Batavia's Graveyard (22 page)

The discovery of several cisterns on the High Land, which occurred on 9 July,
thus threw his schemes into utter disarray. The under-merchant watched in disbelief as
first one beacon, then a second, then a third, flared into life along the shoreline of
Hayes’s islands. These signal fires confirmed that Wiebbe was still alive, 20 days
after he and his men first went ashore, and informed the people of Batavia’s
Graveyard that the longed-for water had been found. They were also the agreed sign that
rafts should be sent to pick up the landing party.

For the first time since he had come ashore, Cornelisz found himself in a
quandary. The signals could not be concealed—the beacons were clearly visible from
the survivors’ camp—and yet they had to be ignored. Jeronimus had no intention
of permitting Hayes and his troops to leave the High Land, but by refusing to send rafts
to rescue them, he and his councillors gave the men and women of Batavia’s Graveyard
the first clear indication that the councillors of the
raad
did not have their best
interests at heart. Wiebbe, too, would doubtless realize that something was wrong, and it
would no longer be easy to surprise him. To make matters worse, the soldiers could now
survive indefinitely on their island, while Cornelisz and his men remained dependent on
the intermittent rains for their own supplies of water. Hayes’s fires were thus not
merely signs but portents—an indication that Jeronimus’s plot was beginning to
unravel.

Almost as soon as the signal beacons were lit, indeed, Jeronimus noticed a flurry
of activity on Traitors’ Island. He and his followers could see the people there
struggling to launch two small, handmade boats from the north side of their coral cay.
Pieter Jansz was the first man aboard, and he was followed by his wife and child. Then
came a German soldier, Claes Harmanszoon of Magdeburg, whose wife was also with him, and a
woman named Claudine Patoys, who took a child with her. The other members of the party
were all men: a mixed group of soldiers and sailors, almost all Dutch. They picked up
rough paddles carved from driftwood and began to propel their rafts through the shallows,
heading north.

Cornelisz knew at once where they were going. He had lured the provost and his
men onto their barren islet with the assurance that they could sail on to the High Land
when the soldiers there found water. It had been an empty promise, of course, but
evidently Jansz had been watching out for signal fires, looking for any opportunity to
leave his miserable base, and now he was making for Hayes’s Island. The prospect of
reinforcements reaching the soldiers on the High Land infuriated the under-merchant. While
Jansz’s rafts were still some way off, he summoned the members of his council for a
hasty consultation. Together, they decided to attack.

Traitors’ Island was only half a mile away, and there was little time to
waste. Zevanck and Van Huyssen ran to gather their familiar accomplices—Gsbert van
Welderen, Jan Hendricxsz, and Lenert van Os—and hurried to the beach where they kept
their boats. Two other members of Jeronimus’s gang came with them—they were
Lucas Gellisz, a young cadet from The Hague, and Cornelis Pietersz, a common soldier from
Utrecht—but this, it seems, was as many as their fastest yawl could carry. The seven
men seized oars and steered southwest to intercept the rafts.

Pieter Jansz must have been alarmed to see the mutineers. The provost may well
have guessed that Zevanck and his friends intended violence, for the murders of Hans
Radder and Jacop Groenwald had taken place within sight of Traitors’ Island, but he
soon realized that he could not evade the yawl. His clumsy rafts were so much slower than
the neat rowing boat the
Batavia
’s carpenters had built that Zevanck and his
men had little difficulty in catching him.

The rafts were in the middle of a stretch of deep water when the mutineers caught
up with them. As the yawl came within hailing distance, Zevanck raised his voice and
called out to Jansz, demanding to know where he and his companions were going. Then he
ordered the provost to change his course and make for Batavia’s Graveyard
instead.

While this was happening, the mutineers’ yawl had swung alongside the
provost’s raft, and Gellisz, Pietersz, Hendricxsz, and Van Os swarmed from one to the
other, armed and full of menace. Three or four of Jansz’s men attempted to escape by
hurling themselves into the sea, where they quickly drowned. The rest offered little
resistance, and in less than a minute Zevanck’s men had relieved the provost of his
command. Soon both the rafts were heading for the under-merchant’s island.

Jansz must by now have become seriously concerned for the safety of his family,
but there was little he could do to protect them. He and his men watched uneasily as
Zevanck jumped into the shallows and ran up the beach to where Jeronimus was standing by
the entrance to his tent. The two men consulted for a moment, then Zevanck turned and
hastened back toward the rafts.
“Slaet doodt!”
he was shouting.
“Kill!”

Lucas Gellisz had got into the water and was holding the rafts steady.
Hendricxsz, Pietersz, and Van Os were still on board. Quickly, the three men drew their
swords and cut down the provost and his child. Two, perhaps three, of the remaining men
were also killed, as was Claudine Patoys’s child, but for once the mutineers had
found themselves outnumbered, and four of Jansz’s party threw themselves over the
side into water that came up to their waists. Two of them were sailors—friends named
Pauwels Barentsz and Bessel Jansz, who both came from the little port of Harderwijk in
Gelderland. The other pair were soldiers Claes Harmanszoon and Nicolaas Winckelhaack.
These men had apparently not realized that Cornelisz himself had ordered the attack, for
they staggered out of the sea loudly imploring the under-merchant for protection.
Jeronimus gazed down as the four men sprawled at his feet, soaked and breathless,
panicked, desperate. “Give them no quarter,” he declared.

Jan Hendricxsz had come running up the beach behind the men, his sword still in
his hand. Now he lunged at Pauwels Barentsz, carving a great wound in his side. Barentsz
fell backward onto the sand as Andries Jonas—another of Cornelisz’s followers
and, at 40, the oldest of the mutineers—loomed over him and thrust a pike right
through his throat, turning the sailor’s screams to blood-flecked gasps and pinning
him down while he died. Hendricxsz, meanwhile, slashed at Winckelhaack, killing him
immediately, after which he wounded Bessel Jansz. Rutger Fredricx came to join him,
“striking the mentioned Bessel with his sword until he was dead”; then the
locksmith, alone, slew Harmanszoon as he fled back through the shallows. That left only
the three women on the rafts. Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen bundled them into the
yawl and sculled out into the channel, where the water was more than 100 feet deep. They
then pushed Jansz’s wife, and Harmanszoon’s, and Claudine Patoys into the sea
where—weighed down by their wet skirts—they drowned.

The massacre of the provost’s party, which took place in full view of the
130 survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard, brought the under-merchant’s plot into the
open for the first time. For three weeks or more, the people of the island had accepted
Cornelisz as their leader without question; now they saw him as he really was. Jeronimus
may well have tried to justify his actions; it is possible he argued that Pieter Jansz had
been a traitor to the Company for fleeing to the High Land in defiance of the orders of
the council. But, if so, it did him little good. Even the most trusting of the
retourschip
’s
crew understood that the killings they had witnessed were nothing less than cold-blooded
murder—and mutiny against the authority of Jan Company. And although the VOC
loyalists still outnumbered the under-merchant’s gang by about four to one, they were
powerless to stop them. Cornelisz controlled all the weapons on the island, and only his
followers had access to the swords, daggers, and axes in the stores. The island was so
small and barren that there was nowhere to hide, and the boats were always guarded.
Moreover, by a bitter irony, Jeronimus himself was now the living embodiment of the
Gentlemen XVII in the Abrolhos. As the leader of the
raad,
he claimed the
allegiance of all of the survivors. Any attempt to oppose him—even the least
dissent—might itself be classed as mutiny against the VOC. Those who had watched as
Pieter Jansz was hacked to pieces now understood that such actions would be punished with
the utmost severity.

It was, then, hardly a surprise that at least another dozen men declared for
Cornelisz over the next few days. Most appear to have joined the under-merchant in the
hope of saving their own lives; a few were no doubt attracted by the prospect of better
rations and freer access to the boats and stores. The majority of these opportunists were
idlers or soldiers from the orlop deck, but at least one was an officer—an assistant
from North Holland named Isbrant Isbrantsz. Frans Jansz, too, now that he had seen what
Jeronimus was capable of, threw in his lot with the mutineers.

As it transpired, the new recruits played only minor roles in events on the
Abrolhos, although they would sometimes be required to join the others in a show of force.
Jeronimus, it seems, never really trusted them and frequently demanded some demonstration
of their loyalty. For their part, the camp followers feared Cornelisz almost as much as
did the other people on the island.

The first mutineer to be tested by the under-merchant was a German soldier named
Hans Hardens. He came from Ditmarschen, a province close to Denmark’s border with the
Holy Roman Empire. Having taken service with the VOC for a five-year term, Hardens had
boarded the
Batavia
with his wife, Anneken, and his six-year-old daughter,
Hilletgie. All three of them had survived the voyage and the wreck and found themselves
together on Batavia’s Graveyard.

Hardens, so far as one can tell, had played no part in the conspiracy on board
the ship, but he had gravitated towards Cornelisz’s circle in the month after the
wreck, apparently in the hope of feeding and protecting his wife and daughter. In time he
became one of the more active mutineers, though he was hardly the most violent.
Nevertheless, there was something about him that gave Jeronimus pause. The soldier may
have been too slow to obey an order, too free with his opinions, or perhaps too friendly
with Frans Jansz. He invited Hardens and his wife into his tent and—while they ate
and drank together—sent Jan Hendricxsz to strangle their little girl.

Hilletgie Hardens was the first child to be killed on Batavia’s Graveyard,
but if her death was intended to test Hans Hardens’s loyalty, Jeronimus must have
been satisfied with the result. No matter what his private grief, Hardens knew he had no
choice but to stick to his allegiance to the mutineers, especially if he was to have any
hope of protecting his wife. Three days after his daughter’s murder, Hardens swore an
oath of fealty to his comrades: a solemn vow, a “written unbreakable agreement, the
greatest oath that anyone can take, to be faithful in everything.”

The brutal killing of the little girl perhaps affected the
Batavia
survivors more than any of the other early murders. The other victims had at least been
tried by the ship’s council, while Pieter Jansz and his men had arguably been guilty
of disobeying Zevanck’s orders. Awful though their deaths had been, there had at
least been some sort of explanation for them. Hilletgie’s murder seemed senseless in
comparison, for not even Cornelisz argued she had been guilty of a crime. The girl’s
death thus marked a significant deterioration of conditions in the archipelago. From then
on, none of the
retourschip
’s passengers and crew could be certain they were
safe. Showing loyalty to the under-merchant, obeying orders and working hard were no
longer any guarantee of Jeronimus’s favor. He and his followers had begun to murder
indiscriminately.

Matters were very different for the under-merchant’s gang, who now felt a
sense of liberation. The first days of the mutiny cannot have been easy for David Zevanck
and his friends. Their work was difficult and dangerous, and the risk of discovery was
very real. By the middle of July, however, the assistant and his friends had gained
considerably in confidence, parading openly about the island, fully armed, and taking what
they wanted for themselves. “The whole day long it was their catch-call, ‘Who
wants to be boxed on the ear?’ ” remembered Gijsbert Bastiaensz.

“So we all of us together expected to be murdered at any moment, and we
besought God continuously for merciful relief  . . . O cruelty! O atrocity of atrocities!
They proved themselves to be nothing more than highwaymen. Murderers who are on the roads
often take their belongings from People, but they sometimes leave them their lives; but
these have taken both, goods and blood.”