Batavia's Graveyard (40 page)

Wiebbe Hayes, whom Pelsaert had promoted to the rank of sergeant at a salary of
18 guilders a month, received further recognition and reward upon his arrival in
Batavia.

He was commissioned as an officer in the Company’s army and made a
standard-bearer. It was an astonishing promotion for a man who had left Amsterdam as a
common soldier, but certainly no less than he deserved. As a standard-bearer, Hayes’s
salary was increased again, to 40 guilders a month—roughly equivalent to that
previously enjoyed by Jeronimus Cornelisz—and he was promised the chance of further
promotion “according to opportunity and merit.”

The Defenders were rewarded, too. All Hayes’s common soldiers became cadets,
with a salary of 10 guilders a month—a gesture that was not quite as generous as it
sounds, since they already earned 8 or 9 guilders a month as privates. His sailors had
their pay increased to the same figure. In addition, the Council of the Indies awarded all
those who had “shown themselves faithful and piously resisted evil” in the
Abrolhos an additional gratuity of two months’ wage, a bonus worth somewhere between
10 and 20 guilders a man. The two dozen sailors of the
Sardam,
who had helped
Pelsaert to put down the mutiny, were given 100 pieces of eight (worth about 240 guilders
in total) to share among themselves.

Hayes himself was not heard from again after landing in Batavia. There is no
trace of him in the records of his hometown, Winschoten, but the archives there are so
incomplete it cannot be said with any certainty whether he lived to return there. Perhaps
he moved elsewhere and married, or took up residence in a crowded town such as Amsterdam,
which he could now certainly afford. It is equally possible, however, that
Jeronimus’s captor died somewhere in the Indies, perhaps in battle, but more likely
manning an outpost on some distant island, of some unknown tropical disease.

Toward the end of December 1629, Gijsbert Bastiaensz sat down to write a letter
to his family at home. Remarkably, his narrative of the mutiny—rambling and almost
incoherent in places, and hurriedly composed to catch the fleet returning to the Dutch
Republic—survived to become the only independent account of events on Batavia’s
Graveyard. It shows that the
predikant
still far from recovered from his
tribulations in the archipelago (“we have just come out of such a sorrow that the
mind is still a little confused,” he wrote) and seeking consolation in religion.
“Having yielded myself to the providence of the Lord, who tries his children for his
benefit,” Bastiaensz concluded, “[I] through the Grace of God have gained some
strength and power, for I could hardly stand on account of weakness.”

As it happened, the
predikant
’s trials were not yet over. His role in
the Abrolhos incident had come to the attention of Jacques Specx and the Council of
Justice at Batavia, who wanted to know not only whether he had done all he could to oppose
Jeronimus and his godless henchmen, but exactly how a minister of the Reformed Church had
come to swear an oath of allegiance to a heretic. All the papers relating to
Bastiaensz’s actions were turned over to the public prosecutor, who spent almost four
months looking into the case, and it was not until the spring of 1630 that the
predikant
was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Batavian Church Council. Even then, the
governor-general remained suspicious; between 18 and 22 April, he clashed on three
separate occasions with the church authorities over their desire to proclaim
Bastiaensz’s innocence from the pulpit. Specx plainly thought the
predikant
had displayed fatal weakness in the Abrolhos. Had a better man been assigned to the
Batavia,
he told the leaders of the Church Council, “things might not have gone the way they
did.”

So Bastiaensz was called to account for his equivocal behavior on Batavia’s
Graveyard and emerged with his reputation barely intact. The Church Council’s support
at least meant that he could now preach anywhere in the lands under its jurisdiction, and
it only remained to find him a suitable church. There was some talk of sending him to
Surat, but it came to nothing, and it was only after a long while in Batavia that
Bastiaensz was dispatched to the remote Banda Islands to minister to the troops guarding
the world’s supply of nutmeg. The
predikant
remained in Java long enough to
complete two years’ mourning for his dead wife and marry, in July 1631, Maria Cnijf,
the widow of the Bailiff of Batavia. Shortly thereafter he departed for the Bandas, where
he survived for at most 18 months before being struck down and killed by dysentery in the
spring of 1633.

Gijsbert Bastiaensz, who had experienced so much on Houtman’s Abrolhos, now
lies buried in an unknown grave on another long-forgotten island. News of his death was
not forwarded to Batavia until the summer of 1634. Plainly it was not regarded as an event
of any great significance.

Of the handful of people from Batavia’s Graveyard who did live to see the
Dutch Republic once again, Judick Gijsbertsdr suffered more than most.

The
predikant
’s one surviving child had sailed on the
Batavia
as the eldest daughter of a family of nine. She arrived in Java a little more than a year
later with only her father for company, quite destitute, and having survived scurvy and
shipwreck, the brutal murder of her mother, two sisters, and four brothers, and two months
as the “fianceé” of Coenraat van Huyssen. She was one month shy of her 22nd
birthday, and her troubles were far from over.

Judick’s immediate concern would have been her precarious financial
position. Her father’s investigation by the Church Council of Batavia kept him from
working for several months after their arrival, and since the family had lost almost all
of their possessions in the wreck, Bastiaensz and his daughter probably found it hard to
make ends meet. Judick would have found it expedient to marry, and though her
father’s poverty and her own loss of virginity might have rendered her an
unattractive prospect in the United Provinces, the marriage markets of the Far East worked
quite differently. White women were a rarity in Java, and pretty, single European girls
were rarer still. The merchants and soldiers of the town coveted new arrivals “like
roasted pears,” and the
predikant
’s daughter would have had no shortage
of suitors.

Sadly, good fortune eluded her even then. Within a few weeks of her arrival
Judick had met and married a certain Pieter van der Hoeven—whose profession is not
recorded—and so, she must have hoped, secured her future; but he died within three
months of their wedding day, adding widowhood to her recent tribulations. She completed a
full year’s mourning before marrying again, this time to Helmich Helmichius of
Utrecht, whom she accompanied to the Spice Island of Ambon. Judick’s new
husband—a
predikant
of absolutely no distinction—was probably an
acquaintance of her father’s. This time the marriage lasted for a while, but in 1634
the bloody flux struck down Helmichius, as it had claimed Gijsbert Bastiaensz the year
before, leaving the girl orphaned and twice-widowed.

Even the VOC was moved by this new misfortune, and on the orders of the Council
of the Indies Judick received 600 guilders to compensate her for her widowhood and general
suffering. This substantial payment—the equivalent of perhaps $48,000
today—enabled her to return to Dordrecht with her second husband’s estate still
intact. She was back in her hometown by October 1635, when, aged 27 and in robust health,
she made a will naming two uncles and an aunt her “universal heirs.” From this
it would appear that neither Judick’s relationship with Coenraat van Huyssen nor her
two marriages had produced surviving issue. The will does, however, show that she was at
last comfortably off. She left in excess of a thousand guilders to be distributed to her
relatives, the poor committee of the Reformed Church of Dordrecht, and a religious
institution in the town.

There is no record of Judick Gijsbertsdr’s death in the archives of
Dordrecht. She may well have married for a third time and moved away from her hometown or
been caught in the great epidemic of bubonic plague that swept through the city in 1636,
throwing normal recordkeeping into temporary disarray. Without further clues it is
impossible to say.

Creesje Jans, who had traveled 15,000 miles to rejoin her husband, reached
Batavia at last only to discover he was dead. Having survived so much herself, she now
found herself alone in a ruined town where she had no business and few friends.

Her husband, Boudewijn van der Mijlen—it will be recalled—had been sent
in September 1627 to Arakan, a Burmese river port, to purchase slaves for the Dutch
settlements in Java. He had orders to remain there indefinitely, and there is no record
that he ever did return to Batavia; certainly he was dead by July 1629, when
“Lucretia Jans of Amsterdam” is mentioned as his next of kin in the records of
the town. He had been in his late twenties, and Creesje had just turned 28 when she
discovered she had been widowed.

The woman capable of arousing enormous passion in suitors as diverse as
Jeronimus, Ariaen Jacobsz, and Francisco Pelsaert thus found herself without a man. Life
in the seventeenth century was harsh, and it was rare to reach maturity without losing a
father or a mother, a sibling, or a spouse. Creesje Jans had nevertheless endured far more
than was usual even in that age, and it seems inconceivable that she would not have been
profoundly marked by her experiences and loss. Still, she had unusual courage and strength
of spirit, and she evidently remained a fine prospective wife, for in October 1630 she
married a certain Jacob Cornelisz Cuick. The couple lived on in Batavia until about
1635—probably the time it took for Cuick to see out his contract with the
VOC—and then returned together to the Netherlands, where they were both still alive
in 1641.