Batavia's Graveyard (3 page)

Up on deck, the abandoned treasure chests of the VOC became an irresistible lure
for anyone courageous or foolhardy enough to brave the shrieking wind and growling surf.
An old soldier from the German town of Heidelburg named Jean Thirion proved bolder than
the rest and chopped open one of the chests with a hatchet. Seeing what was happening, a
handful of loyal sailors drove him off, and a carpenter was summoned to nail a length of
plank over the breach. But by now discipline had all but broken down throughout the wreck.
By morning the loyalists had themselves dispersed and a swarm of treasure seekers once
again surrounded the damaged chest. They prized off the carpenter’s plank and tipped
the contents out on deck. Thousands of guilders, enough to make a man rich for several
lifetimes, bounced across the planking, but such was the seriousness of the
Batavia
’s
plight that even Thirion and his drunken friends saw little point in hoarding them.
Instead they turned the coins into playthings, hurling great handfuls of currency at each
other’s heads in jest.

It was at about this time that Cornelis Janssen, still wearing his suit of
knives, emerged from the Great Cabin with his share of the merchant’s booty: a gold
medallion set in agate. Walking to the side, he tucked the medal into his hat with other
valuables and tossed it into the sea. “There lies the rubbish,” shouted the
inebriated Bean, “even if it is worth so many thousands.”

Back inside the coral crescent, where the roaring seas were calmed by their
passage across the reef, rescue work got under way again an hour before dawn. The first
priority was to move the majority of the survivors to a larger island. Filling both the
boats with a total of 60 people, the sailors hauled up the deep-sea channel and around to
the north side of a larger, womb-shaped island a mile from the
Batavia.
It was some
350 yards long and nearly as far across at its western end, but it tapered sharply to the
southeast and for most of its length it was no more than 50 yards wide. Like the
mushroom-shaped rock on which they had spent the night, it offered little in the way of
shelter and no fresh water, but at least there was a small sandy beach where the boats
could land, and room on the island for all the
Batavia
’s passengers and crew.
By the afternoon about 180 men, women, and children had been transported to the larger
island, together with a portion of their scant supplies of bread and water. Pelsaert, with
40 of the best seamen and a handful of favored passengers, remained on the islet, where
the skipper had taken care to retain almost all of the water and a good deal of the
food.

Conditions outside the reef remained atrocious. With considerable daring, one
more trip was made from the
Batavia
to land and a new group of survivors was
brought to safety inside the coral, but after that the weather closed in once again and by
afternoon the skipper did not dare to bring rescue boats alongside the ship. There were
still 70 men on board, the majority of them much the worse for drink and the excesses of
the night before, but sober enough by now to realize that the
Batavia
would soon
break up under the constant pounding of the waves. For several hours Pelsaert kept the
rescue boats hovering nearby, as much in the hope of recovering the money chests as of
saving lives. He prayed for a break in the bad weather, but none came. At dusk the
upper-merchant retreated back inside the shelter of the reef, calling to the men on deck
that they should construct some rafts and save themselves.

By nightfall on the second day, therefore, the situation at the wreck site had
deteriorated further. The survivors huddling within the reef had been split between two
islands, and the rescue of another boatload of people from the ship meant there were now
60 more mouths to feed. But supplies were already running dangerously low. Despite their
attempts at rationing, the water was all but gone. If more could not be found within a day
or two, they would all die of thirst.

On the smaller islet, Pelsaert and Jacobsz debated what to do. The discovery that
they had been wrecked in a coral archipelago had persuaded the skipper that they were
probably somewhere in an all but unknown chain of islands that the Dutch called
Houtman’s Abrolhos
^*4
after Frederik de Houtman, the merchant who had first nearly run
aground on them some 13 years before. The islands were completely unexplored, and it was
uncertain whether any of them held fresh water. But they were known to lie several hundred
miles to the east of the
Batavia
’s last estimated position, and a little less
than 2,000 miles south of the Indies. If the ship was indeed in the Abrolhos, it might at
least be possible for some of the survivors to reach Java in her boats.

The first imperative, however, was to find water. Pelsaert still wished to
salvage the VOC’s money chests from the wreck, but he suspected—probably quite
correctly—that malcontents would seize the boats and conduct their own searches of
the nearby islands if he failed to take decisive action quickly. He knew that to lose
control of the yawl and the
Batavia
’s larger longboat would be disastrous, not
only to his shaky authority over the now-scattered refugees from the wreck, but also to
his own prospects of survival. And supplies of water really were running short. So the
upper-merchant authorized a search of the archipelago, beginning on the morning of 6 June.
He also decided to transport one barrel of fresh water to the people on the larger island
to the north.

Ariaen Jacobsz and his officers approved of the search for water, but grim
realism left them aghast at Pelsaert’s determination to succor those on the
womb-shaped island, which—being within sight of the wrecked ship lying stranded on
the reef—had quickly been dubbed “Batavia’s Graveyard.” The 180 people
on the island were stranded on a waterless lump of coral with neither a boat nor rafts
upon which to escape; they had, the skipper reckoned, probably already consumed their
supplies. The arrival of the upper-merchant with one small barrel of water would be of
little comfort to them. They were much more likely to try to seize the boat.

Jacobsz told Francisco Pelsaert this, and he also warned the merchant that he
could no longer expect the men to obey his every order. In situations such as this, those
who had the skills to save themselves would do so—at the expense of others if need
be. It was unrealistic to expect the rough-hewn sailors of the VOC to be exceptions to
this rule, and they were unlikely to volunteer to help their comrades to the north if
there was any chance the people there might damage one of the boats. “They will keep
you there, and you will regret it,” the skipper warned Pelsaert. “Secondly,
there is no-one who will sail with you.”

To the sailors’ surprise, the upper-merchant persisted, and at length the
high boatswain, Jan Evertsz, and six men were persuaded to take him to the larger island
in the yawl. The sailors remained wary, though, and insisted that they would row away if
Pelsaert went ashore and was held against his will. But it did not come to this; as they
approached Batavia’s Graveyard they saw such a crowd of people gathered on the beach
that Evertsz grew apprehensive. When the merchant made as if to leap into the shallows
with his barrel, the high boatswain hauled him back into the yawl, and the men rowed
rapidly away, with the cries of those they left behind still ringing in their
ears.

This unpleasant incident robbed Francisco Pelsaert of resolve. Next morning,
rather than renewing his attempts to resupply the island, he accompanied some seamen who
were going in the yawl to search for water elsewhere in the archipelago. This time they
sailed several miles to the north, to two big islands the merchant had first noticed from
the wreck. They dug for water in several places but discovered nothing more than a little
brackish rainwater in hollows by the shore. For Pelsaert and for Jacobsz, their last real
hope was gone. It now seemed certain there was no fresh water anywhere nearby. Moreover,
the storms that had plagued them on the night of the wreck had blown themselves out and
there was no prospect of more rain.

Next morning they began to build up their longboat’s sides in preparation
for a lengthy ocean voyage. While they were working, the
Batavia
’s yawl, which
Pelsaert had sent over to the wreck, appeared on the horizon. Eleven men were on board,
led by an officer named Gillis Fransz, but the longboat was a much more substantial craft
than the little yawl and could hold 40 people in reasonable comfort. Fransz and his men
were expert sailors, and when they asked to join the crew of the larger boat, their
request was eagerly accepted.

Pelsaert and Jacobsz sailed four days after the
Batavia
had hit the reef,
leaving nearly 200 frantic, thirsty people on Batavia’s Graveyard, and another 70
stranded on the wreck. A braver commander, and a better leader of men, might have insisted
that his place was with the bulk of the survivors. Pelsaert, by his own account, did wish
to stay and help those whom he now left behind: “It was better and more honest to die
with them if we could not find water than to stay alive with deep grief of heart,” he
wrote. But the sailors were determined to leave the archipelago, and in the end the
upper-merchant chose to save himself. On the morning of 8 June he joined the sailors and
the favored passengers in the
Batavia
’s longboat. There were 48 of them,
including two women and a babe in arms. Towing the yawl, they set sail and headed slowly
north.

As he went, Francisco Pelsaert glanced back toward the crescent of white water
that marked the reef, and the battered hulk that had once been his command. On board were
several dozen of the worst cutthroats and drunkards who had sailed from Amsterdam, and one
senior VOC official. He was the under-merchant—after Pelsaert, the most senior man on
board. His name was Jeronimus Cornelisz.

1

The Heretic

“He was more evil than if he had been changed into a tiger
animal.”

FRANCISCO PELSAERT

J
ERONIMUS HAD NEVER MEANT TO GO TO SEA. He was not a merchant by profession and
had no family or interests in the East. He was, in fact, a man of education and
refinement, who moved with ease among the upper classes of the United Provinces. At home
in the Netherlands, his social standing had been higher than that of any other man or
woman on board the
Batavia;
he had even outranked his superior on the ship,
Francisco Pelsaert. Indeed, throughout his life—and he was 30 when he sailed for
Java—the under-merchant would have had no reason to associate with what Dutchmen
called the
grauw,
the rabble of criminals and paupers who occupied the lowest
strata of society. Now, however, he had at least one thing in common with the thugs and
sots who had made themselves at home on the wreck. He was a desperate man.

In the seventeenth century few people sailed to the East by choice. The Spiceries
of the Indonesian archipelago were the source of unimaginable wealth, it was true. Yet the
men who earned vast fortunes trading with the Indies were the astonishingly wealthy
merchants who stayed at home in Amsterdam and Middelburg, Delft and Hoorn and
Enkhuizen—not those who actually manned their ships and risked their own lives on the
long sea voyage. For the ordinary traders and the sailors of the VOC, service with the
Company did offer certain opportunities to profit from the spice trade. But it also
exposed them to privation, disease, and early death. The life expectancy of a merchant
newly arrived in the Indies was a mere three years, and of the million or so people who
sailed with the VOC during the lifetime of the Company, fewer than one in three
returned.

A small proportion of the million settled in the Indies and survived, but the
climate and conditions accounted for most of the deaths at VOC’s trading bases
overseas. Lethal bouts of dysentery—“the bloody flux”—were the
principal scourge, but assorted plagues and fevers also took their toll. Some died in
accidents at sea or in battle with the local people, and a good number perished at the
hands of the Dutch authorities themselves, who ruled with considerable severity. A man in
Jeronimus’s position was, in short, much more likely to meet his doom in a place like
Java than he was to make his fortune.

It is thus hardly surprising that throughout the history of the VOC the men who
sailed aboard the East Indiamen were portrayed as the lowest of the low. In the popular
perception, the Company was (in one contemporary’s opinion) “a great refuge for
all spoilt brats, bankrupts, cashiers, brokers, tenants, bailiffs, informers and suchlike
rakes”; its soldiers and sailors were violent, feckless and otherwise unemployable;
and its merchants either disgraced debtors or plucked students who would risk anything for
the chance to restore their failing fortunes.

Jeronimus Cornelisz was a merchant of this type: a man who had compelling reasons
of his own for gambling his life on the lottery of an Indies voyage. When he left the
United Provinces, he was almost bankrupt, a bereaved father—and also a dangerous and
possibly wanted heretic. These misfortunes were entirely of his own making.

Cornelisz came originally from Friesland, one of the most isolated and northerly
of the United Provinces. It was a place apart, largely rural and with borders so well
protected by a dense barrier of peat bogs, lakes, and marshes that only the most
persistent travelers ventured in by road. The few who did, and made their way along the
almost impassable mud tracks that led into the interior, found themselves passing through
a land that was somehow not entirely Dutch.

The Frisian people certainly thought of themselves as different. They traced
their ancestry back to Roman times and claimed descent from age-old tribes who had lived
along the German border. Their cities were similarly ancient. Many Frisians disliked the
Dutch and thought of them as interlopers, whose history hardly began before 1000 and who
had usurped lands that had once been part of the semilegendary Dark Age Frisian kingdom.
Even in the 1620s, when the rise of Holland had long since reduced the province to a
northern backwater and forced the inhabitants of its cities to work and trade with their
richer cousins to the south, the majority of the population did not speak Dutch. The
language of the countryside was Frisian, a tongue with certain similarities to English.
Visitors from the southern provinces struggled to understand it.

Jeronimus Cornelisz was probably born into this environment in the year 1598. His
family appears to have come from the area around the provincial capital, Leeuwarden, which
was then a city of some 11,000 people; it is possible that their home was the smaller
settlement of Bergum, five miles to the east, though the destruction of the relevant
records makes it impossible to confirm this town as his birthplace. Cornelisz’s
father and mother were almost certainly well-off, and the province’s surviving legal
records suggest that they had connections with some significant local property owners.
Beyond that, however, almost nothing is known of Jeronimus’s early years. Even the
names and occupations of his parents remain a mystery.

One thing is certain: Cornelisz would have attended school from the age of six.
In the first years of the seventeenth century, the Dutch education system was by far the
most advanced in Europe; all towns and most villages were provided with elementary
schools, and the costs of schooling were subsidized by the state. In consequence, even the
children of the lower classes received at least a general education, and foreign visitors
to the country were frequently astonished to discover Dutch servants who could
read.

These schools existed for a reason. The United Provinces had only recently
converted to Protestantism, and the old Catholic religion was still practiced by some
Dutch families. The main purpose of the state primary schools was to produce new
generations of Calvinists; consequently, the basic syllabus was confined to reading and
Bible studies. Rival churches maintained establishments of their own, for the same reason.
Although they were taught to read Scripture, not all pupils received instruction in
writing, and parents who wished their children to learn such skills had to pay extra fees.
Arithmetic was considered too advanced to form part of an elementary education.

Many boys and most girls left school at the age of 8 or 10, but as the son of
wealthy parents, Jeronimus may have continued his education at one of the famous Latin
schools of the United Provinces. These schools, one of which was owned and run by each of
the principal towns of the republic, took the male children straight from local schools at
the age of 10 and gave them a thorough classical education. They taught Latin and Greek
and offered boys a grounding in calligraphy, natural philosophy, and rhetoric as well.
They were, however, much more than just places of learning, for the masters of the Latin
schools prided themselves in turning out young humanists—men who looked beyond the
stifling confines of contemporary religion to embrace the virtues and the values of
ancient Rome. Thus, while the Dutch elementary school system existed to instill a rigid
Calvinism into its pupils, boys who went on to graduate from the Latin schools were
encouraged to abandon fixed patterns of devotion and think for themselves. The schools of
Friesland and Groningen were particularly noted for their liberalism in this
respect.

As a Frisian and, perhaps, the graduate of a northern Latin school, the young
Cornelisz would have experienced an upbringing as far removed from the narrow strictures
of orthodox Dutch Calvinism as was possible in the United Provinces. But he would also
have been prepared for the highest callings in the Dutch Republic. A good number of the
products of the Latin schools went on to become ministers or physicians. Others studied
law or were trained as bureaucrats. The rest, who lacked either the scholastic aptitude or
the wealth and social standing necessary to command a place at university, were generally
apprenticed to one of the more gentlemanly professions.

For whatever reason, Jeronimus Cornelisz followed the latter path and began to
train as an apothecary. In the early modern age, the medieval system of craft guilds
remained strong throughout the United Provinces. Would-be blacksmiths and grocers,
surgeons and tailors—all were required to find themselves a master and bind
themselves to him for a period of between three and seven years. The master gave the
student board and lodging and revealed to him the mysteries of his trade. In return, the
student provided labor for the duration of his apprenticeship.

At the conclusion of the contracted period, the boy—by now a young
man—was required to prepare one or more masterpieces, samples of work that, quite
literally, demonstrated mastery of his chosen profession. These masterpieces were
submitted for examination by officials of the relevant guild, and, if the apprentice was
judged to have acquired a thorough knowledge of his trade, he was permitted to join the
guild himself. This was a significant commitment. Membership of a guild brought with it
certain obligations, and in particular the requirement to contribute regularly and
liberally to guild funds. Many men who had successfully completed their apprenticeships
never could afford to pay these fees and remained journeymen all their lives.

Jeronimus was probably apprenticed at some time between 1615 and 1620. His was a
coveted position. In early modern Europe, qualified apothecaries had a monopoly on the
preparation and supply of medicines and were therefore more or less assured a steady
stream of customers. Their nostrums were complicated and expensive, and many grew rich
supplying them. Gideon DeLaune, a French emigrant who had his dispensary at the English
court, died leaving $144,000 and was more wealthy than the majority of the nobles whom he
treated. Dutch apothecaries, while not quite so spectacularly rich, were generally
well-off.

The number of illnesses requiring their attentions was endless. The major
infectious diseases, endemic throughout the century, were plague—which proved fatal
in somewhere between 60 percent and 80 percent of cases—leprosy, and typhus.
Dysentery (which killed one in four of its victims), syphilis, tuberculosis, and typhoid
were also commonplace. Those fortunate enough to escape the attentions of these killers
often succumbed to virulent influenza—called “the sweats”—smallpox, or
malaria. Cancer was relatively scarce; few people lived long enough to develop
it.

It is possible, even now, to determine with some precision just how common and
how widespread these complaints were in the disease-ridden seventeenth century. There
were, for example, no fewer than 123 saints in the Catholic heaven to whom those struck
down by fever could pray for intercession, by far the largest number devoted to any
particular affliction. A further 85 saints were kept busy with supplications from parents
desperate for help with the wide variety of childhood diseases. Fifty-three more saints
covered the panoply of plagues, and there were 23 whose sole concern was gout. Catholics
even had a patron saint of hemorrhoids: St. Fiacre, an Irish priest who had lived a life
of notorious mortification in the seventh century.

As an apprentice apothecary, the young Cornelisz would have spent at least three
years learning to prepare the myriad potions, unguents, poultices, and clysters that were
the stock-in-trade of the seventeenth-century pharmacist. The identity of his master is
not certain, but there is at least a possibility that he was Gerrit Evertsz, an apothecary
and corn-trader who ran a prosperous business in Leeuwarden from the early years of the
century until his death some time after 1645. Evertsz was clearly someone with whom
Cornelisz had a close relationship, since Jeronimus eventually asked him to take charge of
his legal affairs in Friesland. If he was indeed the young man’s master, Cornelisz
had found himself an influential patron. Evertsz was one of the most prominent citizens of
the Frisian capital, acting, in addition to his career in pharmacy, as curator of the
city’s orphans and an official receiver of bankrupts.

Apprentice apothecaries were not generally permitted to become masters before the
age of 25, and this suggests that Jeronimus submitted his masterpieces—which would
have been treatises on the proper treatment of some illness, or perhaps upon the
preparation of a poison—in about 1623. Evidently they were good enough to impress his
examiners and, as a newly qualified pharmacist, he now became a member of the trinity of
physicians, apothecaries, and surgeons who made up the medical establishment of early
modern Europe.

The physicians, who were university graduates, were by far the most haughty and
prestigious of these three groups. They had labored for years to master the medical
theories of the time and reserved for themselves the sole right to write prescriptions and
issue diagnoses. They were enormously grand and distant personalities, who charged huge
fees, distinguished themselves from ordinary professionals by donning long gowns and
mortarboards, and invariably wore gloves when seeing patients to ensure there could be no
actual contact between them. Only the very wealthiest could afford their services; even in
the largest cities there were rarely more than a dozen physicians to every 50,000
people.