Batavia's Graveyard (23 page)

Among their many privileges, Cornelisz’s most trusted men enjoyed better
rations than the other
Batavia
survivors, eating cask meat instead of sea lion and
bird, and drinking wines and spirits rather than rainwater. They had better clothes and
larger tents, and their access to the boats gave them a freedom of movement that was
denied to the loyalists. Significantly, the mutineers also experienced—for the first
time in their lives—complete freedom from the constraints that had previously
governed them. In the United Provinces they had generally been men of little significance
and few resources, who struggled to make a living and were subject to the rule of law. In
the Abrolhos they had status and wielded power over men and women who were their nominal
superiors. They felt, moreover, little fear of retribution. Cornelisz’s position in
the archipelago appeared to be unchallengeable, and the prospect of arrest and punishment
remote.

Jeronimus had perhaps derived some satisfaction from crushing Hardens, for he
next turned his attention to Andries de Vries. The young Zeelander was lucky to be alive,
having escaped death by drowning at the beginning of the month, but he had yet to
demonstrate his loyalty to the men who had spared his life. On 10 July Jeronimus gave De
Vries that opportunity. He was told to prove his worthiness by killing on the
under-merchant’s orders.

The chosen victims were people in the sick tent. There were 11 of them in
all—useless mouths, Cornelisz observed, who were so weakened by scurvy and fever that
they would offer no resistance. De Vries crept into their tent by night and cut their
throats, one by one, while Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen stood over him to make
quite sure he carried out his task. Three days later the assistant was compelled to return
and slaughter another four or five men who had taken sick in the interim.

From then on, to fall ill on Batavia’s Graveyard was to receive a death
sentence. First Jan Hendricxsz and Allert Janssen slit the throat of Jan Pinten, the
island’s only English soldier, while he lay in bed; then a sick cabin boy went the
same way. A few days later, De Vries and Janssen conspired to end the life of Hendrick
Claasz, a carpenter. These killings also took place by night. The only invalids to be
spared were associates of the mutineers: Hans Frederick, who had already helped to kill
one man and may have been one of Hendricxsz’s associates, and Olivier van Welderen,
who was Gsbert’s elder brother.

Having disposed of the sick, Jeronimus turned his attention back to the stronger
survivors. On the evening of 12 July the under-merchant sent his favorite killer,
Hendricxsz, out to rid him of Passchier van den Ende, a gunner, and Jacop Hendricxen
Drayer,
^*31
who was a carpenter. These men were to be confronted by the old allegation that
they had stolen something from the stores.

It was, it seems, a typically blustery Abrolhos night, for the shrieking of the
wind and the snap and crack of canvas walls masked the sound of Hendricxsz’s
approach. Van den Ende and Drayer only realized he was there when the flaps of their tent
were suddenly thrown back and the German soldier emerged from the darkness like a vengeful
angel, flanked by Zevanck, Van Os, and Lucas Gellisz.

The sailors realized at once that their lives were forfeit:

“[Jan] went into their tent and asked Passchier if he had any goods hidden
there . . . . He answered weepingly, ‘No,’ and begged that he might be allowed to
say his prayers, because he thought that it would cost him his life. But Zevanck said,
‘Get on with it.’ Thus Jan Hendricxsz threw him to the ground and cut his
throat.

“The other one, Jacop Hendricxen Drayer, begged bitterly for his life,
whereupon Zevanck and the others went to Jeronimus and said that Jacop was a good
carpenter and should he not be spared. But Jeronimus answered, ‘Not at all, he is
only a turner and furthermore he is half-lame. He must also go. He might become a babbler
now or later.’ ”

With that, the murderers returned to Drayer’s tent. Remarkably, the hapless
turner was still there, waiting for them. Perhaps his injured leg made it useless for him
to attempt to flee; perhaps he genuinely hoped for mercy. If so, one glance into
Hendricxsz’s blank eyes would have informed him of his error.

Disposing of a crippled man should not have taken long, but for all his
disability, Drayer proved almost impossible to kill. Hendricxsz pushed him to the ground,
and Van Os sat astride the turner’s hips while his friend stabbed him repeatedly in
the chest. The dancing flame of Zevanck’s lantern set a shadow play of murder
flickering against the canvas walls, but even with the benefit of light the German could
not find Jacop’s heart. First one knife hit a rib and snapped in two, then a second
broke uselessly in half. Hendricxsz seized another pair of daggers and drove them deep
into his victim’s neck, but anger had made him careless and his thrusts missed
Drayer’s windpipe, arteries, and veins. The two knives sliced through muscle and
struck bone; their blades splintered on the turner’s spinal column and the mutineer
found himself holding another pair of useless hafts. Jacop was still alive, and
Hendricxsz, breathing heavily, had to thrust slippery fingers into the spreading pool of
blood beneath the body, fumbling for a sliver of broken knife with which to slit his
victim’s throat.

For Jeronimus’s mutineers, the glut of killings in the first half of July
substantially improved conditions on Batavia’s Graveyard. By the 14th of the month,
they had disposed of almost 50 men, women, and children, almost a third of whom had been
too ill to put up any sort of fight. These deaths had reduced the population of
Batavia’s Graveyard to about 90 people, of whom almost half were either active
mutineers or hangers-on who had pledged loyalty to Cornelisz in the hope of saving their
own lives.

By now, the mutineers’ chief enemy was boredom. The
Batavia
journals
tell us almost nothing about how they passed the time from day to day. Some were set to
catching fish and birds; others, evidently, must have mounted guard, watching the campsite
and the boats. We know they sometimes fashioned makeshift weapons such as morning
stars—lethal clubs manufactured from strips of lead that had been bent in half,
studded with long iron nails and threaded through with a short length of rope so that they
could be swung at the heads of future victims—and that Jeronimus occasionally invited
a few men to his tent. There, amid overflowing bales of trade goods and company stores
purloined from the wreck, the under-merchant plied his followers with wine and showed off
their most prized possession—Pelsaert’s case of valuables, which had been landed
on Traitors’ Island and abandoned there when the
commandeur
left in the
overloaded longboat.

Inside the case were four bags of jewels, worth nearly 60,000 guilders, which the
merchant would allow his men to run through their fingers, and a large agate cameo, almost
a foot from end to end, which Pelsaert was taking to India at the request of an Amsterdam
jeweler called Gaspar Boudaen. The cameo had been carved in the Eastern Roman Empire early
in the fourth century, possibly on the orders of Constantine the Great; it depicted a
classical scene, and the
commandeur
believed that it would find favor at the Mogul
court. Boudaen had mounted it within a golden frame studded with precious stones, creating
a piece so rare and valuable that even the Gentlemen XVII had not been permitted to
inspect it before it was loaded onto the
Batavia.
Pelsaert had anticipated selling
the jewel at a profit of perhaps 50 percent; the VOC was to receive more than a quarter of
its value as commission, but in all likelihood the
commandeur
had also arranged to
keep a portion of the sale price for himself. The cameo had thus been central to his hopes
of earning a fortune trading luxuries and “toys” with the Great Mogul, and now
it assumed an equally important place in Jeronimus’s plans.

While he watched his men caress the agate, the under-merchant spoke seductively
of the wealth that they could earn from piracy. The mutineers were captivated by the
stories that their leader spun. They were, said Andries Jonas, later, willing to do
Cornelisz’s bidding, “for they were led into thinking that they would all be
rich for life.”

While the under-merchant’s men lay back and dreamed of wealth and luxury,
life for the remaining loyalists became a waking nightmare. They all existed in a constant
state of fear. Trapped on a tiny island with a group of ruthless murderers, there was
little they could do to save themselves. They were thousands of miles from everything they
knew and just as far from help. They were unarmed, with nowhere to hide and no way to
escape. Life on Batavia’s Graveyard thus became a matter of waiting for one’s
turn to die.

The apparently arbitrary nature of the killings only made things worse, for it
was impossible to know who would be the mutineers’ next victim. The
under-merchant’s followers had grown accustomed to murder and needed little excuse,
or none, to kill again. Standing out in any way—being too loud or too quiet, or
failing in some task—could only hasten the inevitable moment when Zevanck or Jan
Hendricxsz would appear, ready with some trumped-up charge and brandishing a
sword.

Days in the Abrolhos were bad enough—but the nights were worse. Most of the
murders took place after dark, when the islands seem to bulge with wind and even the
endless thunder of the surf is drowned out by the calls of terns and mutton birds,
^*32
whose
endless keening sounds exactly like the screams of human babies. By mid-July the moon had
waned, so that the only illumination came from stars pulsing feebly from behind the
scudding clouds, and the survivors had grown wary of approaching lights. Once the bobbing
firefly of a watchman’s lantern, threading its way through the little settlement, had
been a symbol of security. Now it could, and often did, mean death. Lying in their
makeshift beds, shifting uneasily on the tilting plates of fan coral that littered the
ground, the loyalists caught their breath whenever lamps approached. They waited for the
sickly yellow glow to pass their tents and leave them alive, knowing all the while that
one day it would not.

In the mornings, when Jeronimus arose, he could look west across the half-mile
of deep water that separated him from Seals’ Island and see the figures of the men
and women he had landed there moving about their own camp, almost opposite his own. He had
left them unmolested for the best part of a month, while never doubting they should go the
way of Pieter Jansz’s men eventually. By the middle of July, with the provost and the
sick safely out of the way, he felt ready to attack.

There were still 45 survivors on the cay. Without supplies from Batavia’s
Graveyard they would have struggled to find sufficient food and water to feed themselves,
and many of them must have been ill and exhausted. Their leaders—Cornelis Jansz, a
young assistant from Amsterdam, and Gabriel Jacobszoon, the corporal—had no more than
10 or 12 men under their command. The other members of the party were either boys (perhaps
two dozen of them) or women with young children.

It is not clear how much these people knew of Cornelisz’s activities, but
the murders of 9 July would have been clearly visible to anyone watching from the other
side of the deep-water channel, and if Jansz and Jacobszoon really had no contact with the
small boats that now ventured out to fish, they must have wondered why. It seems that the
assistant and the corporal at least guessed what Jeronimus was planning, for they, like
the provost’s men, had begun to construct rafts. Three or four were being assembled
on the west side of their island, out of sight of Batavia’s Graveyard. The boats were
just about complete when, on 15 July, the under-merchant’s men appeared, paddling a
yawl across the channel separating the islands, heading directly for their
campsite.