Batavia's Graveyard (48 page)

The other three surviving accounts have the advantage that they appeared
shortly after news of the
Batavia
mutiny first reached the Netherlands, but they
are considerably shorter. The first, a typical “news song” of the period, was
published as
Droevighe Tijdinghe van de Aldergrouwelykste Moordery, Geschiet door
Eenighe Matrosen op ’t Schip
Batavia [“Sad tidings of the most horrible
murder done by some sailors of the ship
Batavia
”], an anonymous pamphlet
containing a short explanatory preface and a song of 16 verses. The news song contains no
information not available from other sources, but the information in it is so detailed
that it is reasonable to suppose that the publisher had his information direct from a
Batavia
survivor [R 227–30]. The other two accounts appear in the anonymous pamphlet
Leyds
Veer-Schuyts Praetjen, Tuschen een Koopman ende Borger van Leyden, Varende van Haarlem nae
Leyden
[“Conversation on a canal-boat between a merchant and a citizen of Leyden,
travelling from Haarlem to Leyden”]. One is an anonymous letter dated December 1629,
written by someone who accompanied Pelsaert to Java in the
Batavia
’s longboat
and returned with him to the Abrolhos. This letter includes the statement that Cornelisz
was a Frisian, a fact that is nowhere mentioned in Pelsaert’s journals but that
appears, from the research undertaken for this book, to be correct. It has been suggested
that Claes Gerritsz, the
Batavia
’s upper-steersman, was the author; this is
quite probable, but there is no evidence [R 49, 61]. The second letter, dated 11 December
1629, is the work of someone who was originally on Seals’ Island and later escaped to
join Wiebbe Hayes. It, too, is anonymous, but it is fairly certainly the work of the
assistant Cornelis Jansz [R 48].

Other Contemporary Sources

Background information on the main characters in the
Batavia
’s
story has been drawn from the contemporary records of the Dutch Republic. All cities kept
registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, and on the whole these still exist in either
town or provincial archives. Where they do, it is usually possible to discover basic
biographical information about local citizens, though in some cases—the baptismal
records, which are Reformed Church documents and thus take no account of the birth of
Catholics, Mennonites, and members of other religious minorities, are a case in
point—the records can appear misleading.

Archives full of solicitors’ papers also survive for many cities, and
these often offer rich pickings for historians. Contemporary Dutchmen were so obsessed
with upholding their personal honor (for reasons that are discussed later) that almost
anyone with any property or money occasionally resorted to solicitors to make a record of
some controversial incident for possible use in a future legal action. The legal records
therefore provide odd snapshots of the lives of people whose personal histories would
otherwise have been completely lost. The incidents they record are, by definition, hardly
representative of their subjects’ ordinary existence, but they were important
nonetheless, and if the records’ contents can be somewhat sensational, it is also
often possible to deduce a good deal from casual asides.

Books

The first noteworthy book on the
Batavia
was Henrietta
Drake-Brockman’s
Voyage to Disaster,
published in Australia in 1963. Though it
is chaotically organized, lacks any significant narrative, and is also poorly indexed, it
does print a tremendous amount of original material, including—critically—the
first full translation of Pelsaert’s journals into English. Drake-Brockman also
conducted a good deal of research into contemporary Dutch archives—a laborious
business for someone living in Western Australia years before the introduction of the
Internet and e-mail. It is impossible not to admire Drake-Brockman’s results, and if
the author discovered little about Cornelisz himself, she had great success in fleshing
out the histories of Ariaen Jacobsz, Creesje Jans, and other major characters in the
story. Forty years after its first publication,
Voyage to Disaster
remains an
essential source book for all those interested in the
Batavia.

More recently, a Haarlem scholar, Vibeke Roeper, reedited Pelsaert’s
journals for publication in the Netherlands by the Linschoten Society. Her scholarly
edition,
De Schipbreuk van de Batavia,
usefully prints a number of documents from
the VOC archives that escaped Drake-Brockman and her collaborators.

Hugh Edwards, who helped to discover the
Batavia
’s wreck site,
wrote the first narrative history of the whole incident. His
Islands of Angry Ghosts
is particularly valuable for its firsthand accounts of the early excavation of the wreck
and the grave pits on Beacon Island. More recently Philippe Godard has gone over much of
the same ground in a privately published volume,
The First and Last Voyage of the
Batavia.
It adds little that is new, but very usefully prints hundreds of color
photographs of the islands, the artifacts, and the documents in the case.

A Note on Citation

A large proportion of the existing primary source material on the
Batavia
has been published over the years—the first official documents by H. T. Colenbrander
and W. Ph. Coolhaas,
JP Coen: Bescheiden Omtrent Zijn Bedrijf in Indiï
(The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 7 vols., 1920–52), and the journals themselves, with extensive
supporting material including Coolhaas’s sources, by Roeper and Drake-Brockman. Most
readers will find it easier to obtain one of these books than to visit archives in the
Netherlands and so, in referring to the primary sources, I have also added references to
the printed editions as appropriate. These appear in the notes as [R], for Roeper, and
[DB], for Drake-Brockman, followed by the relevant page numbers. Drake-Brockman has been
my main source simply because my mother tongue is English; as it is by 30 years the older
of the two works, it seems worth noting that Marit van Huystee, a Dutch linguist working
for the Western Australian Maritime Museum, gives it as her opinion that its translations,
by E. D. Drok, are excellent in almost every respect.

Prologue: Morning Reef

The details of the
Batavia
’s last hours at sea and of the
aftermath of the wreck have been principally drawn from Pelsaert’s own account, JFP
4–8 June 1629 [DB 122–8]. I have made a few minor conjectures, based on standard
Dutch nautical practice in this period—for which see Jaap Bruijn, F. S. Gaastra, and
I. Schöffer,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries
(The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols., 1979–1987) and C. R. Boxer, “The Dutch East Indiamen:
Their Sailors, Navigators and Life on Board, 1602–1795,”
The Mariner’s
Mirror
49 (1963).

The Dutch watch system
Boxer, “The Dutch East Indiamen,” p.
93.

Ariaen Jacobsz
It has not been possible to discover much information about
the skipper of the
Batavia.
Drake-Brockman, in
Voyage to Disaster,
pp.
61–3, records the essential details of his career from 1616 onward. The surviving
records of his hometown, Durgerdam, are meager. We know he was (or had been) married, and
that his wife was a Dutch woman—one of the
Batavia
’s under-steersmen was
his brother-in-law, according to JFP 19 Sep 1629 [DB 162]—but although the Durgerdam
marital registers survive for this period, no reference to the marriage of an Ariaen
Jacobsz could be found.

Already been a servant
Records of Jacobsz’s service have not been
traced back before 1616, when he was promoted to the post of high boatswain;
Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 61. But this was a senior rank, and to reach it would almost
certainly have required up to 10 years’ sea service, and quite possibly much longer.
Jacobsz’s age is likewise unknown, but the records of his service, together with
comments that he made to Jeronimus Cornelisz at the Cape (see chapter 4), imply he was
significantly older than the upper-merchant, Pelsaert—who was 34. He was probably in
his mid-40s in 1629, and it is not impossible that he was 50.

Jacobsz’s culpability for the wreck
Pelsaert’s declaration to
the Council of Justice, Batavia, 20 July 1629, ARA VOC 1098, fol. 223r–224r [R 214].
There is no reason to doubt Pelsaert’s statement that Jacobsz ignored the
lookout’s warnings, since the skipper himself signed his declaration to confirm its
truth.

Difficulty of identifying reefs in the dark
It should not be assumed that
Ariaen Jacobsz and Hans Bosschieter were uniquely negligent in allowing the
Batavia
to run aground. It was notoriously difficult to spot low-lying reefs by night, and the
records of the period contain many similar instances of ships coming to grief after dark.
The VOC ship
Zeewijk,
which was wrecked in the Southern Abrolhos in 1727, was also
lost because members of her crew made the same mistake as Jacobsz: “ . . . We asked
the look-out, who had sat on the fore-yard, if he had not seen the surf, and he answered
that he had seen the same for even half an hour before, but had imagined it was the
reflection of the moon.” Louis Zuiderbaan, “Translation of a journal by an
unknown person from the Dutch East Indiaman
Zeewijk,
foundered on Half Moon Reef in
the Southern Abrolhos, on 9 June, 1727” (typescript, copy in Western Australian
Maritime Museum), entry for 9 June 1727. Similarly, the Spanish maritime historian Pablo
Pérez-Mallaína cites a virtually identical incident that occurred when the New Spain
fleet of 1582 neared Veracruz one night: “[One] ship was commanded by an impulsive
and imprudent master who wanted to be the first to enter Veracruz, but in the darkness he
was surprised by a strange brightness, first attributed to the light of the dawn but which
finally proved to be the deadly whiteness of a reef, against which the ship crashed and
broke into pieces. ‘And because for half an hour [the master] saw the sea whitening,
like to foam of waves breaking, he asked the sailors to be on guard  . . . and they all
said it was the light of day.’ ” Pérez-Mallaína,
Spain’s Men of the
Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 179.

Timing of the wreck
Pelsaert, in JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 122], gives the time
as “about two hours before daybreak,” which, after making allowance for the time
of year and prevailing local conditions, Drake-Brockman (op. cit., p. 122) put at about 4
a.m. I think it must have been slightly earlier, given that the watch would have changed
at 4 and that it seems most unlikely Jacobsz would have stood the early morning
watch.

“First a coral outcrop
 . . .” Pelsaert’s declaration, 20
July 1629 [R 212–4].

“Flung to the left
 . . .” Excavation of the ship in the 1970s
revealed that the
Batavia
had settled on her port (i.e., left-hand) side. The wreck
was found in a shallow depression some 800 yards east of the southwest corner of Morning
Reef at a spot where there is a noticeable drop of about six feet to the seabed at the
stern. Hugh Edwards,
Islands of Angry Ghosts
(New York: William Morrow, 1966), pp.
134–5; Jeremy Green,
The Loss of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie Retourschip
Batavia,
Western Australia 1629: an Excavation Report and Catalogue of Artefacts
(Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1989), p. 5.

Another 270 people  . . .
This figure assumes 50 of the Batavia’s 150
sailors were on watch. The ship had originally set sail with 332 people (List of those on
board the
Batavia,
ARA VOC 1098, fol. 582r [R 220–1]), but 10 had died
en
voyage—
rather a low total for the period, as will be seen.

Actions after the wreck
JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 122–3]. For the various
dimensions of the Batavia, see Willem Vos, Batavia
Cahier 1: De Herbouw van een
Oostindiïvaarder: Bestek en Beschrijving van een Retourschip
(Lelystad: np,
1990).

“What have you done  . . . ?”
JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 123].

“The smallest of the Batavia’s eight anchors”
This anchor was
eventually recovered by marine archaeologists from a position some distance from the
wreck. A woodcut in OV shows a cable run out through one of the
Batavia
’s
stern gunports. This ancient method of hauling a ship off rocks is still sometimes used
today. It is known as “kedging off.”

The sounding lead
Dutch leads were about 18 inches long and cast with a
hollow, bowl-shaped end. This would have been filled with sticky tallow, which would bring
up traces of mud or sand where the bottom was soft. In unknown waters the lead was swung
regularly from the bows and the results reported to the officer of the watch by loudly
singing out the depth. For the details of the soundings, see Governor-General in Council,
Batavia, 9 July 1629, in H. T. Colenbrander,
JP Coen: Bescheiden Omtrent zijn Bedrijf
in Indiï,
V, pp. 756–7 [DB 44].

“Dutch East Indiamen were built strong  . . .”
Boxer, “The
Dutch East-Indiamen,” p. 82.

View of the Abrolhos from the wreck site
Hugh Edwards, “Where Is
Batavia’s Graveyard?,” in Jeremy Green, Myra Stanbury, and Femme Gaastra (eds.),
The ANCODS Colloquium: Papers Presented at the Australia-Netherlands Colloquium on
Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History (Fremantle: Australian National Centre of
Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 1999), pp. 88–9.

“The largest island”
This was East Wallabi (Pelsaert’s
“High Island” in the journals), which, with a 50-foot hill as its highest point,
is visible from considerably farther off than any other island in the Wallabi
Group.