3
“Now and then persons of strange opinion come here.”
JACQUES SPECX
A GREAT FLEET WAS ASSEMBLING NEAR THE ISLAND OF TEXEL. Nearly a dozen huge East Indiamen lay at anchor in the Moscovian Roads while the sea around them swarmed with small boats full of sailors and barges packed with ballast for the holds. The Batavia was there, with several other large retourschepen moored close by—the Dordrecht, ’s Gravenhage,*13 Nieuw Hoorn, and Hollandia. A group of smaller vessels, fluyten and jachten, had anchored close inshore. The whole fleet was alive with preparations for the long voyage east.
It was now late October 1628. Autumn was the busiest time of year for the VOC; weather conditions in the Atlantic favored a fast passage to the Indies for ships that left the Netherlands before Christmas, recruitment became easier as Holland’s summer sailors became desperate for work, and ships reached the Indies at the perfect time to load fresh crops of spices. Before they could depart, however, each vessel had to take on board not only a cargo and a crew, but all the supplies required to sustain her for up to a year at sea. Into her 160-foot length the Batavia now had to pack 340 people with all their personal possessions, many tons of equipment, and materiel for the garrisons of the East.
Up from the barges came several thousand barrels of supplies, then sailors’ sea chests by the hundred. Wood for the galley stove and ammunition for the guns were stowed below, and the deck was festooned with coils of rope and cable. Over the sides swarmed a multitude of ill-dressed sailors, whom Jan Evertsz and his men drove to work with curses and knotted lengths of rope. Next came the soldiers—a handful of young company cadets and noncommissioned officers leading a hundred undernourished men off to five years of garrison duty in the Indies—and finally, when the work of loading had been done, Jeronimus Cornelisz and the merchants of the VOC.
In all probability, the Frisian apothecary had never before stepped aboard a ship the size of the Batavia. Like most landsmen, his initial impressions of an East Indiaman were most likely wonder at her great size and alarm at the apparent frenzy up on deck. There are accounts, written by awestruck German soldiers, that testify to the remarkable impression a fully rigged retourschip made on those who came alongside her for the first time; “true castles,” they were sometimes called, which seemed enormous when approached from sea level in a boat. Looking up as they came alongside, many merchants felt quite dwarfed by the sheer wooden walls that towered out of the water all around them and by the massive masts and yards soaring almost 200 feet into the air above their heads.
The chaos up on deck must have been even more disconcerting—the planking strewn with a disordered mass of gear, and ragged sailors rushing to and fro in response to orders the landsmen did not even understand. The constant motion of the anchored ship—which rolled incessantly in the choppy autumn sea—was very far from pleasant, but, dimly through their discomfort, Cornelisz and his colleagues would have been aware they were now committed to the voyage, and to whatever consequences might flow from it.
In the midst of all this bustle and confusion, the chief comfort to the novice tradesmen would undoubtedly have been the thought that they would not be expected to share quarters with the rabble milling around them. The most luxurious berths in the Batavia’s stern were always given over to the merchants of the VOC, and the area abaft the mainmast would become the exclusive preserve of the ship’s officers, the merchants, and their servants. This arrangement at least ensured them some privacy and reduced the prospect of discomfort, since the ship pitched and yawed less violently by the stern. In the course of a nine-month voyage, such incidental mercies came to mean a lot.
The best quarters of all went to the most senior men aboard. Francisco Pelsaert and Ariaen Jacobsz shared the privilege of using what was known as the Great Cabin on the level of the upper deck. It was by far the largest room on the ship and easily the best lit, as it alone was fitted with lattice windows rather than portholes. Its centerpiece was a long table capable of seating 15 or 20 people, and it was here that Pelsaert and his clerks transacted their daily business while at sea and the senior officers and merchants ate their meals. The rest of the officers’ quarters were located elsewhere in the stern. Jeronimus and half a dozen other distinguished passengers were shown to a warren of little cabins on the deck above, where the quarters were smaller and more spartan; the more junior officers and the Company clerks shared a large communal cabin just below the steersman’s station. When it came to accommodation, the VOC had spared considerable expense. The private quarters were quite unheated, only marginally better ventilated than the rest of the ship, and less than the span of a woman’s arms in breadth—but at least they offered the luxury of bunks instead of sleeping mats, sufficient room to put a writing desk and chair, and cabin boys to fetch and carry meals and empty chamber pots.
The allocation of these cabins was determined by rank and precedence. The best would have gone to Jeronimus, the under-merchant, who was after Pelsaert the most senior representative of Jan Company on board. Ariaen Jacobsz’s second-in-command, the upper-steersman Claes Gerritsz, would have had another, and in normal circumstances the Batavia’s two under-steersmen (whose rank was roughly equivalent to a modern-day lieutenant’s), the provost (who was responsible for discipline on board), and the most senior of the VOC assistants might also have expected cabins of their own.
On this voyage, however, the Batavia was carrying two high-ranking passengers whose presence upset the normal rules of precedence. One was a Calvinist predikant, or minister, named Gijsbert Bastiaensz, a citizen of the ancient town of Dordrecht who was sailing to the Indies with his wife, a maid, and seven children. The other was Lucretia Jansdochter, an unusually beautiful and highborn woman who came from Amsterdam and was traveling to join her husband in the East. Both would have been allocated cabins near Jeronimus’s. In the close confines of the stern, the three of them could hardly help but become acquainted.
It is not difficult to guess whose company Cornelisz would have most enjoyed. Creesje (she was generally known by her diminutive) was not only youthful and attractive; she came from a family of merchants and thus commanded a social status equal to Jeronimus’s own. Gijsbert Bastiaensz, on the other hand, was in many ways Cornelisz’s opposite. He came from the most southern part of the province of Holland; he was 52 years old; and he was a strict, straightforward Calvinist with very little formal education. His scant surviving writings betray no hint of wit or intellectual curiosity; there was no room in his theology for the exotic speculations that the under-merchant entertained, and had Jeronimus dared to explain his true beliefs, the predikant would certainly have been scandalized by them. As it was, Cornelisz kept his own counsel on the subject and wisely chose to charm the preacher rather than confront him.
Gijsbert Bastiaensz was later to confess that he had entirely failed to recognize the undertows that lurked beneath Jeronimus’s superficial decency. This failure was hardly surprising. The predikant was an honest and straightforward sort, of little intuition and less experience, whose horizons had until quite recently been limited to his calling and his church. Dordrecht was noted for its uncomplicated orthodoxy. A minister from such a town would hardly have encountered a creature quite like Cornelisz before.
Bastiaensz, it seems, was a typical example of the Indies predikant. Because the Reformed Church was quite devoid of missionary zeal—the doctrine of predestination implied there was little point in converting heathens—it was never easy to persuade ministers to serve in the east. The few who went were seldom members of the Calvinist elite. They were, rather, “hedge-preachers”: artisans whose religious views were frequently naive, and who, while preaching economy and restraint, were often in financial difficulties themselves.
The predikant of the Batavia was all these things and more. Gijsbert Bastiaensz was a member of the working classes of the Dutch Republic, who made a living with his hands and attended to church business when he could. He had little formal education. But—like Jeronimus Cornelisz—he was a man on the verge of ruin, forced by the threat of bankruptcy to seek redemption in the east.
The minister’s early life had been comfortable enough. His father, Bastiaen Gijsbrechtsz, had been a miller, and Gijsbert followed him into what appears to have been a well-established family business. In February 1604 he was married to Maria Schepens, the daughter of a Dordrecht wine merchant, and—as was common at the time—the couple produced a large family. There were eight children in all, four boys and four girls, and no fewer than seven survived infancy. The fact that so many of the children lived, and that their father was able to provide for them, suggests that—for the first two decades of the century at least—Bastiaensz controlled a profitable mill.
By the time that he was 30, the miller had become an elder of the Reformed Church of Dordrecht. Between 1607 and 1629, Gijsbert Bastiaensz served no fewer than five two-year terms on the town’s church council, a proud record that suggests he was among the best-respected (and most strictly orthodox) churchmen in the town. Further proof of this contention can be found in the voluminous legal records of Dordrecht, where the predikant appears as an arbitrator, an executor, and a witness who stood surety in a number of legal cases. All of these were solemn duties assumed only by those whom the public trusted—men of unimpeachable integrity.
For all that, the mill that the predikant owned and ran for a quarter of a century was not a very grand one. He relied for his living on a rosmolen (a horse-powered mill) rather than one of the newer and more efficient windmills then becoming widespread in the Netherlands. During the severe depression of the 1620s, the owners of rosmolens often struggled to make a living, while millers who ground corn more quickly and more cheaply using windmills prospered. Gijsbert Bastiaensz was one of many who could not compete. Between 1618—when he appears in the town records as a landowner with his own mill and 12 rented acres of grazing for his horses—and 1628, the predikant’s financial position disintegrated. At around the time that Jeronimus was transferring all his worldly goods to the merchant Vogel, Bastiaensz was signing his home and mill over to his own creditors.
His good name and his faith were of no help now, and there were no church livings to be had in Dordrecht. With eight mouths to feed, the predikant applied to be a preacher in the Indies. He was in Amsterdam by the second week of September, became an employee of the VOC at the beginning of the following month, and found himself on board Batavia a few weeks later. His wife and children, who had lived in Dordrecht all their lives, had been uprooted with him. The eldest boy was 22 years old and the youngest only 7; too young, no doubt, to understand how little chance there was the whole family would return alive.
In another cabin in the stern, Creesje Jans sat amid the handful of personal possessions she had been permitted to bring on board. She was 27 years old and had been married to a VOC under-merchant named Boudewijn van der Mijlen for nearly a decade, but her decision to join him in the Indies requires some explanation. Van der Mijlen had sailed for the East without her, apparently in 1625 or 1626, and it was most unusual for an under-merchant’s wife to follow later and alone. In Lucretia Jans’s case, however, the archives of her native Amsterdam provide a ready explanation for her presence on board the Batavia. Creesje was an orphan whose three infant children had all died, one by one. By 1628 she had no reason to stay in the United Provinces. Boudewijn, wherever he might be, was all that she had left.
Creesje had never known her father, a cloth merchant who died before she was born. When she was two years old, her mother Steffanie had remarried and her stepfather, a naval captain named Dirk Krijnen, had moved the family first to the Leliestraat, in a fashionable and wealthy quarter of Amsterdam, and eventually to the Herenstraat—then, as now, one of the more expensive and prestigious addresses in the city. Creesje’s mother died in 1613, when her daughter was only 11 years old, and the girl became a ward of the Orphan’s Court, while continuing, it seems, to live with her stepfather; sister, Sara; and a stepsister, Weijntgen Dircx. Within a few years, however, Krijnen too was dead, a loss that may have helped to propel Lucretia into her early union with Boudewijn van der Mijlen.
The bride was 18 on her wedding day. According to the marriage register, Creesje’s husband was a diamond polisher who lived in Amsterdam but came from the town of Woerden. The couple’s three children—a boy named Hans and two girls, Lijsbet and Stefani—were born between 1622 and 1625, but none lived to reach the age of six. Such misfortune was exceptional, for even in the seventeenth century child mortality generally ran at no more than one infant in every two, and it is possible that the children may have succumbed to some epidemic. There is, however, no evidence of this; nor is much known of Boudewijn’s business affairs. All that can be said is that he, too, most likely suffered badly in the recession of the 1620s. Certainly no successful diamond merchant would voluntarily join the VOC only to be sent, as Van der Mijlen was, to Arakan—a stinking, disease-ridden river port in Burma—to deal in slaves for the greater glory of Jan Company.
Boudewijn had received orders to sail for Arakan in the autumn of 1627, when he was living in Batavia, and it took so long—up to a year—for letters to travel from there to the Netherlands that Creesje was surely unaware her husband would not be in Java when she arrived. It seems equally improbable that her voyage was planned 12 months or more in advance, and that he knew she would be leaving the Republic. Most likely the last of Creesje’s children died some time in 1628 and she, weighed down with grief, made the more or less impulsive decision to rejoin her husband, sending perhaps a letter in advance and settling her remaining affairs in time to secure a berth on the Batavia. She took with her no more than a few belongings and a lady’s maid. Like Cornelisz and Bastiaensz, Creesje Jans had little reason to look back.
So much for the passengers in the stern. Like all East Indiamen, the Batavia was a segregated ship, in which the accommodation got more spartan as one moved toward the bow. Those of middling rank, particularly the “idlers” (specialists such as the surgeons, sailmakers, carpenters, and cooks who were not expected to stand watch and work by night) lived down on the gun deck, though they too had the privilege of relatively spacious berths in the forecastle or the stern. The sailors and soldiers who made up more than two-thirds of the crew, on the other hand, were crammed into the space “before the mast,” and it was a serious offense for any of them to appear aft unless their duties called them there.
This strict segregation served several purposes. It reinforced status and emphasized the divisions that existed on board between soldiers and sailors, officers and men. But it was also a practical measure. Seamen and troops were placed on separate decks because long experience had shown that they did not get along and would fight if they were billeted together. Ordinary seamen were to stay before the mast to minimize the ever-present threat of mutiny, and the entrance to the officers’ quarters in the stern was fortified for the same reason.
The soldiers came off worst from these arrangements. Their quarters were two decks down on the orlop—what the Dutch called the “cow-deck”—where the roof beams were so low it was impossible to stand upright, and which was so close to the waterline that it was equipped with neither vents nor portholes to provide a minimum of air and light. The orlop was actually part of the hold, and on return journeys it became a spice store. Uncomfortable though it was, it was not unknown for the troops to remain confined to this dark and airless deck for all but two 30-minute periods each day, when they were brought up under escort to taste fresh air and use the latrines.
The soldiers of the VOC were a particularly motley collection, misfits gathered more or less indiscriminately from all over northern Germany, the United Provinces, and France. A number came from Scotland, and there was even one Englishman—whose name appears as “Jan Pinten” in the records of the voyage—among the soldiers on the Batavia. The troops were largely untrained, and at a time when local dialects and thick provincial accents were the norm, many found it difficult to understand each other, let alone the orders of their officers.
There is little evidence of any solidarity among soldiers of the VOC; thievery and casual violence were rife, and the only bonds that seem to have formed were friendships of convenience between men who hailed from the same town or district. Friends would keep an eye on each other’s possessions, share food and water, and nurse each other if they fell sick. It was important to find a companion like this. Those who had no friend to turn to when they succumbed to illness might be left to die; retourschepen were fitted with sick bays in the bows, but officers and seamen received priority for treatment. A typical Dutch sailor, it was observed, “shows more concern for the loss of a chicken in the coop than for the death of a whole regiment of soldiers.”
On the Batavia the majority of the troops were German. A number came from the North Sea ports of Bremen, Emden, and Hamburg, where the VOC maintained recruiting centers to gather up the dregs of the waterfront. Though some were decent men—it was not unknown for the younger sons of honorable but impoverished families to seek their fortunes in the Company’s army—they were, on the whole, a potentially dangerous group of malcontents.
The soldiers were led by a Dutch corporal, Gabriel Jacobszoon, who had come on board with his wife. Jacobszoon was assisted by a lansepesaat (lance corporal) from Amsterdam called Jacop Pietersz, whose nicknames—he was variously known as steenhouwer, “stone-cutter,” and cosijn,which means “window-frame”—suggest a man with the considerable strength and bulk required to control the brutal men under his command. The Stone-Cutter and the corporal were in turn responsible to the young VOC cadets who were the only military officers on board, and who did not themselves share the discomforts of the orlop deck.
These youths were frequently junior members of old noble families whose lands, in the time-honored tradition, were passed down from a father to his eldest son, leaving any other male children to make their own way in life. The crew of the Batavia included a dozen such cadets, at least four of whom—Coenraat van Huyssen, Lenert van Os, and the brothers Olivier and Gsbert van Welderen—appear to have had pretensions to nobility.
Van Huyssen is the only cadet of whom it is possible to say much. The predikant noticed him as a “handsome young nobleman” who came from the province of Gelderland, and it would appear that he was a junior member of the Van Huyssen family that owned the manor of Den Werd, a fief near the German border in the county of Bergh. Over the years the Van Huyssens produced several members of the knighthood of the province, but their estate at Den Werd was small and not particularly productive. If Coenraat were indeed a scion of this family, it would not be surprising to find him seeking a living in the East. Perhaps he joined the Company’s army with some friends; the Van Welderen brothers came from the provincial capital of Gelderland, Nijmegen, and it is not impossible that the three young nobles knew each other.
If the Batavia’s soldiers endured appalling hardships, conditions were only marginally better for the seamen on the gun deck. Their quarters stretched forward from the galley to the bows. Here there was headroom, and gunports offered light, but 180 unwashed men still lived together, crammed into less than 70 feet of deck that they shared with their sea chests, a dozen heavy guns, several miles of cable, and other assorted pieces of equipment. The gun deck was wretchedly cold in winter and unbearably hot and stuffy in the tropics. Hammocks, which had been introduced in the previous century, were still not widespread, and many sailors used sleeping pads instead, squeezed into whatever spaces they could find on deck. Worst of all, the gun deck was almost always wet, rendering even off-duty hours wretched for the many men who worked in heavy weather without an adequate change of clothes.
The very sight of an ordinary seaman was alarming to the genteel merchants in the stern, and it is not surprising that they were kept as far away from the passengers as possible. Dutch sailors in general stood apart by virtue of their shipboard dress—loose shirts and trousers offered the necessary freedom of movement in an era of stockings and tight hose—and they had a reputation for being unusually rough and raw, even by the standards of the time. But those desperate or destitute enough to risk their lives on a voyage to the East had a particularly poor reputation, and ordinary merchant skippers and even the Dutch navy would not recruit men who had served the VOC.
“For sailors on board Indiamen,” one passenger observed, “cursing, swearing, whoring, debauchery and murder are mere trifles; there is always something brewing among these fellows, and if the officers did not crack down on them so quickly with punishments, their own lives would certainly not be safe for a moment among that unruly rabble.” A retourschip sailor, wrote another, “must be ruled with a rod of iron, like an untamed beast, otherwise he is capable of wantonly beating up anybody.”
Nevertheless, the seamen of the VOC did form a more or less cohesive group, united by the bonds of language and experience. Most were Dutch, unlike the soldiers, and all shared the unique dialect of the sea. The jobs they were expected to perform, from weighing anchor to making sail, required cooperation and encouraged mutual trust, and they were in general more disciplined and less disruptive than the troops.
The bulk of the mainmast, which ran right through the ship, marked the limit of the sailors’ quarters. Here, halfway along the gun deck, there were two small rooms—one the surgeon’s cabin and the other a galley lined with bricks and full of copper cauldrons. The galley was the only place on a wooden ship where an open fire was permitted, and in this tiny space the Batavia’s gang of cooks were required to prepare more than 1,000 meals a day. Then came a capstan and the pumps, and farther back again the quartermaster and the constable occupied two little cabins between the bread store and the armory. Their quarters were directly below Pelsaert’s Great Cabin, but for all those who lived down on the gun deck, the wooden beams that separated them from the more privileged inhabitants of the stern were much more than a purely physical barrier. They protected the merchants from the artisans and kept the officers safe from the men. On most East Indiamen, this was a necessary precaution. On the Batavia, it was to prove no protection at all.
The Gentlemen XVII had originally decreed that fleet president Specx would assume overall command of the winter fleet, a substantial convoy of 18 vessels. Francisco Pelsaert, in the Batavia, was to have sailed with them, his responsibilities extending no further than the ship under his command. Toward the end of the month, however, Specx was unexpectedly recalled to Amsterdam on business, and in view of the deteriorating weather the VOC took the unusual decision to split the fleet in two. Eleven ships would wait and sail with the president when he was ready. The other seven were to depart immediately under the command of the most experienced upper-merchant available.
Thus it was that Pelsaert found himself appointed commandeur of a whole flotilla of merchantmen: three retourschepen—the Dordrecht and ’s Gravenhage as well as the Batavia—and three other vessels, the Assendelft, the Sardam, and the Kleine David. The final vessel in the squadron was the escort warship Buren. One ship, the Kleine David, was to sail to the Coromandel Coast of India to take on textiles, dyes, and pepper. The rest were bound for the Spice Islands—which, God willing, they might expect to reach in the summer of 1629.
Jeronimus Cornelisz and Creesje Jans probably had only the sketchiest ideas of the dangers they would face during such a voyage, but experienced merchants knew better than to underestimate the difficulties of the eastward passage. The distance from Texel to the Indies was almost 15,000 miles—more than halfway around the world. The voyage was the longest that any normal seventeenth-century ship would ever undertake, and conditions along much of the route were harsh. Most ships took eight months to reach Java, traveling at an average speed of two and a half miles per hour, and though one or two of the most fortunate reached their destination after only 130 days at sea, it was not unknown for East Indiamen to be blown off course and left becalmed for weeks or sometimes months at a time. The Westfriesland left the Netherlands in the early autumn of 1652 and eventually limped home two years later, having endured a succession of disasters and sailed no farther than the coast of Brazil. The Zuytdorp, which sailed in 1712, found herself becalmed off the coast of Africa and made the fatal decision to sail into the Gulf of Guinea in search of fresh water. Lack of wind trapped her there for five more months, and four-tenths of her crew died of fever and disease. The ship finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope nearly a year after leaving the United Provinces.
The Gentlemen XVII were roused to fury by the thought of such delays and even resented the need for all retourschepen to put into land at least once to rest and take on fresh supplies of food and water. In the early years of the VOC, ships had visited Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands, and sometimes St. Helena as well, but these calls could add several weeks to the voyage. By the 1620s most fleets outward bound called only at the Cape, about 150 days’ sailing from the Dutch Republic. Most ships tarried there for about three weeks, long enough to nurse the sick, and restock, and the Cape became so useful that the VOC built a fort there in the middle of the century and settled colonists to provide fresh food for its ships. It was popular with the sailors, too, who took to calling it “The Tavern of the Ocean” for the bounties that it promised them. To the directors of the VOC, however, the Cape was at best an unfortunate necessity, which slowed down the all-important flow of profit. They offered bonuses to merchants, skippers, and steersmen whose vessels made fast passages—600 guilders for a voyage of only six months, 300 guilders for one of seven, and 150 for those who arrived in the Indies less than nine months after setting sail. Such measures seem to have had little effect. Some ships did make extraordinarily short passages; in 1621 the Gouden Leeuw*14 completed the voyage from the Netherlands to the Indies in 127 days, and in 1639 the Amsterdamestablished a new record of just 119. But such speedy voyages were rare. The masters of most ships evidently preferred the comforts of the Cape to the lure of guilders in their pockets.
Francisco Pelsaert had never had to consider such necessities before. The additional responsibility that he now assumed was all the more daunting for being so unexpected. Still, even the most experienced fleet commanders had relatively little control over their ships; the vessels of a departing convoy could well spend weeks at anchor, waiting for good winds, and the order to sail—when it eventually came—could easily lead to chaos as unwieldy retourschepen maneuvered in the tight confines of their roadsteads. Minor collisions were common and, though the ships all lit their huge stern lanterns to keep track of each other in the dark, it was rare for a convoy to stay together all the way from the Channel to the Indies.
Pelsaert’s flotilla did not even leave the Zuyder Zee together. The Batavia was left behind when the other six ships in the convoy sailed on 28 October 1628, and the commandeur’s new flagship did not finally get under way until the following day. The most likely explanation is that there was trouble in loading the Batavia’s cargo of silver and trade goods, but, whatever the reason, the retourschip’s passengers and crew soon had cause to regret the short delay.
On the first day at sea, Batavia ran into an exceptionally violent storm while still off the Dutch coast. The crew was still green and untested, and before the ship could be got properly under control, she ran aground on the treacherous Walcheren sandbanks. Stuck fast and battered by the steep waves that built up quickly in the shallows, both passengers and crew had good reason to fear for their lives.
Storms were the greatest danger an East Indiaman could face, and stranding was one of the worst calamities that could befall her in a storm. Even in open seas, heavy waves could swamp a retourschip, or smash her sides, or make her roll until the masts dipped into the water and the sails filled with sea and carried the whole ship down. Aground, the waves could open up her seams, and if they were big enough to make the ballast shift, the weight of the guns, masts, and yards could tip her over, too.
The Walcheren Banks were a particularly deadly obstacle; though well within the home waters of the Dutch Republic, they claimed one ship in every five of the total lost by the VOC between Amsterdam and the Indies. The threat to the Batavia was considerable, and it took all Ariaen Jacobsz’s skill as a seaman to get her off the banks without serious damage. The skipper not only bullied and encouraged his men to shorten sail and check the stowing of the ballast, but kept the ship intact until the storm had blown itself out. Then he floated the Batavia off on the tide. Careful checks revealed the hull was not too badly damaged and by morning on 30 October the ship was able to continue on her way.
Jacobsz steered west, heading for the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic. At some point during the passage down the Channel, it appears, the Batavia came upon the battered survivors of the rest of Pelsaert’s convoy. They had been savaged by the same storm that had nearly sunk their flagship, and the smallest of the retourschepen, ’s Gravenhage, had been so badly damaged that she had been forced to run into the Dutch port of Middelburg for repairs that were to keep her there for about four months. The other six ships continued to steer west.
It was November now; the northern winter was drawing in, and the days were mostly short and cold and wet. For novice sailors such as Jeronimus Cornelisz, this was their first experience of the sea and it took time to get used to the constant motion of the ship, particularly in the stormy waters of the Bay. Surviving accounts written by voyagers to the East are full of the misery of these early days at sea, when seasickness was rife. Even the livestock on the main deck—carried to ensure a supply of fresh meat—suffered in this way. The pigs in particular were prone to bouts of mal-de-mer.
The shock of life at sea would have been considerable for Jeronimus and his companions. Within a week of sailing even basic cleanliness became a dreamed-of luxury for the passengers and crew of a retourschip. There was no fresh water to spare for washing, and although one of the largest ships of her day, the Batavia was equipped with no more than four latrines. One pair was located on either side of the Great Cabin and reserved for the use of the people in the stern. The rest of the crew had to line up to use the remaining pair in the bow, which were nothing more than holes in the deck under the bowsprit. These heads were open to the elements and in full view of all those waiting in line. The only additional amenity was a long, dung-smeared rope that snaked through the hole in the latrine. The frayed end of the rope dangled in the sea and could be hauled up and used to wipe oneself clean.
This miserable existence was compounded in bad weather. All the gunports and the hatches had to be closed and battened down, and little fresh air penetrated below deck. The men stank of stale sweat and garlic (a popular cure-all at the time); everything was permanently damp, and it became too dangerous to venture to the latrines. Soldiers and sailors relieved themselves in corners or crouched over the ladders down to the hold,*15 and if the weather was bad enough for the pumps to be called into action, the urine and feces that had been deposited below made an unwelcome reappearance. Rather than discharging into the sea, the Batavia’s pumps simply brought up filth and water from the bilges, “fuming like hell and reeking like the devil” as one contemporary put it, and sent it cascading down the gun deck to slosh around sleeping seamen until it found its own way out through open ports and sluices. When the weather finally improved, the men would scrub the decks with vinegar and burn frankincense and charcoal down below in an attempt to clear the air, but for much of the passage the lower decks of the Batavia smelled like a cesspit. Those fortunate enough to travel in the stern were spared the worst of this unpleasantness, but every account of the journey east makes it plain that, during the first weeks at sea, even the most distinguished passengers endured discomforts they could scarcely have dreamed of back at home.
At length Pelsaert’s convoy left the worst of the weather behind it and headed south. The winds became lighter as the ships entered the Horse Latitudes off the North African coast, and though there were occasional excitements—the first sight of dolphins, which often came to play around Dutch ships, and seaweed in the water, heralding the approach to the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands—for the most part the voyage quickly became tedious. When the winds dropped there was relatively little for even the sailors to do, and for the soldiers, merchants, and passengers on board, day followed day with scarcely a break in the general routine.
In these circumstances, food quickly became a subject of consuming importance for the inhabitants of the Batavia. The passage of time was marked by the hot meals served three times a day: at eight in the morning, noon, and 6 p.m. These could be grand occasions; Pelsaert and Jacobsz ate in the Great Cabin, usually with the ship’s senior officers and the most distinguished passengers as guests. Jeronimus Cornelisz and Lucretia Jans dined at the upper-merchant’s table, along with Gijsbert Bastiaensz and his wife. Claas Gerritsz the upper-steersman would have been there, too, along with his deputies, the watch-keepers Jacob Jansz Hollert and Gillis Fransz—whose nickname, somewhat unnervingly, was “Half-Awake.” Further down the table sat the provost, Pieter Jansz, and perhaps some of the junior merchants: young VOC assistants such as Pelsaert’s favorite clerk, Salomon Deschamps of Amsterdam, who had been with him in India. But even these privileged people could not take an invitation to the merchant’s table entirely for granted; there was another well-stocked table in the passenger accommodation at the stern to which they might occasionally be relegated and where the predikant’s children and the less-favored merchants and officers ate. Here and in the Great Cabin there were napkins and tablecloths, pewter plates and tin spoons, cabin boys to bring the food and the steward to serve wine. The sailors and soldiers, on the other hand, dined where they slept, sitting on their sea chests and eating from wooden dishes with wooden spoons. There were no servants before the mast. Instead the men were grouped into messes of seven or eight, and one man from each mess acted as orderly to his shipmates in weekly rotation, fetching food from the galley in pails and washing the dishes afterward. The cook and his mates ate last of all, standing watch while the rest of the crew had their meals.
The quality of the food varied considerably. Officers ate better than the men and all on board enduring a progressively more unsavory diet as the voyage progressed. Some effort was made to provide fresh food: as well as the live chickens, goats, and pigs carried in pens on the main deck, the topmost cabin in the stern—a low-roofed little hutch known as the bovenhut—served as a sort of greenhouse in which Jan Gerritsz, the ship’s gardener, grew vegetables. On calm days fish were sometimes caught, but the tradition of the service dictated that no matter who reeled them in, the first landed each day went to the skipper, the next dozen or so to the merchants and the officers, and so on down the established lines of precedence. It was uncommon for much fresh food to reach the ordinary sailors and soldiers.
The men lived almost entirely on cask meat, legumes, and ship’s biscuit, a sort of bone-dry bread often known as hard tack. Although it was possible, in the first half of the seventeenth century, to preserve some foods fairly well, the VOC was not renowned for the quality of its stores. On land, meat was cured by carefully rubbing it with salt (which drew out moisture), or hung for a while and then pickled by being repeatedly immersed in boiling brine or vinegar. Both processes killed bacteria and flavored the meat and could produce surprisingly palatable results when done well. But such methods were costly and time consuming, and Jan Company balked at the expense. For less money, its suppliers took freshly slaughtered pigs and cows and dunked whole sides of meat into seething cauldrons full of seawater without even draining off the blood, which seeped out later to sour the brine. Meat preserved in this way was cheap but extremely salty. It needed to be soaked in fresh water before being cooked, but at sea it was generally boiled in brine, to preserve the limited supplies of drinking water on board, and emerged from the pot snow white with encrusted salt. Served, as it was, in an equally salty broth, it could burn the lips and induce a raging thirst.
Retourschepen also carried preserved fish, which was dried, not salted. The Vikings had crucified the cod they caught in their longboats’ rigging; Netherlanders impaled theirs and called them stokvisch after the Dutch word for the stick on which they threaded up to 30 split and gutted cod for air drying. The drying process produced bone-hard slabs of white fish that had to be softened up for cooking by being soaked, or beaten with mallets. Like salt pork and beef, stockfish was generally served in a stew with dried peas or beans. But fish was relatively difficult to preserve, and—at least according to the later records of the Royal Navy—it tended to go bad more quickly than preserved meats and was probably among the first stores to be consumed. The chances are that stockfish featured heavily in the meals served on the Batavia at this early stage in the voyage.
Even salt meat was difficult to store in the sort of conditions that confronted the little fleet as it neared the coast of West Africa under a tropical sun. In the absence of any form of refrigeration, conditions down in the hold quickly became unbearable. Ventilating the nether reaches of the ship was practically impossible, and the lowest decks became so stifling that it was not unknown for seamen sent into the storerooms to suffocate. Casks burst open in the heat, scattering their contents and providing food for the multitude of vermin that scurried and swarmed down below. When it rained and water seeped down into the stores, dried food rotted or became moldy and infested, too.
Hard tack was the worst affected. This twice-baked bread contained no fats or moisture and would keep indefinitely in normal conditions, though it was so dry it cracked teeth and had to be dunked in stew to make it edible. Damp, it was easier to eat but became a perfect larder for the weevils that laid their eggs within and turned each piece into a honeycomb of tunnels and chambers full of larvae. Every sailor who made the passage to the Indies learned to tap his ration of bread against the sides of the ship before he ate it, to dislodge the insect life within. Any that remained were eaten anyway. Novice seamen learned to distinguish the flavors of the different species: weevils tasted bitter, cockroaches of sausage; maggots were unpleasantly spongy and cold to bite into.
On board ship, as on land, the officers and men not only ate differently but drank differently as well. Pelsaert and Cornelisz and the other senior officers were permitted to carry their own supplies of wine and spirits, in quantities proportionate to their rank; those who had reached the post of boatswain or above were also accorded double rations of the water and weak beer that was shipped for general use. The men were allowed spirits only to prevent disease, and their water and beer were prone to turn green with algae in the tropics. Water from the island of Texel was highly favored by the VOC because its mineral content helped to keep marine growth at bay, but by the time the Batavia reached Africa her drinking water was slimy and stinking. It had even become heavily infested with tiny worms, which the sailors sieved with their teeth, and the daily three-pint ration was brought up from the hold “about as hot as if it were boiling.”
Unfortunately for the people on board, the deterioration in the Batavia’s supplies of water and beer coincided with the onset of blazing weather, which caused both passengers and crew—many of them still dressed in the thick cloth suited to a northern winter—to sweat profusely and develop thirsts that were only heightened by the salty diet. Rationing was necessary to conserve the precious supply of beer and water, however undrinkable it became. Almost every sailor, no matter how poor, possessed a cup in which to receive his ration; serving the men beer or water in a common jug inevitably led to violent disputes over who had received more than his fair share of precious liquid.
For all this, the men of the Batavia ate and drank well by the standards of the day. Their food was laden with sufficient calories to keep them working, and at a time when it was usual for peasants and artisans to eat meat no more than three or four times a month, a retourschip’s crew enjoyed it three or four times a week. Nicolaes de Graaf, a surgeon who made five voyages to the Indies between the years 1639 and 1687, observed that “each mess gets every morning a full dish of hot groats, cooked with prunes and covered with butter or some other fat; at midday they get a dish of white peas and a dish of stockfish, with butter and mustard; save on Sundays and Thursdays when they get at midday a dish of grey peas and a dish of meat or bacon. Each man gets 4 lbs of bread (or usually biscuit) weekly, and a can of beer daily, as long as this lasts. They are also supplied with as much olive-oil, vinegar, butter, French and Spanish brandy, as they need to keep themselves reasonably healthy and fit.”
At the captain’s table, there was no rationing. Pelsaert and Jacobsz, Cornelisz, and Creesje ate meat or fish three times a day, and on special occasions 11- or 12-course feasts were served in the Great Cabin. It was a way to pass the time.
Boredom tested the patience of everyone on board during the long voyage south toward the Cape. In between meals, the passengers and crew passed the time with gossip and games. There was singing and sometimes the crew staged amateur theatricals. Gambling with dice was popular, though technically illegal, and draughts and tick-tack—a form of backgammon—were widely played. A few, chiefly among the officers, read for recreation, though most of the books available were the religious texts that the VOC, in a rare moment of piety, had determined to supply to all its ships. (Sir Francis Drake himself, on his voyage around the world, is known to have whiled away the hours by coloring in the pictures in his copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.) The handful of women on board knitted or wove lace; on some voyages, old records attest, they even took over in the galley on occasion, fed up with a diet of bread “which lay like a stone in their stomachs.” The sailors enjoyed rougher sports. Fistfights were tolerated as an amusing diversion, and when they could the men played the “execution game,” a contest involving forfeits that included being smeared with pitch and tar. This game was so dangerous that it could only be played with the express permission of the skipper.
Disputes flared rapidly amid the boredom and the heat. The fights that were not about the rations generally concerned the living space, or lack of it. With more than 330 people crammed into a ship only 160 feet long, privacy was almost impossible to come by. The men fought over space to lay their sleeping mats, and so disruptive was the problem of theft that stealing was punished almost as severely as murder. The temptation was great, however; most of the sailors and soldiers on board were almost destitute—they would hardly have been risking their lives in the Indies otherwise—and minor theft was a continual problem on every Dutch ship.
It was during this period of indolence and tedium that Jeronimus Cornelisz first revealed his heterodox views to the people of the Batavia. Talk in the Great Cabin in the stern turned quite frequently to matters of religion, and from time to time—far now from the grasp of the Reformed Church—the under-merchant enjoyed shocking the assembled company with his thoughts on some bit of doctrine. He was an unusually eloquent man and talked so persuasively that even his more inflammatory beliefs were somehow rendered almost palatable. Jacobsz and his officers, who seldom encountered educated men, found his smooth tongue almost hypnotic. The merchant was, in any case, careful not to stray too far into outright heresy. “He often showed his wrong-headedness by Godless proposals,” the predikant recalled, much later on, “but I did not know he was Godless to such an extent.”
In time, Cornelisz’s practiced charm seems to have made a great impression on the skipper, and somewhere off the coast of Africa the two men became friends. They had a number of interests in common, and the many hours the ship spent becalmed in the tropics provided them with ample opportunity to become better acquainted. It is safe to assume they touched on two subjects more than once: the fortunes to be made in the Spiceries, and the beauty of Lucretia Jans.
Creesje commanded the attention of many of the officers in the stern. With the exception of the provost’s wife, who seems to have been considerably older, she was the only woman of any rank on board the Batavia. That alone would have been enough to engage the interest of men denied much female company for several months on end, but her remarkable beauty, which is attested to in the records of the voyage, undoubtedly enhanced this allure. There can be no question Cornelisz had noticed it. By the time the Batavia neared the West African coast, it would seem that the skipper and the commandeur—who both greatly enjoyed the company of women—were well aware of Creesje, too.
By the last days of December the ship had reached the southern limit of the Horse Latitudes,*16 which lay at 25 degrees north. By then, it would appear, the ship was short of either food or, more likely, drinking water, since Pelsaert made the decision to put in at Sierra Leone. Doing so was a violation of the VOC’s sailing instructions which had, since 1616, designated the Cape of Good Hope as the sole permissible port of call on the voyage to Java. By putting in to port, Pelsaert made himself liable not only to a fine but to the condemnation of his employers. Moreover, even at this early date Sierra Leone—infested as it was with malaria and yellow fever—was so rotten with disease that it had earned a deserved reputation as a “white man’s grave.” To sail into port there was to take a risk, and although it was not unheard-of for VOC ships to visit the African coast, those that called there generally did so as a last resort.
The first Westerners to visit Sierra Leone had been the Portuguese, who made contact with the local tribes as early as the fifteenth century. The people who lived along the coast were members of the Temne clan, which controlled much of the commerce with the interior. They lived on fish, supplementing their diet with rice, yams, and millet, and they traded food for swords, household utensils, and other metal goods when they could. By 1628 the Portuguese had also begun to purchase slaves in Sierra Leone.
Pelsaert had no interest in slaves and was interested only in resupplying his ship, but, to general surprise, the Batavia did make one addition to her crew in the port. Rowing ashore to purchase supplies, Pelsaert’s men noticed a single white face among the people waiting on the waterfront. It belonged to a 15-year-old boy from Amsterdam named Abraham Gerritsz, who had deserted from another Dutch East Indiaman, the Leyden, at the beginning of October and was by now just as anxious to leave the settlement. Pelsaert, who had been forced to transfer several of his own men to other ships in the flotilla at the beginning of the voyage, agreed to allow the boy to work his passage to the Indies on board the Batavia.
From Sierra Leone, the little fleet put back out into the Atlantic and headed south toward the equator. Here the winds grew less predictable again, and skippers were instructed to stay within the confines of what the Dutch called the wagenspoor—the “cart-track,” two parallel lines crossing the ocean from northeast to southwest all the way from the Cape Verde Islands down to the equator. The wagenspoor was sketched in on VOC charts and marked the boundaries of the safest route. If a ship sailed east out of the cart-track, she risked becoming becalmed in the Gulf of Guinea. If she ventured too far west, she would rot in windless seas off the coast of Brazil.
Ariaen Jacobsz kept the convoy within the wagenspoor as it limped across the unpredictable doldrums around the equator. There was little wind and the weather was blisteringly hot now, so much so that it became all but impossible to sleep below and the crew sought the sanctuary of the deck at night. Planking warped in the heat, and the sun softened the tar that had been used to caulk gaps between the timbers, trapping animals that had been unwary enough to fall asleep along the cracks. Wax melted below decks, causing candles to ooze and run until they hardened into weird, squat shapes in the cooler evening air. The men wore only loincloths when they had to go below; passengers who had never experienced such unbearable temperatures wrote that the sun had “dried the feces within the body”; and in an era before the invention of effective balms and creams, everyone suffered agonies from sunburn. Cooling these burns in brine brought only temporary relief, and the salt in the water caused rashes that itched unbearably. The latter problem must have been exacerbated by the fact that, in the absence of fresh water, sailors traditionally washed their filthy clothes in urine.
Down in the abandoned hold was the empire of the rats. Bloated rodents scurried between the supplies, gnawing their way into the casks of meat and nesting in the linen trade goods. Having learned that wooden walls of barrels concealed huge quantities of food, they sometimes attacked the sides of the ships in error. Given time, rats could chew their way through the layers of oak planking in the hull, springing leaks that tested the pumps and kept the Batavia’s sweating gang of caulkers busy.
Nevertheless, the biggest irritants on the voyage were undoubtedly the insects that swarmed through every crevice of the ship. Lice were a plague from which even the most senior of those on board were not immune. They lived and multiplied in clothing and could cause terrible epidemics of typhus. Many an East Indiaman lost a quarter or a third of her crew to the disease, and though the Batavia seems to have escaped its ravages, no doubt the lice would have infested every article of clothing on board the ship. Even Creesje and Cornelisz were required to join the other passengers and crew and delouse themselves each week on a special “louse-deck” by the latrines in the bows. Determined hunting would have afforded them some relief, but as numerous contemporary letters and memoirs attest, such measures were only temporarily effective.
Nor were lice the only insects on board. Bedbugs lurked in the bunks and sleeping mats, and new ships such as the Batavia could be quickly overrun with cockroaches. The few days that Pelsaert’s fleet spent at Sierra Leone would have been time enough to allow a few big African insects to find their way down below, where they would have multiplied with astonishing rapidity. The captain of one Danish East Indiaman was so maddened by the plague of scuttling vermin on board his ship that he offered his sailors a tot of brandy for every thousand cockroaches they killed. Within days, the crushed bodies of 38,250 insects had been presented for his inspection.
Tormented by the vermin and the heat, some Dutchmen were driven insane. By the late 1620s, the VOC had already become well acquainted with a variety of mental illnesses caused by the long passage east. Depression was not uncommon in the early weeks of any voyage, as those on board realized the magnitude of the ordeal they faced, and in some cases it was so severe that the victims refused to talk or even eat. Becalmed in the oppressive airs of the equator, others went mad as they waited long, excruciating days—sometimes weeks—for winds that never came. The archives of the East India Company contain many records of men who jumped overboard to end this suffering.
Even so, most voyagers enjoyed some good times, too. Surviving accounts tell of swimming in calm weather, skipping games and storytelling on sultry evenings. When the opportunity arose, there were wild celebrations of signal events such as the skipper’s birthday. Predikanten such as Gijsbert Bastiaensz frowned on the unrestrained revelry that traditionally marked the crossing of the equator, but not even the VOC could ban the singing of bawdy sea shanties or the smoking of tobacco in long, thin Gouda pipes. The danger of fire being very great, however—in the years before the invention of matches, pipes were lit with red-hot coals fetched with tongs from a glowing brazier—smoking was permitted only before the mast, and then only during daylight hours.
It was not until March 1629 that, south of the doldrums at last, Pelsaert’s fleet picked up the northeast trade winds that took the ships on toward the coast of South America, and then the Brazil current, which swept east to the Cape of Good Hope. But now, just as the voyage was becoming bearable again, debilitating illness struck.
The little convoy had entered the scurvy belt, an area of the South Atlantic that stretched from the Tropic of Capricorn all the way to the Cape. In the 1620s (and for another 200 years), scurvy was a menace on every lengthy ocean voyage, generally manifesting itself three to four months after a ship had left port. The first cases usually occurred among the most malnourished members of the crew, and it was only when a vessel was becalmed and drifted slowly across the ocean for months on end that the officers suffered with the men, but the symptoms of the disease were unique and all too familiar to veterans of the Indies trade such as Jacobsz and Pelsaert. They included painful and swollen legs, fetid breath, and spongy, bleeding gums. After a while, the victim’s mouth became so swollen and rotten with gangrene that his teeth would fall out one by one. Eventually—after about a month of suffering—he would die an agonizing death.
Cases of scurvy occurred on almost every voyage to the Indies; a retourschip usually lost 20 or 30 men to the disease, generally between the equator and the Cape. Sometimes the death toll was far worse. On the Eerste Schipvaart of 1595, more than half the men in the fleet were dead of scurvy by the time the ships reached Madagascar. When the handful of survivors finally reached Texel two years later, there were not enough fit men left on board one of the ships to lower her anchors.
Little progress had been made in treating the disease by the time the Batavia sailed three decades later. Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, which is found in fresh food and particularly in fruit and fruit juice—supplies of which had usually run out by the time a ship reached the equator. But this fact was unknown in 1628, and doctors differed as to what caused the illness and how it should be treated. Foul air below decks was often blamed for the disease, as was a surfeit of salt meat. Wine was a popular, if ineffective, remedy. Perhaps surprisingly, the vitamin-rich juices of lemons and limes—which were to be recognized, late in the next century, as a preventative and cure—were already known to be effective in combating scurvy, although no one fully understood why. They were prescribed as a remedy by a number of naval surgeons, and quantities were carried aboard some ships, particularly those of the rival English East India Company. But this cure was only one among many tried by the VOC, and its unique efficacy was not recognized in the seventeenth century. In consequence the Batavia lost nearly a dozen seamen to scurvy on the passage between Sierra Leone and the Cape.
The dead men were buried at sea. There was not enough wood for coffins, so the deceased were sewn up inside spare pieces of sailcloth and, after a short burial service, tipped into the sea. A dead sailor’s mess-mates would try to make sure that his body was well weighted with sand or lead, in the hope that it would sink too quickly for the sharks that were by now a common sight around the Batavia to tear it apart.
Even in the seventeenth century, sharks enjoyed an evil reputation for ferocity, and Dutch sailors sometimes told stories of fish that had been caught and cut open to reveal the severed legs or arms of recently deceased shipmates in their bellies. Seamen viewed all sharks as man-eaters and would go to considerable trouble to hook them on their lines. Sometimes a captured fish would be killed and put to good use on board—the rough, sandpapery skin was used to sharpen knives, heart and liver became ingredients for the surgeon’s nostrums, and the brains were turned into a special paste that was thought to ease the agony of childbirth. But on other occasions, the men of a retourschip would exact revenge for all the sailors who had died between the jaws of a shark. It was considered fine sport to torture a captured monster by gouging out its eyes and cutting off its fins. Then an empty barrel would be tied to the mutilated animal’s tail and the shark would be returned to the Atlantic. Unable to see or swim or dive, the wounded fish would thrash wildly in gouts of its own blood, endlessly circling and smashing into the sides of the ship until it either died of exhaustion or was eaten by its fellow predators.
Cruel sports such as this were among the few permitted outlets for the baser instincts of the men. Violence and disputes were severely punished, and the total lack of privacy made any form of sexual activity all but impossible for those who lived before the mast. On the great majority of East Indiamen this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there were no more than a handful of women on board—and most of those were either married or prepubescent. A few of the men (though not, it seems, too many) were active sodomites, but the penalties for being caught engaging in a homosexual relationship were draconian; if the commandeur decreed it, the lovers could be sewn, together, into a sailcloth shroud and thrown alive into the ocean. The great majority of such affairs were thus conducted not among the men of the lower deck but between officers and common sailors, since the officers alone had access to private cabins and the status to coerce their partners (some of whom, at least, were unwilling) into silence.
The Batavia, however, carried an unusual number of female passengers. There were at least 22 women on the ship, and although most were married and were traveling to the Indies with their husbands, a few were to all intents and purposes unattached. This was a little peculiar, as the VOC had already learned from bitter experience that to allow unmarried women to sail alongside several hundred young men—all tight-packed together with little to occupy them for anything up to nine months—inevitably led to trouble.
As early as 1610 the Company’s first attempts to procure wives for its lonely merchants in the Indies had ended in humiliation when Governor-General Pieter Both was dispatched to Java with 36 “spinsters” who turned out to be prostitutes. A few years later Both’s successor, Jan Coen, abandoned the attempts he had been making to purchase slave girls in the East and had the orphanages of the Netherlands scoured for young Dutch women instead. “You, Sirs,” Coen lectured the Gentlemen XVII in his uniquely blunt style, “would only send us the scum of the land, [and] people here will sell us none but scum either . . . . Send us young girls, and we shall hope that things will go better.” These “company daughters” were packed off to the Batavia and provided with food and clothing on the voyage east on the understanding that they would marry when they got there. Most were between 12 and 20 and sailed with only a single chaperone to look after groups of up to several dozen girls. Unsurprisingly, even the plainest of the “daughters” attracted the unwelcome attentions of the crew long before the coast of Java appeared over the horizon.
By 1628 Jan Company had learned from these mistakes. It was now rare for any women, other than the wives and daughters of its most senior merchants, to be granted permission to sail out to the Indies. But for some reason the VOC’s proscriptions appear to have been flouted on the Batavia.It is probable that some of the women who found their way on board, including a group of half a dozen sailors’ wives, were actually stowaways. Certainly councillor Jacques Specx, who commanded the larger half of that year’s Christmas fleet, uncovered a host of whores and common-law spouses on the ships in his flotilla, writing home from the Bay of Biscay: “We want for nothing save honest maids and housewives in place of the filthy strumpets and street wailers who have been found (may God amend it) in all the ships. They are so numerous and so awful that I am ashamed to say any more about it.” Pelsaert appears to have checked his ships less scrupulously than Specx. Any stowaways on the Batavia managed to remain hidden until it was too late to send them back.
Among the unchaperoned women on Pelsaert’s ship were the alluring Lucretia Jans and Zwaantie Hendricx, her traveling companion and maid. They made an unlikely couple: Creesje patrician and aloof, her servant Zwaantie earthy and available. Whether Zwaantie had been Lucretia’s maid in Amsterdam is not known; it has been suggested that she was hired—and hired in haste—solely to accompany Creesje on the voyage east. The contention is unprovable, but it fits the facts, for these two women were uneasy companions, and the ill feeling that sprang up between them was to be the cause of considerable trouble on board the Batavia.
The problems began shortly after the ship sailed from Sierra Leone. During the crossing of the North Atlantic Ariaen Jacobsz had become infatuated with Creesje Jans. The skipper, who had left a wife at home in Durgerdam, somehow persuaded himself that he could attract Lucretia, who was not only married, but several degrees his superior in social status. He quickly learned otherwise. Creesje rejected his initial advances, but apparently she did so gently, for they remained for a while on friendly terms. But as the Batavia set course for the wagenspoor, and Creesje continued to resist, her relationship with Jacobsz began to deteriorate.
Jeronimus saw what Pelsaert and the rest had missed. As the Batavia left the African coast in her wake, he tackled Ariaen in private. “I chided him,” the under-merchant later recalled, “and asked what he intended with that woman. The skipper answered that because she was fair, he desired to tempt her to his will, and to make her willing with gold or other means.”
Jacobsz’s bribes appear to have been as unwelcome to Creesje as his earlier advances, and this time she must have told him so in blunter terms. Abruptly the skipper broke off the pursuit. But long before the ship approached the Cape, the irrepressible Ariaen had picked up another scent. This time the object of his affections was Zwaantie, and this time he was successful.
It never was explained whether the Batavia’s skipper seduced the maid because he desired her or simply to spite her mistress. Whatever the reason, the burgeoning relationship between Ariaen and Zwaantie placed Lucretia in a delicate position. It was impossible to keep secrets on board ship, and Jacobsz’s scandalous dalliance with the maid was soon a public humiliation for Creesje; but she could hardly avoid the skipper all the way to the Indies, and while they remained at sea he could make her life less than pleasant if he chose. Furthermore, it was unthinkable for a woman of her station to travel without a servant, but there was no obvious replacement for Zwaantie on board the Batavia. Creesje had little choice but to make the best of the situation.
As for Jacobsz and his mistress, they seem to have been united not only in their dislike of Lucretia—the skipper smarting from rejection, the maid from the real or imagined slights of her employer—but by their lustful natures. Ariaen was “crazed anew” by his passion for the servant girl, while Zwaantie, so the cook’s gossipy wife confided to Jeronimus as they approached the Cape, “was a whore” who denied her lover nothing. If the under-merchant desired proof of this allegation, it soon presented itself. Repairing to the officers’ privy in the stern one day, he opened the door to find the skipper already there, making love to Zwaantie in the awkward confines of the closet.
So the Batavia and her consorts neared the Cape of Good Hope. As Jan Huygen van Linschoten had predicted in his Reysgeschrift, the first indication that they were approaching land was the sight of Cape gannets—white birds with black-tipped wings that the Dutch called “velvet sleeves”—wheeling and calling around the convoy while it was still well out to sea. A day or two later, the sailors began to notice mats of broken, trumpet-stemmed reeds floating in the water and then the bones of dead cuttlefish bobbing on the waves. These were sure signs that the Batavia was within 30 miles of land.
They dropped anchor under Table Mountain on 14 April 1629, having been nearly six months at sea. The Cape was quite unlike the coast at Sierra Leone. It was delightful country, green and teeming with life. Since its discovery by Batholomeu Diaz in 1488, the Tavern of the Ocean had become a port of refuge for almost every European vessel heading east. English and Dutch, French, Portuguese and Danes all came to barter for supplies with the Hottentots who farmed cattle in the hinterland.
Ships heading for the Coromandel Coast rarely put in at the Cape, but on board the Batavia and the Sardam, the Dordrecht, the Assendelft, and the little warship Buren, men readied the ships’ boats and carried the scurvy-ridden and the sick ashore. Landing parties set up sailcloth tents for them along the edge of the beach. Other seamen hunted sea lions and penguins along the beach, or fished and gathered mussels from the rocks while they waited for the Hottentots’ arrival.
It was Pelsaert’s duty to negotiate for supplies of food. The natives of the Cape had grown used to dealing with visitors from Europe. A mutually beneficial trade had sprung up, for the Hottentots had oxen and sheep to sell, and the sailors iron hoops and copper plates that could be fashioned into ornaments and spears. The rate of exchange seemed laughably advantageous to the Dutch, who on one occasion bartered a copper bracelet for a sheep, and on another received “three oxen and five sheep for a crooked knife, a shovel, a short iron bolt, with a knife and some scraps of iron, worth altogether perhaps four guilders in Holland.” But metal was hard to come by at the Cape, and for their part the Hottentots seemed content that it was they who had the better of the deals.
Neither party really understood the other. The Dutch thought the inhabitants of the Cape primitive and ugly, and their journals contain numerous disparaging comments concerning the near nakedness of the Hottentots and the foul smell of the animal fat they rubbed into their bodies to insulate against the cold. The Africans found the Dutch greedy and violent, and in the early years of the seventeenth century men on both sides died as a result of this mutual mistrust.
Pelsaert’s greatest problem was communication. Europeans could not understand a word of the extraordinary language of the bushmen, who talked by clicking their tongues—“their speech is just as if one heard a number of angry turkeys, little else but clucking and whistling,” one baffled merchant wrote—and when the Hottentots eventually appeared the commandeur had to rely on mimicry and mime to make his wishes known. Indeed, everything about the Cape “savages” seemed alien to the Dutch, and they were utterly repulsed by the Hottentot diet. The locals liked their meat uncooked, and their greatest delicacy, the Dutch observed, was the intestines of an ox, which they “ate quite raw after shaking out most of the dung.”
It took Pelsaert some time to secure the necessary supplies, and his absences ashore had consequences he could hardly have predicted. While Pelsaert was inland bartering for sheep, Ariaen Jacobsz took a boat and embarked on an illicit pleasure trip around the bay in the company of Zwaantie and his friend Jeronimus Cornelisz. Afterward the little group rowed from ship to ship in the southern dusk, enjoying the hospitality of the other vessels in the fleet until Jacobsz became thoroughly inebriated. The skipper’s behavior deteriorated rapidly, and he began to lash out with his fists and tongue. By the time the commandeur returned to the Batavia, several complaints had already been lodged against him.
The episode reflected badly on Pelsaert and his flagship and greatly worried the commandeur. “They went ashore without my knowledge when I had gone in search of beasts,” he recorded in his journal, “until the evening, when they sailed to the Assendelft where Ariaen behaved himself very pugnaciously, and at night time went to the ship Buren, where he behaved himself worse.” Jacobsz, the commandeur concluded, had been “very beastly with words as well as deeds.”
The skipper’s behavior was a serious problem for Pelsaert. The drunkenness and violence were bad enough, but the fact that Jacobsz had taken a boat without the commandeur’s permission was worse. It was clear that the skipper would have to be disciplined if the commandeur was not to lose face, and early the next morning Pelsaert called Jacobsz into the Great Cabin and “chided him over his arrogance and the deeds committed by him, saying that if he did not refrain from his unheard-of behavior, [I] would take a hand; with more other good admonishments.” This dressing-down, like Ariaen’s antics with Zwaantie, could not be kept secret for long, and it was soon the talk of the Batavia. The skipper had been humiliated, and his old antagonism for Francisco Pelsaert was rekindled.
Jacobsz smoldered while his men slaughtered cattle on the beach and packed the fresh meat into empty barrels. Down below, the carpenters and caulkers finished their repairs and made things ready for the voyage across the Southern Ocean. They were ready to weigh anchor by 22 April, having spent only eight days at the Tavern of the Ocean—less than half the typical duration of a visit to the Cape.
The Batavia that sailed from Table Bay was not the ship that had left Amsterdam the previous October. Ten of her men were dead and now she creaked with fatigue and crawled with vermin. She was full of tired and squabbling passengers. But in this the Batavia was no different from the majority of East Indiamen that sought shelter at the Cape and could count herself more fortunate than many. What made Pelsaert’s flagship unique was not that there was unrest, but the exalted rank of those embroiled in the dispute. So long as the commandeur and the skipper of a retourschipacted together, rivalries and sexual jealousy among the crew could be dealt with easily enough. But once the two most senior men on board took issue with each other, there was no one to restrain them or their growing enmity.
Up on the quarterdeck, Jeronimus stood with his friend the skipper as Jacobsz nursed his wounded pride. “By God,” muttered the old sailor, glancing at the other vessels in the fleet, “if those ships were not lying there, I would treat that miserly dog so that he could not come out of his cabin for fourteen days. And I would quickly make myself master of the ship.”
This was dangerous talk. What the skipper threatened was mutiny, and if Pelsaert had heard what was being said he would have been within his rights to have Jacobsz thrown overboard or shot. But Jeronimus neither demurred nor went to tell the commandeur.
The two men stood in silence for a while, and the skipper’s words hung in the autumn air as Cornelisz considered them. At length the under-merchant spoke.
“And how would you manage that?” he asked.