Batavia's Graveyard (33 page)

Like Cornelisz, Loos required the other mutineers to swear an oath of loyalty to
him. This document, which was signed on 8 September, closely resembled the allegiances
made to Jeronimus. At about the same time, a new ship’s council was elected. Nothing
is known of its composition, but it was, in any case, entirely ineffectual, since
Loos’s one real strategy was to continue the war against Wiebbe Hayes. He was
encouraged in this by his men’s escalating complaints concerning rationing,
but—since it was by now apparent that the Defenders were too strong and too well
organized to be easily overrun—it is by no means clear exactly what Wouter hoped to
gain by returning to the attack. The most likely explanation is that he planned to inflict
sufficient damage to win concessions from the Defenders, particularly with regard to the
supply of food and water. It is also possible that he hoped to raise the morale of his
dwindling band by reminding them that they had a common enemy. In any case, Loos was
determined to proceed. On Hayes’s Island, Bastiaensz was still trying to negotiate a
truce—“I had made up a script,” he noted, “that they should have peace
with each other, and that they [the mutineers] should not do any harm to the good
ones.” But Wouter had no interest in such niceties. “They tore that in
pieces,” Gijsbert wrote, “and have come at us.”

The fourth attack on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island began at about 9 o’clock on
the morning of 17 September and continued in a desultory fashion for about two hours, for
the sides were not well matched. The committed mutineers by now were rather less than 20
strong, and the deaths of Zevanck, Pietersz, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen had deprived
them of four of their best men. Of those who remained, only Loos and seven or eight other
soldiers had much military experience. They were supported by a rather smaller number of
gunners and sailors who were also useful fighting men, but the other active mutineers were
either ill or little more than boys. The camp followers—another dozen or so men who
had taken the oath of loyalty demanded by their new captain-general—had played no
real part in events thus far, and some at least had signed under duress. Given the
opportunity, some, if not all, of this last group might well defect to Wiebbe Hayes. They
were certainly not trustworthy, and if they were included in the raiding party, they would
all have to be watched. Some or all of them may in fact have been left behind on
Batavia’s Graveyard.

The Defenders, on the other hand, still numbered 46 or 47 fighting men. Half of
them were soldiers and the rest were able-bodied sailors; they were better fed and rested,
and they also had the advantage of the higher ground. In the circumstances, it is hardly
surprising that Loos’s plan was to balance the odds by depending on his muskets. The
mutineers had managed to drag two guns from the wreck, and each of them, properly handled,
could fire one round a minute. By keeping the action at long range they might hope to pick
off the Defenders one by one. Hayes’s men, it seems safe to assume, simply took
cover, perhaps sheltering behind slabs of coral. Neither side dared engage the other at
close quarters, and so the action sputtered on intermittently throughout the
morning.

By 11 o’clock the situation had begun to change. Four Defenders had been
hit; three had severe flesh wounds, though only one, Jan Dircxsz, an 18-year-old soldier
from Emden, had sustained a mortal injury. The mutineers, however, had suffered no losses
at all, and it therefore seemed that Loos’s strategy was working. By keeping the
action at long range, he slowly but surely had begun to even the odds against him. In a
few more hours, with a little more application by his musketeers, he might hope to inflict
more telling casualties; and if he did that, eventually the Defenders would surely have to
break cover to attack him. When they did, the soldier thought, everything would come down
to the matter of hand-to-hand combat, and his superior weapons might prevail. Some sort of
resolution might be possible by midafternoon, and  . . .

It was then that Pelsaert and the rescue ship sailed over the horizon.

8

Condemned

“The justice and vengeance of God made manifest.”

GIJSBERT BASTIAENSZ

P
ELSAERT STEERED THE
SARDAM
as close to the islands as he dared, tacking
cautiously through the treacherous maze of shallows to the north. It was difficult work,
and it was not until midday that the jacht came to anchor in a natural deep-water
channel on the southeast side of the High Island, still two miles away from Wiebbe
Hayes’s Island and about four from Batavia’s Graveyard. She was on the edge of
further shallows there, and the
commandeur
could go no deeper into the
archipelago.

Pelsaert had arrived in the Abrolhos not knowing whether he would find the
Batavia
’s
people alive or dead. The sight of smoke rising from the islands in the group had caused
him to hope—as Cornelisz had once predicted—that some, if not all, of them might
still be saved. As soon as the
Sardam
had dropped anchor, he had one of the
ship’s boats loaded with supplies of bread and water and rowed for the nearest land,
which happened to be the southwest corner of the High Island. It was not far away, and as
the
Sardam
’s men strained at their oars, the
commandeur
examined the
beaches and the interior of the island for any sign of life. There was none to be found
but, even so, he leapt ashore as soon as the boat grounded in the shallows, still
confident that survivors would be found. The oarsmen followed—and as they did so,
Pelsaert glanced back out to sea and saw a wonderful sight. “A very small yawl with
four Men” was heading toward him as swiftly as her crew could manage. The men in the
boat were still too far away for the
commandeur
to determine who they were, but he
could now at least anticipate that the
Batavia
’s story would turn out
well.

The sudden appearance of the
jacht,
coming as it did at the height of the
climactic battle between the Defenders and the mutineers, had had a dramatic effect on the
men fighting on both sides. For Wiebbe Hayes it seemed to be, quite literally, the product
of divine intervention. Salvation had arrived when everything seemed lost, and he and his
men greeted the ship’s arrival with frantic relief. For Loos and the other mutineers,
Pelsaert’s return meant something altogether different: not life, but death; not
rescue, but the certainty of retribution. All their plans had depended on dealing with
Hayes’s men before the appearance of a rescue ship; now that strategy lay in ruins,
and when the ship was seen they broke off the action almost at once and retired in some
confusion to their camp. Hayes, meanwhile, ran for his own boats in order to warn the
commandeur
of what had happened in the archipelago.

While Pelsaert tacked slowly through the shallows, the mutineers on
Batavia’s Graveyard were debating what to do. Wouter Loos—who had never held the
men in thrall as Jeronimus had—lacked the captain-general’s demonic singleness
of purpose. Without the advantage of surprise, the fight had gone out of him. But other
members of Cornelisz’s band, including Stone-Cutter Pietersz, Jan Hendricxsz, and
Lucas Gellisz, were not yet ready to surrender. “Come on,” Jan Pelgrom urged,
“won’t we now seize the
jacht
?” Loos demurred—“No, I have
given up the idea,” he replied—but Pelgrom found plenty of support for his idea,
and within minutes a group of heavily armed mutineers were tumbling into the most
seaworthy of their boats and pulling as quickly as they could for the High
Island.

The Defenders and the mutineers raced to be the first to reach the
Sardam.
Wiebbe Hayes kept his skiffs on the north side of his island, safe from capture by the
mutineers; to reach them he had to cross almost two miles of rough ground, thick with
nettles and riddled with the burrows of nesting birds, and then row the best part of three
miles from his mooring to the
jacht.
The mutineers’ boat splashing up from the
south had an almost identical distance to travel. Neither party knew exactly where the
other was, or who would be the first to find the
jacht,
and Pelsaert, on the High
Island, was as yet unaware of either Jeronimus’s treachery or the danger he was in.
The outcome of the mutiny itself thus hung in the balance.

Wiebbe Hayes’s task was to find Pelsaert, persuade him to believe his
undeniably amazing account of what had happened in the islands, and then warn the people
in the
Sardam
before the murderers could surprise them. The mutineers’ one
hope was to get aboard the
Sardam
and attack before her crew realized they were in
danger. Jeronimus had been quite right to predict that the rescue
jacht
would be
only lightly manned, to leave room for large parties of survivors; she had left Java with
a crew of only 26, and perhaps a quarter of those men were with Pelsaert in the boat. The
remaining sailors, finding armed mutineers among them, might yet be overwhelmed; and if
they were, Jeronimus’s gang would control the one means of escape from the Abrolhos.
The Defenders would have to come to terms or be abandoned, and the mutineers might thus
secure the freedom of their captain-general. As for Pelsaert—still standing on the
beach trying to discern who was in the fast-approaching boat—his difficulty would lie
in deciding whom he should believe.

It was a while before the
commandeur
at last made out the identity of the
people in the yawl. They came “rowing round the Northerly point,” he later
recalled, “and one of them, a man named Wiebbe Hayes, sprang ashore and ran towards
me, calling from afar: ‘Welcome, but go back on board immediately, for there is a
party of scoundrels on the islands near the wreck, with two sloops, who have the intention
to seize the
jacht.
’ ” The Defenders’ leader had just sufficient
time to gasp out a brief summary of events in the archipelago before the
commandeur,
suddenly alert to the danger he was in, made off to warn the
Sardam.
As he jumped
into his boat, Pelsaert ordered Hayes to bring Cornelisz to him, “bound”; then
he pulled like fury for the
jacht.

Hayes and his men had won their race with the mutineers, but not by much.
Pelsaert was still some distance from the
Sardam
when he “saw a sloop with
people rowing come round the Southerly point of the High Island.” It was the
mutineers’ boat, coming on with steady strokes, and the
commandeur
had barely
enough time to scramble up the sides of the
jacht
and alert the crew before the
sloop pulled alongside. One look at the 11 men on board—dressed in their ostentatious
laken
uniforms, dripping with gold and silver braid and crewing a vessel filled
with swords and cutlasses—was enough to convince Pelsaert that Hayes’s story was
true. At his command, the swivel guns on the
Sardam
’s poop were leveled at
mutineers’ boat and men with pikes lined the deck. Thus reinforced, the
commandeur
felt ready to repel boarders. He hailed the boat, demanding: “Wherefore do you come
aboard armed?”

Even now, Jan Hendricxsz and the other cutthroats in the sloop were not quite
ready to surrender. “They answered me that they would reply to that when they were on
the ship,” Pelsaert recalled, but by now he was thoroughly alarmed and would not
permit any such thing. A brief standoff ensued, the men in the boat refusing to lay down
their arms and the
Sardam
’s men threatening to open fire, and it was only when
it at last became apparent to the mutineers that their cause was hopeless that they threw
their weapons overboard and clambered, unarmed, onto the
jacht.
Each man was seized
the moment that he stepped on board, securely bound, and locked up in the
forecastle.

Pelsaert began the process of interrogation that same afternoon, at once anxious
and appalled to discover the true extent of the disasters that had engulfed the
archipelago. Most of his information came from “a certain Jan Hendricxsz from Bremen,
soldier,” who immediately and freely confessed to having killed “17 to 20
people” on the orders of Jeronimus. Hendricxsz had been one of the first men to join
the conspiracy on the
Batavia,
and he possessed an intimate knowledge of all
Cornelisz’s stratagems and plans. Under questioning by the
commandeur,
the
German mutineer soon revealed not only the terrible details of the murders and massacres
in the Abrolhos, but the original plot to seize the ship, and the skipper’s role in
it, which Pelsaert had long suspected but never had confirmed. Armed with this
information, the
commandeur
then had the other mutineers brought before him, one by
one, confronting each man with statements of his guilt:

“We learned from their own confessions, and the testimony of all the living
persons, that they have drowned, murdered and brought to death with all manner of
cruelties, more than 120 persons, men, women and children as well, of whom the principal
murderers amongst those still alive have been: Lenert Michielsz van Os, soldier, Mattys
Beer of Munsterbergh, cadet,
^*45
Jan Hendricxsz of Bremen, soldier, Allert Janssen of
Assendelft, gunner, Rutger Fredricx of Groningen, locksmith; Jan Pelgrom de Bye of Bommel,
cabin servant, and Andries Jonas of Luyck, soldier, with their consorts.”

Other names were also mentioned. Those of councillors David Zevanck, Coenraat
van Huyssen, and Jacob Pietersz cropped up several times in the course of the
interrogations. Nevertheless, the evidence of Jan Hendricxsz and his fellow mutineers
seemed conclusive on at least one point. Jeronimus Cornielsz had been the cause of all the
trouble.

Hayes brought Jeronimus aboard late that same afternoon. The captain-general
arrived under close guard. Stripped of his men and all his power, he was reduced to
something of a curiosity. Even now, however—disheveled, tied up, stinking of
decomposing birds, with his red cloth finery in tatters—Cornelisz plainly retained
something of his weirdly compelling aura, the hypnotic fascination that had bound the
mutineers together and made men willing to kill for him. Nor had two weeks of plucking
feathers in a limestone pit deprived him of his facile tongue, his agile mind, or his
ingenuity. Francisco Pelsaert, a less clever and a much less complex man, hardly knew what
to make of his former deputy. “I looked at him with great sorrow,” wrote the
commandeur,

“such a scoundrel, cause of so many disasters and of the shedding of human
blood—and still he had the intention to go on . . . . I examined him in the presence
of the [
Sardam
’s] council, and asked him why he allowed the devil to lead him
so far astray from all human feeling, to do that which had never been so cruelly
perpetrated among Christians, without any real hunger or need of thirst, but solely out of
bloodthirstiness.

“[Jeronimus] answered, that one should not blame him for what had happened,
laying it on David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and others, who have been killed, that
they had forced him and willed him to do it; that also one had to do a great deal to save
oneself; denied that he had ever had the intention to help in the plan to seize the ship
Batavia,
and as to the idea of seizing any
jacht
that might come, he said Zevanck had
proposed this, to which he had only consented on account of his own safety without meaning
it. For, firstly, he believed that they would never be delivered; [and secondly] that
skipper Ariaen intended to throw the
commandeur
overboard [from the longboat] . . .
. In this manner he tried to talk himself clean, with his glib tongue telling the most
palpable lies, making out that nowhere had he had a hand in it, often appealing to the
[other mutineers], who would say the same thing.”

Unable to penetrate this barrage of untruths for the time being, Pelsaert halted
the interrogation at dusk. There were other things to do: salvaging the wreck and subduing
the remaining mutineers, who were still on their island. Cornelisz was returned to his
prison in the forecastle, and next morning, before dawn, Pelsaert took the
Sardam
’s
boat to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, where he armed 10 of the Defenders with swords and
muskets. At daybreak he sailed to Batavia’s Graveyard, “where the rest of the
scoundrels were, in order to capture and secure them.” Half a dozen mutineers had
stayed on the island, including Wouter Loos, Lenert van Os, and Mattys Beer; but when they
saw a boatload of fully equipped soldiers disembarking on the beach, even these hardened
men surrendered without a fight. Pelsaert had them securely bound and immediately began to
search the island for the Company’s valuables, and in particular the casket of jewels
he had landed on Traitors’ Island three and a half months earlier. He was pleasantly
surprised to discover his hoard intact, down to and including the Great Cameo of Gaspar
Boudaen—“these were all found,” he wrote later, “except a ring and a
gold chain, and the ring has been recovered hereafter.” In the course of hunting for
the valuables, the
commandeur
’s search parties also found fresh evidence of
the mutiny in Jeronimus’s tent. From various bundles of papers they recovered copies
of the oaths that the mutineers had sworn to Cornelisz and Loos and the promises that the
women kept for common service had been forced to make. These and other incriminating
documents were handed to Pelsaert.