Batavia's Graveyard (65 page)

Jan Willemsz Selyns
JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB 157]; sentence on Mattys Beer, JFP
28 Sep 1629 [DB 193]; confession of Wouter Loos, 27 Oct 1629 [DB 226].

Pelsaert’s later career and death
The renewed onset of the illness
can probably be dated to some time shortly before 14 June, on which day Pelsaert made his
will. Drake-Brockman, pp. 52–60, 259–61; Roeper, op. cit., pp. 39–41; D. H.
A. Kolff and H. W. van Santen (eds.),
De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal
Indiï, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), p.
41.

Pelsaert’s affair with Pieterge
Mooij, p. 330; Kolff and van Santen,
op. cit., p. 33.

Jambi
Today the town is called Telanaipura. It lies on the northern side
of the island, more than 50 miles up the River Hari. The Dutch expeditionary force, which
Pelsaert joined, was so substantial that the Portuguese fled when it appeared, and the
siege was lifted without the necessity of firing a shot.

“. . . wholly ill . . .”
Pelsaert to the Gentlemen XVII of
Amsterdam, 12 December 1629, ARA VOC 1630 [DB 258–60]. This is apparently the only
letter known to have been written by Pelsaert still extant. It was the
commandeur
’s
covering note to the journals containing his account of the disaster.

Council of the Indies
Neither Specx nor Pelsaert seems to have been aware
that Pelsaert himself had been nominated to the Council as a “councillor
extraordinary,” or supernumerary, at a salary of 200 guilders per month. The letter
noting this appointment was written in the Netherlands at the end of August 1629, when the
commandeur
was still searching for the Abrolhos in the
Sardam,
and would not
have arrived until some time in the spring of 1630. By then Pelsaert had been posted to
Sumatra, and there is no record that he ever took up the seat or even learned that he had
received the honor. Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 36–7. Pelsaert’s new salary is
mentioned in a letter from the Gentlemen XVII to Jan Coen, governor-general of the Indies,
cited in ibid.

The fate of the cameo
A. N. Zadoks-Josephus Jitta, “De lotgevallen
van den grooten camee in het Koninklijk Penningkabinet,”
Oud-Holland
66
(1951): 191, 200–4; Roeper, op. cit., pp. 40–1; Kolff and Van Santen, op. cit.,
p. 42.

Pelsaert’s private trade
Roeper, op. cit., pp. 41, 59;
Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 56–9.

Pelsaert’s mother
Roeper, op. cit., pp. 41, 59; Kolff and Van Santen,
op. cit., p. 42. Roeper points out that the payment of any compensation at all implies
that the Company could not entirely substantiate its allegations of private trading, as it
would certainly have confiscated the entire amount had the case been thoroughly
clear-cut.

Wiebbe Hayes and the Defenders’ rewards
Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp.
270–1; Roeper, op. cit., pp. 38, 59.

Records of Winschoten
As noted above, only the town’s judicial
records (in the Provincial Archive at Groningen) survive from this period, and no
signature of a Wiebbe Hayes can be found in them—not even among the marriage
contracts. There are no notarial records from Winschoten, either.

Hayes’s fate
Mortality rates for soldiers in the Indies ran to
25–33 percent over the course of a commission. C. R. Boxer, “The Dutch
East-Indiamen: Their Sailors, Their Navigators and Life on Board, 1602–1795,”
The
Mariner’s Mirror
49 (1963): 85.

The fate of Gijsbert Bastiaensz
LGB; Mooij, op. cit., pp. 328, 331–2,
339–42, 344–5, 347, 359, 366–8, 380–1, 446, 456; Drake-Brockman, op.
cit., pp. 79–80.

The fate of Judick Gijsbertsdr
The 600-guilder payment comprised 300
guilders to which she was entitled as the widow of a Company
predikant,
and the
unusual
ex gratia
sum of 300 more, paid in recognition of her tribulations in the
Abrolhos. Will of Judick Gijsbertsdr, ONAD 58, fol. 817v–819; CAL van Troostenburg de
Bruijn,
Biographisch Woordenboek van Oost-Indische Predikanten
(Nijmegen: np,
1893), pp. 176–7; Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 80–1.

“. . . like roasted pears . . .”
L. Blussé, “The Caryatids
of Batavia: Reproduction, Religion and Acculturation under the VOC,”
Itinerario
7 (1983): 64, citing the eighteenth-century Dutch historian Valentijn.

The later life of Creesje Jans
Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 63–71. A
search of the surviving records of Leyden seems to confirm that Drake-Brockman was wrong
in assuming Creesje and her husband went to live in the city. No burial records can be
found for the couple and they have left no trace in Leyden’s church or
solicitors’ records, with the exception of the two occasions on which they stood as
godparents. Furthermore, Cuick’s name does not appear in the Leyden
Poorterbooks,
which scrupulously list every full citizen of the town. Finally, it defies belief that a
couple with some money—and we know that Creesje was reasonably well-off—could
have lived for more than 15 years in a city without once requiring the services of a
solicitor. Had they dwelled in Leyden, in short, they would surely have left more record
of their presence.

Creesje’s husband
Cuick was a widower, having been the husband of
Catharina Bernardi of Groningen. Drake-Brockman notes, from the records of
Amsterdam’s Orphans’ Court, that Creesje may have taken a third husband between
the other two—a certain Johannes Hilkes, of whom nothing else is known. No other
records exist to prove the case either way, but the church records of Batavia record that
when Creesje married Cuick, she did so as the widow of Boudewijn van der Mijlen and not of
Johannes Hilkes. The Orphans’ Court papers may therefore be in error. If Hilkes did
marry Lucretia Jans, he must have done so almost immediately after she arrived in Batavia,
and died perhaps as rapidly as Judick’s Pieter van der Heuven. Even if that was the
case, Lucretia could not have completed the appropriate period of mourning either for
Boudewijn or Johannes before marrying Jacob van Cuick. Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 64n,
71.

Creesje Jans as godmother
On the first occasion, 4 September 1637, Creesje
alone stood as godparent to twins named Willem and Dirck; on the second, 3 December 1641,
she and her husband both became godparents to another pair—this one a boy and a
girl—who were christened Willem and Neeltje; presumably the first Willem must have
died in the interim. Some years earlier, in Batavia, Jans had also stood as godmother to
two other infants baptized in the Dutch Church there. Ibid. pp. 70n–71n.

It also seems worth noting that the first husband of Creesje’s sister, Sara,
was called Jacob Kuyk (ibid. p. 67). The tangled interfamily relationship between the
Janses, the Cuicks, and the Dircxes may thus have been even more complicated than it first
appears.

Lucreseija van Kuijck
GAA, burial registers 1069, fol. 38.

The further interrogation of Ariaen Jacobsz
Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp.
46, 62–3. As has already been noted, a good deal of paperwork concerning
Jacobsz’s case went missing somewhere between Batavia and the VOC record office. In
its absence, it is impossible to say for certain how good or bad the evidence against the
skipper was.

“The skipper was very much suspected . . .”
Specx to the
Gentlemen XVII, 15 Dec 1629, ARA VOC 1009 in Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 63.

“Jacobsz . . . is still imprisoned . . .”
Van Diemen to the
Gentlemen XVII, 5 June 1631, in ibid., p. 58.

The fate of Belijtgen Jacobsdr
ONAH 132, fol. 157v; GAH, rood 215,
burgomasters’ decisions 1628–32, fol. 94v; for the significance of the
burgomasters’ memorials, see Gabrielle Dorren, “Burgers en hun besognes.
Burgemeestersmemorialen en hun Bruikbaarheid als bron voor Zeventiende-Eeuws
Haarlem,”
Jaarboeck Haarlem
(1995): 53–5; for the social status of the
Cornelissteeg, see Dorren,
Het Soet Vergaren: Haarlems Buurtleven in de Zeventiende
Eeuw
(Haarlem: Arcadia, 1998), p. 17; for the date of the arrival of the news of the
Batavia
mutiny in the Republic, see Roeper, op. cit., pp. 42, 47, 61.

Decomposition of the bodies and the blooming of Batavia’s Graveyard
Archaeological
excavation has revealed that many of the
Batavia
corpses lie partially buried in a
dense black mass. Analysis of this substance has shown it is composed almost entirely of
decayed plant roots, with a 1 percent trace of human fat. The explanation appears to be
that plants were tapping into the nutrients offered by the decomposing bodies; food of any
sort was so scarce on the island that competition for such resources must have been
fierce. Author’s interview with Juliïtte Pasveer and Marit van Huystee, Western
Australian Maritime Museum, 12 June 2000.

Epilogue: On the Shores of the Great South-Land

It is impossible to say with any certainty what became of the Dutch
survivors thrown up on the Western Australian coast. The most important sources, which are
archaeological, are well summarized by Phillip Playford, the rediscoverer of the
Zuytdorp
wreck, in his
Carpet of Silver: the Wreck of the Zuytdorp
(Nedlands, WA: University
of Western Australia Press, 1996), which is probably the most interesting and
best-researched contribution to the subject yet published. The case for survival is put by
Rupert Gerritsen in
And Their Ghosts May Be Heard . . .
(South Fremantle, WA:
Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994), though many of his most important points have
subsequently been rebutted. For the archaeology of the
Batavia
victims’
skeletons, I turned mainly to Myra Stanbury (ed.),
Abrolhos Islands Archaeological
Sites: Interim Report
(Fremantle: Australian National Centre of Excellence for
Maritime Archaeology, 2000), Juliïtte Pasveer, Alanah Buck, and Marit van Huystee,
“Victims of the
Batavia
Mutiny: Physical Anthropological and Forensic Studies
of the Beacon Island Skeletons,”
Bulletin of the Australian Institute for Maritime
Archaeology
22 (1998), and Bernandine Hunneybun,
Skullduggery on Beacon Island
(BSc Hons dissertation, University of Western Australia, 1995).

The fate of the two mutineers
“Instructions to Wouter Loos and Jan
Pelgrom de By van Bemel,” JFP 16 Nov 1629 [DB 229–30]; J. A. Heeres,
The Part
Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765
(London: Luzac, 1899),
pp. 64–7; Henrietta Drake-Brockman,
Voyage to Disaster
(Nedlands, WA:
University of Western Australia Press, 1995), pp. 81–3; Gerrilsen, pp. 64–8,
224–32; Playford, pp. 237–42.

The champan
As Drake-Brockman points out (op. cit., pp. 123n, 229n),
Pelsaert’s nowhere else uses the word
champan
in his journals. Normal
ship’s boats are referred to throughout as
boot
—a longboat or
yawl—or
schuijt
—a small jolly-boat or dinghy. It defies belief that the
commandeur
would have supplied the two mutineers with a VOC boat, which he would certainly have had
to account for on his return to Batavia, particularly as it would have meant leaving
himself and the people on the
Sardam
without a single boat of their own.

Wittecarra spring
The spring could be seen in its original state as late
as 1967, but by 1996 it had dried up due to the extraction of groundwater from a nearby
bore. Phillip Playford,
Voyage of Discovery to Terra Australis by Willem de Vlamingh in
1696–97
(Perth: Western Australian Museum, 1998), p. 47.

“. . . the first western vessel . . .”
The identity of the first
Westerners to discover the fifth continent remains a matter of dispute. George
Collingridge, author of
The Discovery of Australia: a Critical, Documentary and
Historical Investigation Concerning the Priority of Discovery in Australasia Before the
Arrival of Lieut. James Cook in the Endeavour in the Year 1770
(Sydney: Hayes
Brothers, 1895), and Kenneth McIntyre, in
The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese
Ventures 200 Years Before Captain Cook
(Medindie, South Australia: Souvenir Press,
1977), have both argued for the primacy of the Portuguese, and a date somewhere in the
sixteenth century. This is not unlikely, although some of the specific evidence these
authors advance—early maps, and, in particular, the discovery of
“Portuguese” cannon off the northwest coast—has since been called into
question. There is, in addition, a tradition on the southern Australian coast of a
so-called mahogany ship, popularly supposed to be of Spanish origin, aground on a beach
near Warrnambool, Victoria, and discovered sometime between 1836 and 1841. This vessel, if
it ever existed, is supposed to have vanished subsequently beneath the sands and has never
been rediscovered. See “Notes on Proceedings of the First Australian Symposium on the
Mahogany Ship: Relic or Legend?,”
Regional Journal of Social Issues,
monograph
series, no.1 (copy in the library of the Western Australian Maritime Museum). A balanced,
popular view of the controversy is provided by Miriam Estensen,
Discovery: the Quest
for the Great South Land
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), pp. 47–50,
52–81. The latter book also mentions the alleged salvage of a “Spanish
helmet” dating to ca. 1580 from Wellington harbor, New Zealand, around 1904 (p.
97).

The
Duyfken
, the
Arnem
, and the
Pera
on the northern
coast
James Henderson,
Sent Forth a Dove: Discovery of the
Duyfken (Nedlands,
WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1999), pp. 32–42, 212n; Heeres, op. cit.,
pp. 4–6, 22–5; Günter Schilder,
Australia Unveiled: The Share of Dutch
Navigators in the Discovery of Australia
(Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1976),
pp. 43–53, 80–98; J. P. Sigmond and L. H. Zuiderbaan,
Dutch Discoveries of
Australia: Shipwrecks, Treasures and Early Voyages off the West Coast
(Adelaide:
Rigby, 1979), pp. 20–1, 47–9. Records of the
Duyfken
’s voyage are,
however, so incomplete that it is uncertain whether her men were killed on the shores of
Australia or New Guinea, though most authorities argue that at least one was lost on a
riverbank somewhere on the Cape York Peninsula.