Batavia's Graveyard (31 page)

As it turned out, Jeronimus had every reason to fear Hayes and the soldiers he
had abandoned six weeks earlier. The captain-general’s scouts—like Pelsaert and
the sailors in the longboat before them—had spent very little time on the two large
islands to the north of Batavia’s Graveyard. They had gone ashore for perhaps an hour
or two, found each in turn as rocky and barren as the rest of the archipelago, and seen no
evidence of pools or wells. But the scouts had made a serious mistake in reporting to
Jeronimus that the High Land could never support life. Both cays were, in fact, far richer
in resources than the islands controlled by the mutineers.

The smaller of the two land masses, which lay farthest to the north, was two
miles from end to end and about a mile and a half across. At its center stood the only
hill in the entire archipelago, a modest hummock rising 50 feet above the sea; in
consequence it was called the High Island. Its neighbor, just under a mile away to the
southwest, was larger still—more than three miles long and not far short of two miles
wide. Hayes and his troops established their base there, and in time it became known as
“Wiebbe Hayes’s Island.” The two isles were connected by the mile-wide
muddy causeway that Wiebbe had used to cross from one to the other.

Had Pelsaert and the skipper had the sense to explore the archipelago with any
thoroughness, they would surely have transferred the survivors of the wreck to Wiebbe
Hayes’s Island, which offered far more in the way of natural resources than
Batavia’s Graveyard and could have supported the whole company for months. Like the
smaller islets in the archipelago, it was surrounded by rich fishing grounds and alive
with nesting birds, but to the soldiers’ surprise, it also turned out to be full of
new and unknown hopping animals, which they called “cats”—“creatures
of miraculous form, as big as a hare.” These were tammars, a species of wallaby
indigenous to the Abrolhos, and as the soldiers soon discovered, they were easily caught
and delicious cooked.

Most significant of all, the island turned out to have wells. They were not
easily located, and both Pelsaert and Jeronimus’s scouts might be forgiven for having
failed to uncover them, but in the end Hayes’s men discovered them by searching under
the limestone slabs that lay scattered on the ground throughout the island. They appear to
have found at least two good wells, one near the coast and the other toward the middle of
the island, and possibly more; one cistern had 10 feet of water in it and an entrance
large enough for a man to climb down into it. Between them they contained so much fresh
water that it would hardly have been necessary to ration it.

Life on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island was thus far easier than it was on
Batavia’s Graveyard. “The Lord our God fed us so richly that we could have lived
there with ten thousand men for a hundred years,” wrote Cornelis Jansz, who had
reached Hayes from Seals’ Island, with the pardonable exaggeration of a man who had
survived the desert islands of the south to find himself living in a land of plenty.
“Birds like doves we could catch, five hundred in a day, and each bird had an egg, as
large as a hen’s egg.” They hunted wallabies, slaughtering “two, three,
four, five, six or even more for each person,” and found fishing spots where they
could haul in “40 fish as large as cod” in only an hour.

Wiebbe Hayes must have wondered why all contact with Batavia’s Graveyard had
ceased as soon as he and his men were put ashore on the High Island, and become still more
perplexed when the signal fires he lit to announce the discovery of water went unanswered.
Lacking boats, he and his men could hardly investigate, however, and they may have
remained ignorant of events elsewhere in the archipelago until the second week of July,
when the first parties of refugees staggered ashore with horrifying tales of murder and
massacre to the south. Over the next few days, at least five different groups made the
difficult passage across more than four miles of open water, sitting on little homemade
rafts or swimming behind planks of wood. The new arrivals included the eight men who
somehow escaped the general massacres on Seals’ Island, and nearly 20 who contrived
to slip away from Batavia’s Graveyard itself in groups of four and five. Between
them, these men more than doubled the strength of Hayes’s force and kept him and his
soldiers well informed concerning Cornelisz’s activities.

The news that Jeronimus’s men had gone to Seals’ Island and massacred
all the people that they found there was particularly disturbing. It must have been
obvious that the mutineers would eventually turn their gaze on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island,
and that when they did the unarmed loyalists would find themselves at a fatal
disadvantage. It was imperative that they organize themselves, construct makeshift
defenses, and improvise some weapons.

Wiebbe Hayes proved equal to the challenge. The soldiers’ leader is a shadow
figure in the
Batavia
journals, remaining out of sight on his own island while the
main action develops to the south. Nevertheless he must have been an able and inspiring
leader. He and his men had already survived for three weeks on the High Island and its
neighbor, and they eventually found the water that Pelsaert’s experienced sailors had
missed. Although a private soldier, Wiebbe not only led the original expedition to the
islands, but then integrated the various groups of refugees who found their way to him, so
that by the middle of July he was in command of a mixed party of almost 50 people. His
forces included not only VOC assistants but also company cadets who were nominally his
superiors; yet there is no suggestion that any of them ever questioned his fitness to
command them. This confidence was justified, for Hayes now directed the construction of
makeshift weapons and defenses that gave his men at least a chance against the
mutineers.

With Wiebbe to rally and cajole them, the soldiers fashioned pikes from planks,
tipping them with wicked sixteen-inch-long nails that had washed ashore with driftwood
from the wreck. Like the mutineers, they improvised morning stars, and though swords and
muskets were still lacking, there were plenty of fist-sized lumps of coral around, which
could be hurled at the heads of any attackers. There is even a reference to the fact that
“guns” were assembled on the island. What these were remains a mystery, but,
supplied with rope, the soldiers could perhaps have cut branches from the stunted trees
that dot the interior and turned them into catapults for larger rocks.

While the soldiers worked, Hayes selected his defensive positions. He recognized
that the geography of the archipelago and the pattern of the shallows meant that the
mutineers would have to approach his island across the mudflats that guarded the whole
southern shoreline. This limited the risk of a surprise attack. A lookout post built
midway along the coast, at the apex of a bay, provided him with a forward base and a clear
field of observation. With sentries posted at intervals along the coast, it would have
made sense to position the bulk of his troops farther inland, close to the wells, where
they could rest and feel relatively secure.

With the arrival of the last party of refugees, Hayes found himself in command of
46 men and a boy. Collectively, these Defenders, as they now became known, gave him a
significant numerical superiority over the mutineers that offset, at least in part, the
inferiority of his weapons. The best troops included a group of Dutch and German soldiers,
and Hayes had his two cadets, Allert Jansz and Otto Smit, to help command them. These men
could probably be depended on, but the ranks of the Defenders also included a party of
half a dozen French troops whose loyalty to the VOC, and thus general reliability, was
perhaps more suspect. The balance of Hayes’s men were gunners, sailors, and civilians
of limited military experience. It was impossible to say how well these men would fare in
the face of a determined attack by well-armed mutineers.

Nevertheless, with his preparations complete, Hayes may have felt a certain
optimism. He had numbers on his side; he could hardly be surprised; and his Defenders were
well fed and well supplied with water. Morale was relatively high. He and his men also had
sheer desperation on their side. It was only too plain, from the descriptions of the
refugees, that Cornelisz would come, and that he would kill them all if given the chance.
Surrender, even a negotiated peace, were hardly options. They would fight, when they
fought, to the death.

Wiebbe Hayes was a competent soldier and a good leader. It was the
Defenders’ good fortune that Jeronimus Cornelisz was neither. The captain-general had
no military experience and, it would appear, little grasp of strategy. As soon as it
emerged that Hayes and his men were still alive, Cornelisz must have known that they would
have to be dealt with, for fear that they would alert a rescue ship. Yet it was not until
the last week of July that Jeronimus resolved to move against them. By then Wiebbe had had
at least two weeks to make his preparations; he and his men were a much more formidable
enemy than they might have been a fortnight earlier.

Perhaps Cornelisz understood this. Probably he had become aware that the
Defenders outnumbered the mutineers, and certainly he recognized the difficulty of
launching an assault without the advantage of surprise. For these reasons the
captain-general decided to begin his campaign by exploiting the well-known antipathy
between the soldiers and the sailors of the VOC in order to divide Hayes’s
party.

He wrote a letter, warning of treachery. The sailors on Wiebbe Hayes’s
Island, Jeronimus alleged, had plotted to betray their comrades. “They have in their
possession (unknown to you) a Compass, in order to go thus secretly with the little skiff
to the High land.
^*42
” To “maintain justice, and punish the evil-doers,” he
urged the soldiers to hand over all the sailors on the island for punishment: “Give
to our hands Lucas the steward’s mate, Cornelis the fat trumpeter, Cornelis the
assistant, deaf Jan Michielsz, Ariaen the gunner, squinting Hendrick, Theunis Claasz,
Cornelis Helmigs and other sailors who are with Your Hons.”
^*43
If they would also
return a boat—the one Aris Jansz had taken during his escape from Batavia’s
Graveyard a few days earlier—the apothecary added, the soldiers and the mutineers
could still be the very “greatest and truest brothers and friends”—and,
indeed, look forward to enjoying “still more bonds and mateships.”

In composing this devious epistle, Cornelisz displayed his absolute conviction
that his actions in the Abrolhos were not only justified, but sanctioned by law. He wrote
as the head of the ship’s council, and apparently in the hope, if not the
expectation, that his orders would be obeyed. He explained that the refugees who had saved
their lives by fleeing to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island were in fact “evil-doers who
deserved death on account of mutiny,” and he even commented on the “particular
liking and trust” he had for Hayes himself. This was more than the self-delusion he
had shown in wooing Creesje Jans. The letter was a product of Jeronimus’s certainty
that he was the legally ordained leader of all the
Batavia
survivors and the
conviction that his actions were inspired by God.

As his emissary, Jeronimus chose Daniel Cornelissen, the young cadet who had
helped to drown several of the first victims of the mutiny. On 23 July the youth was rowed
to Hayes’s Island, where he somehow made contact with the half dozen French soldiers
among the Defenders. These men had been selected as the letter’s addressees,
apparently in the hope that they would be better swayed by Cornelisz’s mendacity than
the Dutch. But even the Frenchmen did not believe in the mutineers’ sincerity, and
rather than receiving Cornelissen as an ambassador, they seized him and took him captive.
The cadet was bound and brought to Hayes, who confiscated the letter and imprisoned
him.