightening the ship by up to 30 tons. A rain of boxes, rope, and other
gear from the main deck followed the guns. While this was happening, another group of
sailors took the smallest of the
Batavia
’s eight anchors and secured it to a
good length of cable. When morning came, the anchor would be run out from the stern into
deeper water and the cable attached to a capstan in the hope that the ship could be hauled
backward off the reef.

By now it was nearly dawn. The wind scoured the decks with ever-greater savagery,
and it began to pour with rain. Up on the poop, Pelsaert called for the sounding lead, a
slim cylinder of metal on a long line used to determine the depth of the water around a
ship. As quickly as he could, the leadsman sounded all around the ship, finding no more
than 12 feet of water around the bows and a maximum depth of 18 feet at the stern, only
fractionally more than an East Indiaman’s normal draught of 16 1/2 feet.

This was a terrifying discovery. The chief hope was that they had had the luck to
run aground at low water. If so, the
Batavia
might yet refloat herself as the tide
rose. But if they had struck at high tide, there was so little water under the ship that
the receding sea would quickly leave her stranded and make it impossible to wind her off
with the anchor, adding to the stresses on the hull and perhaps even breaking her back by
snapping the great keel in two.

With the work of lightening the ship complete, they waited, wondering if the tide
was high. It was only at some time between five and six in the morning that it became
clear that chance was against them: the waters under the hull were not rising but falling.
Slowly the jagged tips of the reef on which they had been stranded began to emerge above
the waves, and before long the people on the ship found themselves surrounded on three
sides by raging surf and claws of coral. As the waters receded, the
Batavia
began
to bump violently on the reef. It became impossible to stand or walk on deck; attempts at
salvage had to be curtailed, and both passengers and crew could do little but sit in
miserable huddles, listening to the awful grating of the hull.

Dutch East Indiamen were built strong. Their timbers were twice as thick as those
of other merchantmen. But they were not designed to withstand stranding on a coral reef
and, in particular, their bottoms were not made to take the full weight of the massive
mainmast unsupported. This mast, 180 feet of Scandinavian pine, weighed well in excess of
15 tons with all its canvas, yards, and rigging and ran down through all four decks to
rest directly on the keel. Now, with the whole ship nearly clear of the water, fierce surf
was thrusting the
Batavia
up off the reef six or seven times a minute, then ebbing
rapidly away to let the hull crash back against the coral. And the mainmast had been
turned into a gigantic pile driver, repeatedly smashing down onto the keel and threatening
to grind right through the bottom of the ship.

Without her mainmast, the
Batavia
could scarcely sail. But with it, she
would certainly founder there upon the reef. It was imperative to relieve the stress on
the hull, and there was only one way to save the ship. Shortly after dawn, Jacobsz gave
the order to fell the mast.

In the age of sail, cutting down a mainmast was an act of such dire significance
that the skipper customarily accepted responsibility for the consequences by striking the
first blow with his own axe. Jacobsz swung, then several others joined him in hacking at
the mast where it passed down through the main deck. But, in their haste, they failed to
calculate the necessary trajectory. Instead of falling overboard into the surf, the
enormous mast with its spars and rigging thundered down onto the
Batavia
herself,
crushing gear and railings, thoroughly entangling itself in the equipment left on deck,
and causing a huge amount of damage.

By good fortune, no one was killed or even injured, but the ship’s company
surveyed the devastation with horror. The mast could not be moved, and it was obvious
there was no longer any chance of saving the
Batavia.
The only hope for those on
board was that there was at least some land in the vicinity that would not disappear
beneath the waves by noon, when the tide was full.

The upper-merchant clambered as high into the stern as he was able and looked
north. Now that the sun had come up and the tide had receded, he could see they had run
onto the southern tip of a huge, crescent-shaped reef. A single line of breakers stretched
for two miles to the east of them, and one mile to the north and west. But in the distance
Pelsaert could see islands.

The largest—and the only ones of any size—appeared to him to be nearly
six miles away. But several pancakes of broken coral lay much closer than that—three
to the northwest and at least one more to the east. Breakers surrounded the islet on the
eastern side of the reef, and it seemed unlikely they could land on it. But the merchant
could see that half a mile to the west of their position, the reef was broken by a clear
deep-water channel that led into the heart of the mysterious archipelago. With a modicum
of care, it might be possible for the ship’s boats to penetrate the reef and
ascertain which, if any, of the islets would provide them with a haven.

The
Batavia
’s yawl, which was the smaller of the two boats that the
big ship carried, had been launched while it was dark and now lay bobbing alongside in the
surf. It was well suited to the task, and about seven in the morning the skipper and a
handpicked crew pulled away to scout the archipelago. At nine o’clock they returned
with encouraging news. They had visited several of the smaller coral islands, Jacobsz
reported, and none seemed likely to be submerged by the tides.

Ariaen’s discovery meant that there was a reasonable chance of saving the
Batavia
’s
passengers and crew. But Pelsaert still faced something of a dilemma. The VOC, he knew,
did not look kindly on servants who were unlucky or incompetent enough to lose its
property. His duty to his employers was certainly to save the cargo first and worry about
the lives of the passengers and crew only when the valuables were safe. But he doubted
this was a realistic course of action. Even if he could keep control of the sailors, it
seemed unlikely that the panicky soldiers and civilians on board would stand by while the
boats ferried boxes of trade goods and chests packed full of silver to the islands. So the
upper-merchant compromised. “Because of the great Yammer that there was in the
ship,” he duly noted, “of Women, Children, Sick, and poor-hearted men, we
decided to put most of the people on land first, and meanwhile to get ready on deck the
money and most precious goods.”

It was the right decision. At 10 a.m., before the first boatloads of survivors
could be got away, the relentless pounding of the surf finally put an end to the
resistance of
Batavia
’s tortured hull. The ship burst open below the water
line, and tons of foaming reef water began to pour into the hold. The breach was so vast
that the caulkers and the carpenters had to flee before the swiftly rising flood. A good
many of the supplies on board were lost, and it was only with considerable difficulty that
a little food and water were salvaged from the stores.

The sight of bales of trade goods floating in the flooded hold was sufficient to
persuade most of the passengers and crew to abandon ship, and the main deck was soon
crowded with men and women jostling for positions along the sides. As was common at the
time, there was no real order to the evacuation. The strongest forced their way into the
boats, leaving women, children, and senior VOC officials behind. A dozen others leapt into
the sea and attempted to swim to land. They all drowned in the surf.

Ariaen Jacobsz and his sailors worked all day, but, fully loaded, the
Batavia
’s
two boats could hold no more than 60 people and the conditions were atrocious.
Transferring frightened people from the pitching deck into a rolling, yawing boat was
dangerous work that could not be hurried; a moment’s inattention or the least
miscalculation might hurl the fragile little craft against the ship, smashing them to
pieces. And, once in the boat, the survivors had to be rowed the best part of a mile along
the deep-water channel before they could be set ashore.

The boats’ crews took them to the closest of the islands the skipper had
scouted earlier in the day. It was tiny, a mere mushroom of coral rubble that measured
only 175 yards from end to end and offered no real protection from the biting wind. During
the afternoon, four more boatloads of survivors arrived. They did what they could to make
themselves comfortable, but the islet was hard and flat and sterile, lacking not only food
and water but even sand on which to lie and rest. There was no shelter. All in all, it
left a good deal to be desired.

By nightfall, with the rescue operation hardly half-completed, some 180 people
had been set on land. But parents had been separated from their offspring, husbands from
their wives—and it had been so imperative to pack as many people as possible into the
boats that the luckless survivors on the island found themselves with virtually no
supplies. Jacobsz and his men had managed to land about 150 pints of poor drinking water,
a dozen barrels of bone-dry bread and—at the insistence of the upper-merchant—a
small casket of the most valuable trade goods, packed with precious stones, worked gold
and jewelery that would have fetched 60,000 guilders
^*3
in the Indies. Such huge wealth was
worthless on the reef; a few guilders’ worth of sailcloth and blankets would have
been of greater use.

At sunset, back on the
Batavia
again, Jacobsz motioned Pelsaert to one
side and insisted that his place was on the island. “It won’t help at all that
we save water and bread,” the skipper said, “for everyone on land drinks as much
as he can. To forbid this has no result unless you order otherwise.”

Twelve chests of VOC silver were still waiting on the main deck, but the merchant
knew there was little more food or water to be had. He and Jacobsz jumped down into the
yawl, intending to call at the little islet and introduce some form of rationing before
returning to
Batavia
for the money. But no sooner had they pulled away than a
violent squall arose and the little boat had to run for safety inside the reef. Fierce
winds whipped up the waves, and once again the stricken ship all but disappeared in a
storm of surf and spray. It was evident there was no chance of boarding her again before
dawn, and it was only with some difficulty the boat’s crew contrived to fall back to
the little island. They reached the survivors as they were settling down to an
uncomfortable night. The conditions on the islet were appalling and, exhausted as they
were, they slept only with difficulty, hard coral fingers in their backs.

On the
Batavia,
the plight of the other passengers and crew was equally
unpleasant. About 120 people remained for the time being on board the sinking ship. For
those on deck, the wind and rain brought with them the threat of exposure. Meanwhile, down
below, the situation had deteriorated sharply in the absence of both the merchant and the
skipper. Not every member of the crew had chosen to flee up to the main deck when the
ship’s hull burst. A good number—convinced, perhaps, that they were dead men
anyway—preferred to break into the gun-deck stores and drink themselves into oblivion
among the casks of alcohol. One, Allert Janssen, a gunner from Assendelft in the North
Quarter of Holland, made his way to the bottle room in the stern where the officers stored
their personal supplies of wines and spirits. There he found his way barred by Lucas
Gerritsz, the steward’s mate. In normal circumstances, Janssen’s very presence
there, so close to the officers’ quarters, would have been a flogging offense; now,
though, it was different. The gunner drew a knife and slashed at Gerritsz’s back,
bawling: “Out, cats and dogs—you have been masters here long enough, now I [will
be master] for a while.” The steward ran for his life, leaving the bottle room
unguarded, and soon several of Janssen’s shipmates had joined him in sampling the
fine wines and spirits within. Denied much alcohol for the better part of a year, these
men quickly became dangerously drunk.

A second party of delinquents, led by a young VOC cadet named Lenert van Os and
freed now from all fear of punishment, began to smash open the sea chests on the gun deck.
They worked their way back along the ship, plundering as they went, until they reached the
officers’ quarters in the stern. No one tried to stop them and, emboldened by drink
and desperation, they broke down the door of Pelsaert’s quarters. A drunken young
sailor named Cornelis Janssen, who was nicknamed “Bean,” was among the first to
enter. He reeked of alcohol and had festooned himself with a considerable array of knives.
One blade had been thrust through the fabric of his hat, and several others protruded from
the pleats of his breeches. Confronted with this piratical apparition, the remaining cabin
servants fled, leaving the merchant’s personal possessions to the mob. They rifled
through the cabin and a Frisian seaman, Ryckert Woutersz, broke open Pelsaert’s sea
chest and scattered the contents all about in the search for valuables. Soon he came
across the upper-merchant’s personal collection of medallions. They were distributed
among the rioters as booty.