4
“I am for the devil.”
ARIAEN JACOBSZ
SLOWLY, OVER SEVERAL DAYS, the bones of a plot emerged. Hunched together at the rail as the Batavia plowed through the rough waters east of the Cape, the skipper and the under-merchant planned a mutiny that would give them control of the ship. They spoke of ways of subduing the majority of the crew, and the necessity of murdering those who would not join them. They lingered in pleasurable debate as to Pelsaert’s fate and thought of turning pirate and preying on the commerce of the Indian Ocean. They dreamed of a comfortable retirement in some Spanish port, far beyond the reach of the VOC. Above all, they talked because they needed one another.
It seems to have been Cornelisz who turned the skipper from a mere malcontent into a mutineer. Ariaen Jacobsz was no longer young. Two decades at sea—and several debilitating voyages to the East—had made the skipper tough, but the years had drained him of his vigor. The six-month journey to the Cape had exhausted him. Though it was common for the skippers of East Indiamen to find their supercargoes an irritant, Jacobsz was no longer sure he had the energy to turn his mutinous thoughts into deeds. Much as his hatred of Pelsaert gnawed him, left to himself he would probably have grunted and chafed without ever taking action. Months later, Cornelisz would recall that as they stood together at the stern, he heard his friend repeat a single sentence over and over again: “If I were younger,” Jacobsz had muttered, “I would do something else.” But with his friend the under-merchant beside him, Ariaen felt emboldened. The very fact that Jeronimus could stand with him on the quarterdeck, coolly discussing the prospect of violence, was a spur in itself.
In his journal, Pelsaert eventually came to realize this. “Jeronimus Cornelissen,” he mused,
“having made himself a great friend and highly familiar with the skipper, moulded their similar intelligence and feelings into one, the skipper being innate with prideful conceit and Ambition, so that he could not endure the authority of any over him. Moreover, he was mocking and contemptuous of all people. Further, he was inexperienced or inept in getting on with people, in so far as it did not concern sea-faring. But Jeronimus, on the contrary, was well-spoken and usually knew how to polish the Truth of his lying words; he was far more sly and skilled in getting on with people . . . So that Jeronimus was the tongue of the skipper and served as pedagogue to insinuate into him what he should answer if I wanted to speak to or admonish him.”
As for Cornelisz, he cared little what befell Francisco Pelsaert. He encouraged the skipper’s fantasies simply because he knew he could not seize Batavia by himself. To do that he would need sailors, whose loyalty he did not command, and the ability to navigate, which only Ariaen and his steersmen possessed. Granted the men and the skills he needed, however, Jeronimus scented a prize greater than mere revenge. As he well knew, the lumbering Batavia contained riches greater than any he could dream of earning in the East.
Cornelisz had motives of his own for mutiny. As the owner of a failed business, with an abandoned wife and a dead child, he had no particular desire to see the United Provinces again. As a near-bankrupt seeking his fortune in the Indies, he was engaged in an enterprise that left him not much more than a 50/50 chance of coming back alive even if he was successful. And as a VOC officer with ready access to the Great Cabin in the stern, he had seen the dozen chests of money there and knew they contained a fortune that would allow anyone who seized it to spend what was left of his life in consummate luxury. Furthermore, as someone of decidedly heretical beliefs, the under-merchant simply did not experience the pangs of guilt and conscience that a pious Dutchman might have felt in plotting rebellion and murder.
In this, as in so much else, Jeronimus Cornelisz was unique; it was unheard-of for an officer of the VOC to mutiny. Skippers, too, were generally loyal. But Jeronimus and Ariaen began to look for confederates among the crew, confident they would find men enough to follow them. The soldiers and sailors of the Dutch East India Company were always ready to revolt.
Harsh treatment, poor wages, and the terrible conditions on the voyage to Java frequently combined to produce outbreaks of trouble on board VOC ships, although the unrest generally fell well short of the sort of bloody uprising Cornelisz and Jacobsz had begun to contemplate. Most mutinies were little more than shipboard protests, which flared up rapidly and were over quickly. They were led by ordinary seamen—the ringleaders were almost always foreigners, not Dutchmen—and usually took the form of a complaint against conditions on board, or concerns about the seaworthiness of a tired old ship. They rarely involved much violence and might more accurately be described as a form of strike.*17 Such mutinies were generally settled by concessions—perhaps by increasing rations or an agreement to restrain excesses in discipline. Once the officers had recovered control of the ship, it was normal to treat the majority of the rebels relatively leniently. One or two ringleaders would almost certainly be executed, if they could be identified, but most of those involved could at least hope to escape with their lives.
Full-fledged mutinies, led by a relatively small group of men who had actively conspired to take over a ship, were extremely rare. They required careful planning, access to weapons—which were generally kept under lock and key in the ship’s armory in the stern—and the cooperation (whether it was given willingly or not) of an officer who knew how to sail the ship. Even if all these conditions were met, such rebellions were highly risky and invariably entailed serious consequences for those concerned. Either the mutiny would be put down, in which case anyone actively involved would be condemned to death, or it would succeed. In the latter case, the mutineers almost always felt compelled to murder most of the officers and many of the men. They knew these actions could never be forgiven and that the agents of Jan Company would pursue them for the rest of their lives.
Jacobsz and Cornelisz must have realized this, but they also knew that such things did occur. Half a dozen major mutinies had broken out in the fleets of the VOC between 1602 and 1628, most recently in 1621 on a ship called the Witte Beer*18 and most seriously in 1615 on board the Meeuwtje and the Grote Maen.*19 The latter ships were part of a fleet sent to explore a westward route to the Indies via Cape Horn. While they were still in the Atlantic, 14 men on the Meeuwtje, led by a sailor and a carpenter, conspired to seize the ship, but word of the plot reached the ears of the officers, and the two ringleaders were hung. The other dozen men were spared because they had expressed remorse, and rather than being punished they were simply dispersed among the other vessels of the fleet. Three months later there was a second mutiny on board the Meeuwtje. The ringleaders of this affair were pitched overboard and left to drown, but again the bulk of the mutineers were spared. This leniency on the part of the vessel’s upper-merchant proved to be a serious mistake. Soon a storm sprang up and the Meeuwtje disappeared. In time the VOC established that a third mutiny had occurred. This one had been successful. The ship had been sailed to La Rochelle and handed over to the French; only one of the mutineers, a man who made the mistake of venturing back onto Dutch soil, was ever caught and punished.
The example of the Meeuwtje may have suggested to Jacobsz and Cornelisz that it was possible to seize an East Indiaman and escape unscathed. But the skipper and the under-merchant must also have realized that the lessons of the mutinies had been well learned by their masters in the Netherlands. Leniency was no longer tolerated. Henceforth all captured mutineers would be put to death immediately, or punished so severely that they wished for it.
Discipline on board a retourschip was brutal at the best of times. The frugal Dutch might punish minor crimes such as blasphemy and drunkenness with a system of fines, but physical violence, or the threat of it, earned violent retribution. At the slightest hint of insolence to an officer, a malefactor could be manacled hand and foot and thrown into “hell”—a tiny cell in the forepart of the gun deck where the wind whistled maddeningly through the slats. This prison was so small that it was impossible either to stand or to lie down, but men could be left to rot there for weeks at a time. Fighting with knives, a common activity that the Dutch called snicker-snee, was an even worse offense. Article XCI of the VOC regulations was explicit on this point. “Anyone pulling a knife in anger,” it ordained, “shall be nailed to the mast with a knife through his hand, and shall remain standing until he pulls his hand off.” In practice this meant that the condemned man was led to the mast with his weaker hand strapped behind his back. His working hand was then impaled to the mast, and the victim had to choose between tearing it in half by pulling sharply downward, or easing the hand slowly and agonizingly from side to side until the wound was so big it was possible to pass the haft of the knife right through it. Whichever method he chose, he would likely never work at sea again.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that after 1615 the most common sentence for a rank-and-file mutineer was 200 lashes, enough to reduce a man’s back to pulp, kill many who endured it, and scar the rest for life. In Dutch service, mutineers were doused with seawater before their lashes were inflicted. This refinement ensured that salt was driven into the wounds, which acted as a crude antiseptic but redoubled the agony of the punishment. More serious cases were dealt with by dropping the mutineer from the yardarm or keelhauling him.
The former sentence involved pinioning a man’s hands behind his back and tying a long, stout rope around his wrists. Lead weights were secured to his feet and he was then dropped 40 or 50 feet toward the sea, falling until the rope went taut. The sudden deceleration inevitably dislocated the mutineer’s shoulders, and his wrists and arms were often shattered, too. The man was then twice hauled back up to be dropped again, a punishment that in his broken state was even more painful than the fall itself. Having been dropped three times, the mutineer would then usually be lashed as well.
Keelhauling, which was a Dutch invention, was generally regarded as an even more severe punishment. Sentence was carried out by tying a man’s arms together above his head and binding his legs. He was given a sponge to bite down on, and a long rope was then passed under the keel of the moving ship and the ends secured to the sailor’s limbs so he could be pulled from one side of the vessel to the other. When the idea was first conceived, keelhauling almost always resulted in the death of the condemned man, who would either be cut to pieces by the barnacles covering the bottom of the ship or decapitated as he smashed into the hull. The ingenious Dutch found a solution to this problem, and soon each VOC ship was supplied with a special full-body harness, made of lead and leather, into which a man could be strapped. The harness was equipped with a flag on a long pole. By adjusting the length of the ropes until the flag was a certain height above the water, it was possible to ensure that the mutineer was dragged under the keel rather than across it, and the lead harness protected him from any incidental contact. Keelhauling, too, was generally repeated three times before the punishment was completed. Nevertheless, in an era in which only one man in seven could swim, it was such a terrifying ordeal that the full sentence was often not completed for fear that the victim would drown.
Soldiers and sailors desperate enough to risk such punishments would hardly balk at killing the officers who would inflict them, and the men whom Cornelisz and Jacobsz recruited to their plot were undoubtedly a rough lot. Significantly, however, they also included a number of senior officers and experienced soldiers and sailors of the sort required to run Batavia successfully.
A good deal of care would still have been required. Rumors traveled swiftly below decks, and the slightest word to the upper-merchant might have proved fatal. But on a retourschip crewed by the dregs of the Amsterdam waterfront there were always malcontents and, between them, the skipper and the under-merchant knew of several men who could be tempted by the lure of easy money and spurred by hatred for the VOC. The first man Ariaen approached appears to have been the bos’n’s mate, who was a cousin of the skipper and presumably a man in whom Jacobsz had full confidence. The most important addition to the ranks of the mutineers, however, was unquestionably the bos’n himself.
Jan Evertsz, the Batavia’s high boatswain and thus the most senior officer—after Jacobsz and the three steersmen—on the ship, came from Monnickendam, a small fishing port on the coast north of Amsterdam with a reputation for producing a particularly brutal sort of sailor.*20 He was probably still in his twenties, and it was his job to implement the orders of the skipper, with whom he necessarily had a close relationship. Like other high boatswains, Evertsz most likely stood watches while at sea and would have been on his way to becoming a skipper himself. “As the master is to be abaft the mast,” one contemporary authority explained, “so the boatswain, and all the common sailors, are to be afore the mast . . . . The boatswain is to see the shrouds and other ropes set taut, the deep sea line and plummet [lead] in readiness against their coming into soundings. In a fight he must see the flag and pendants put forth, and call up every man to his labour and his office. And to conclude, his and his mate’s work is never at an end, for it is impossible to repeat all the offices that are put upon them.”
The high boatswain’s tasks thus required him to be a first-rate seaman. With few exceptions, boatswains were men of long experience who had been promoted from the ranks, and their rough manners and coarse humor made them uncomfortable companions for the passengers in the stern. As the man charged with keeping order among the crew, Evertsz must have been brutal and decisive. As the man in day-to-day command of the ship’s 180 sailors, he was also well placed to pick out troublemakers. He was the ideal recruit to the mutineers’ cause.
It seems to have been the skipper who sounded out Evertsz, and Evertsz who found other mutineers to join them. Among their number were Allert Janssen, of Assendelft—a companion of Jacobsz’s who had already killed one man in the Dutch Republic—and Ryckert Woutersz, a loudmouthed gunner from Harlingen. Sensibly, the skipper and the high boatswain kept the names of these recruits to themselves, and even the other mutineers did not know exactly who was implicated in the plot. It is thus difficult to ascertain how many sailors were involved. There may have been as few as half a dozen of them at first.
One of the most unusual features of the plot on Pelsaert’s ship was the way in which its tentacles extended into every part of the vessel. Most mutinies were the work of a small, tight-knit group of sailors, but the rebellion planned on the Batavia encompassed merchants, cadets, and soldiers, too. It is possible to discern the devious hand of the under-merchant in this unprecedented development. Jeronimus was an articulate man possessed of great powers of persuasion. Those he so charmed came in the end to see him as a “seducer of men,” and he would certainly have had a good deal of influence among the VOC assistants on the ship. Given the traditional antipathy between the soldiers and the sailors of Jan Company, it was possibly his job to sound out the men down on the orlop, too.
Coenraat van Huyssen, the army cadet from Gelderland, may have been Cornelisz’s chosen instrument. Impetuous, hotheaded, with a lust for violence, Van Huyssen and his compatriot Gsbert van Welderen were in the vanguard of the mutineers’ party from the beginning. The young jonkers*21soon took to sleeping with their weapons in their hammocks, and Van Huyssen boasted to the others that he would be “amongst the first who jumped with a sword into the Cabin, in order to throw the commandeur overboard.” Perhaps through him, the mutineers soon made the acquaintance of “Stone-Cutter” Pietersz, the lance corporal from Am-sterdam whose influence over the troops on board was roughly equivalent to the sway that Evertsz held over the sailors. Like the high boatswain, Pietersz was an important addition to the ranks of the mutineers. His role was probably to suggest the names of soldiers he could trust and to identify those whose loyalty to the Company was such that they would have to be disposed of when the mutiny was done.
Between them, the under-merchant, the high boatswain, and the corporal formed a uniquely dangerous triumvirate. With the skipper at their side, their influence extended to every corner of the ship, and the power they wielded was such that—even had word of the mutiny got out—the bravest man on board would have hesitated to denounce them to the commandeur. Together, they had every prospect of success.
To seize the ship, the Batavia’s rebels first had to separate their vessel from her consorts, and thus from all possibility of aid. This was the principal lesson of the repeated mutinies on board the Meeuwtje, which had only finally succeeded when the ship had become detached from her fleet. In the Batavia’s case it was easily accomplished; soon after the convoy left Table Bay, Jacobsz took advantage of the variable winds south of the Cape to drift slowly away from the other ships in the convoy. It was all too common, in the days when the VOC sent ships of wildly differing quality to the East, for the vessels of a fleet to become detached from one another in this way, and even though the Batavia had kept company with the little warship Buren, the old Dordrecht, the Assendelft, and Sardam all the way from Holland, no one seems to have suspected anything was wrong.
Next, and far more problematically, the under-merchant and the skipper had to recruit a large enough body of men to enable them to take control of the Batavia. On the Meeuwtje, which was a smaller vessel, a core of 13 rebellious sailors had been identified, but, given the eventual disappearance of the vessel, others must have remained undetected. On other East Indiamen, groups of up to 60 malcontents conspired to seize their ships. In their first month back at sea, Jacobsz and Cornelisz persuaded somewhere between 8 and 18 men to join them. Ranged against 300 neutrals and company loyalists, this was nowhere near enough to guarantee success. Further action was required.
While the skipper and the under-merchant pondered what to do, and the Batavia nosed her way southward into the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean, Pelsaert himself offered an apparent solution to their problem. A day or two after they had sailed from the Cape, the commandeur fell dangerously ill.
The nature of Francisco Pelsaert’s malady is nowhere specified, but it kept him in his bunk for weeks and came so close to killing him that his recovery was not expected. His illness appears to have been a fever of some sort, possibly malaria contracted during his time in India. Had the upper-merchant succumbed, Cornelisz and Jacobsz could have taken control of the ship by right, without the need for mutiny. So—unknown to all but a handful of the passengers and crew—throughout late April and early May 1629 the fate of the ship lay in the hands of one of the most important of all the members of the Batavia’s crew. He was named Frans Jansz and he came from the old North Quarter port of Hoorn.
Jansz was the Batavia’s surgeon. His practice was conducted from the tiny dispensary on the gun deck, which was scarcely more than five feet square, and his only tools were a set of surgeon’s saws, a small apothecary’s chest, and—because all seventeenth-century surgeons doubled as barbers—a handful of razors and some bowls. With these scant resources, and the assistance of an under-barber, Aris Jansz, he was responsible for the health of all 320 people on the ship.
Of all the officers on board Batavia, Frans Jansz was probably the most popular among the passengers and crew. In the course of a typical journey from the Netherlands to Java, almost 1 in 10 of a retourschip’s crew would die, and a much larger number would fall ill and require treatment. If the proportion of the sick and the dead exceeded certain ratios, the ship would become unmanageable and might be lost together with its crew. Jansz, then, was the chief hope not only of Francisco Pelsaert, but of all those on the Batavia who wished to reach the Indies without undue drama.
It is not possible to say whether or not the Batavia’s surgeon was worthy of the trust that the ship’s crew placed in him, but the likelihood is that he was not. The Gentlemen XVII always experienced great difficulty in attracting competent medical men. The dangers of the journey east were such that no successful physicians or apothecaries could possibly be induced to go to Java. Even reputable barber-surgeons were hard to come by. Unlike merchants, surgeons had relatively few opportunities to profit in the East, and since they endured similar risks, the standard of those who could be lured to serve at sea was often very low.
On a good many East Indiamen, indeed, the problem of obtaining decent treatment was exacerbated by the dangers of the job. Shut up in their dispensaries below decks and constantly exposed to sick and dying men, the mortality rate among sea surgeons was far higher than it was among surgeons on land. Though most retourschepen did carry at least two barbers, it was far from uncommon for both men to expire in the course of a voyage, and if that happened, an untutored sailor would be pressed into service as a make-do surgeon. Men who found themselves in such a situation had no idea how to bleed a patient or amputate a shattered limb. They were simply expected to get on with it.
On ships such as the Batavia where the barbers did survive, the quality of care could occasionally be good. Seventeenth-century surgeons had one inestimable advantage over the physicians and the apothecaries who were their nominal superiors: they were practical men, and learned their trade from experience.*22 Freed from reliance on the false principles of the physicians, surgeons were generally effective in setting broken bones and treating the normal run of shipboard injuries. Some were undeniably conscientious men, who did all they could for the sailors in their care, and a few had passed special “Sea Exams” that qualified them to deal with the full range of shipboard injuries—“fractures, dislocations, shot-wounds, concussions, burns, gangrenes, etc.”
Jan Loxe, a sea surgeon who sailed later in the seventeenth century, left notes that indicate the unpleasant nature and likely extent of Jansz’s work. “First thing in the morning,” he wrote in his journal,
“we must prepare the medicines that have to be taken internally and give each patient his dose. Next, we must scarify, clean and dress the filthy, stinking wounds, and bandage them and the ulcerations. Then we must bandage the stiff and benumbed limbs of the scorbutic patients. At midday we must fetch and dish out the food for sometimes 40, 50, or even 60 people, and the same again in the evening; and what is more, we are kept up half the night as well in attending to patients who suffer a relapse, and so forth.”
Stamina, then, was one requirement for a surgeon. Another was great strength—enough to hold down a conscious, screaming man while amputating a shattered limb without the benefit of anesthetic. But Jansz, and sea surgeons like him, were also required to have a working knowledge of Cornelisz’s art, and it was to the apothecary’s chest, packed by the Gentlemen XVII’s own pharmacist in Amsterdam, that Frans Jansz would have turned in order to treat Pelsaert.
A typical sea surgeon’s apothecary’s chest opened to reveal three drawers, each minutely subdivided into small rectangular compartments and packed with the products of the contemporary pharmacy: approximately 200 different preparations in all. In treating Pelsaert, Jansz may well have turned to theriac, which was often administered to patients suffering from malaria two hours before a paroxysm was anticipated in order to strengthen them for the coming ordeal. Mithridatium—a 2,000-year-old antidote, originally from Persia, which was supposed to neutralize venom and cure almost any disease—was another well-known treatment. Elsewhere in the chest other drawers contained “Egyptian ointment,” a sterilizing balm made from alum, copper, and mercury; the sovereign remedy of mummy; and a variety of oils and syrups fortified with fruits and spices, as well as cinnamon water, camphor, aloes, myrrh, and extract of rhubarb.*23 As a contemporary English book, The Surgeon’s Mate, explained, the provision of so many medicines was hardly excessive, “for although there may seeme many particulars, yet there wanteth at the least forty more.”
For 20 long days, the surgeon dosed and purged the commandeur, trying a variety of treatments in an attempt to cure his illness. And as the Batavia surged onward through the boiling waters of the Roaring Forties at the bottom of the world, the upper-merchant’s fever slowly ebbed away. Whether his recovery was attributable to Jansz’s ministrations or, more likely, to a robust constitution, it is impossible to say. Whatever the reason, three weeks after he had taken to his bunk, and to the consternation of the mutineers, Francisco Pelsaert reappeared on deck.
Ariaen Jacobsz had been enjoying himself in the upper-merchant’s absence. For almost a month he had been the undisputed master of the ship, and his self-confidence had increased proportionately. He had faced down those who sneered at his dalliance with the servant Zwaantie Hendricx, and publicly acknowledged the girl as his companion. Indeed, so enamored was he of her blowsy favors that he vowed (as Pelsaert later heard) “without taking any thought of his honour or the reputation of his office, that if anyone made even a sour face to the foresaid Zwaantie, he would not leave it unrevenged.”
Jacobsz made a powerful protector, and it is not surprising Zwaantie “readily accepted the caresses of the skipper with great willingness and refused him nothing, whatsoever he desired.” Nevertheless, Ariaen remained either unable or unwilling to commit himself fully to her; south of the Cape, when their frequent couplings led Hendricx to suspect she had conceived, the skipper shied away and asked her to spend an evening with his friend Allert Janssen. He got the pair of them drunk and left Zwaantie alone with Janssen, “who has done his will with her, because [Jacobsz] thought that she was pregnant and that she should wed Allert.”
The serving girl seems not to have minded this, and the skipper soon missed having her in his bed when it transpired the pregnancy was a false alarm. Within days they were together once again. But something must have changed in their relationship, for Ariaen now took to making dangerous promises to Zwaantie. Convinced Pelsaert was as good as dead, the records of the voyage relate, “he took from her the name and yoke of servant, and promised that she should see the destruction of her Mistress and others, and that he wanted to make her a great Lady.” Pelsaert’s recovery was thus a setback for the skipper and for Zwaantie. In consequence, Jacobsz resigned himself to action, shrugging: “I am still for the Devil; if I go to the Indies then I have come to shame in any case.”
It was now 13 May, and so confident had Jeronimus been that the commandeur would die that for the best part of a month he and Ariaen had not bothered to seek out further mutineers among the crew. Pelsaert’s unexpected recovery forced a rapid reassessment of their plans. If they were to be successful now, Cornelisz and Jacobsz needed to more than double the number of men they could rely on when the moment came to mutiny. Apparently, the two malcontents had already approached their own most trusted acquaintances, and those of Jan Evertsz and Jacop Pietersz, too. To sound out others, in whom they had less confidence, would be to take a considerable risk. A better way of proceeding, they now decided, would be to rouse the whole crew against the commandeur.
They selected as their instrument the unattainable Lucretia Jans. She was, they knew, as desired by Pelsaert as she had been by the skipper. By arranging for her to be attacked by masked members of the crew, they expected to provoke the upper-merchant into punitive retaliation; and by concealing the identity of her assailants, they hoped that any measures that were taken would be manifestly unfair to the majority of the men on board. Thus, they thought, a larger number of the crew could be persuaded to support their mutiny.
“The skipper and Jeronimus,” Pelsaert later recorded in his journal,
“in the presence and with the knowledge of Zwaantie, decided after long debates and discourses, what dishonour they could do the foresaid Lady, which would be most shameful to her and would be supposed the worst by the commandeur. In order therefore that confusion might be sought through her and through the punishment of those who took a hand in it, Jeronimus proposed that she should be given a cut over both cheeks with a knife, which could be done by one person, and few would perceive that they had been the instigators of it. The skipper was of another mind, that it would be better that many should have a hand in it, then the commandeur could not punish the many, or there would be a big outcry, and if the commandeur should let it go unnoticed, then there was time enough to give her cuts on the cheeks.”
This strange plot, which is unique in all the annals of the sea, was hurriedly conceived within a day of Pelsaert’s emergence from his cabin. It must have owed a good deal to Jacobsz’s desire to revenge himself upon the woman who had spurned him off the coast of Africa. The skipper’s hand, and Zwaantie’s too, can certainly be discerned in the selection of Jan Evertsz as the man to assault Creesje, and also in the bizarre and humiliating way in which the high boatswain carried out his task.
The plotters decided to seize Lucretia as she left the merchant’s table to return to her own cabin on the evening of 14 May. It would be pitch-dark by then, and many of the crew would already be asleep. Swiftly, Evertsz set about recruiting men willing to take part in the assault. Some, and perhaps all, of the group that he approached were established mutineers. There were eight of them in all, including Allert Janssen and Ryckert Woutersz, all lounging on the Batavia’s foredeck in the early afternoon. The most senior was the quartermaster, Harman Nannings. The youngest was Cornelis Janssen, the 18-year-old Haarlem sailor known to all as “Bean”; though still little more than a boy, his “innate and incankered corruptness” made it natural for Evertsz to think of him. All but one of the others were gunners, and thus probably friends of Woutersz and Allert Janssen. “Men,” Evertsz told them, “there is an assault on our hands. Will you help to give the prince a pleasant outing?”*24
There was a good deal of enthusiasm for the “trick” that was to be played on Creesje. Only one member of the group, an Alkmaar man named Cornelis Dircxsz, declined to have anything to do with the idea, and he did nothing to prevent the attack. Plainly, Evertsz felt sure that none of his sailors would dare betray him. His confidence was not misplaced.
With the high boatswain at their head they were eight strong, and much more than a match for one young woman taken by surprise. It was already late when Creesje left the Great Cabin after dinner. She stood silhouetted for a moment against the lanterns that swayed back and forth over the table, and they could see that it was her as the door swung shut. There was a momentary rustle in the darkness; she gasped and started, then she was being forced onto the deck. Hostile eyes glinted from behind cloaks drawn tightly over faces. As she sprawled on her back, uncomprehending, helpless, they seized her by the legs and dragged her across the deck into an unfrequented corner of the gallery. She felt her skirts lifted, and rough hands groping underneath. Other fingers spread a sticky, stinking mess across her face. There were no cuts; she did not scream; the assault lasted only seconds and then she was alone and huddled, shaking, against the rail. Her dress was filthy, and her face and legs and genitals had been thickly smeared with tar and dung.
Word of the attack on Creesje Jans spread rapidly throughout the ship. It was by far the most sensational event that had occurred since their stranding on the Walcheren Banks and must have been the principal topic of conversation on board for many days. The commandeur himself, as Jacobszoon and Corneliszoon had anticipated, took the news “very violently and to the highest degree.” Pelsaert was no policeman, but he investigated the assault as thoroughly as he was able, and Evertsz was soon back at work, spreading rumors:
“This had been the true aim which they thought to have brought off: to let it be spread by the High Boatswain that the people would be punished or brought to grief for the sake of Women or Whores, which the skipper would never permit to happen, so long as he lived.”
Yet to the chagrin of the conspirators, Pelsaert actually took no action that might render him disagreeable to the crew.
The upper-merchant’s restraint can only have one explanation. It was quickly evident that while Creesje herself had no idea who the majority of her assailants might have been, she had recognized Jan Evertsz, and unsupported though her testimony was, Pelsaert could have had the high boatswain arrested and punished on this evidence alone. He failed to do so, partly because he was still ill, but also because he had at last begun to glimpse the nature of the forces ranged against him. The merchant “especially suspected,” the Batavia’s journal observed, “from many Circumstances of which he had become aware during his illness, that the skipper had been the Author of it.” If so, he no doubt also recognized the risk he himself might run by ordering the arrest of both Evertsz and Ariaen Jacobsz—two of his highest-ranking sailors.
The skipper remained sanguine, unaware that he himself was now suspected. He was certain that the commandeur was merely biding his time. Once the Batavia neared Java—and the support of the Dutch authorities there—Pelsaert would surely act, arresting suspects and clapping them in chains. This development could still be the signal for a mutiny.
By now, the plot was fairly well developed. Led by Jacobsz, a small group of dependable men would rise up in the small hours of the morning, when the great majority of those on board were asleep. They would batter their way into the commandeur’s cabin, seize Pelsaert and toss him into the sea, while the main body of mutineers broke out their concealed weapons and nailed down the hatches to the orlop deck to prevent the soldiers intervening. Once it became clear that the rebels had control of the Batavia, fear and greed would make it a simple matter to recruit the 120 or so sailors and gunners needed to run the ship. In the absence of any spare boats, or a convenient island on which to maroon them, the rest of those on board—200 or so loyal officers, useless passengers, and unwanted men—would have to follow the commandeur over the side.
The remainder of the plot was equally straightforward. With a powerful new ship at their disposal, the mutineers would turn to piracy. Putting in to Mauritius or Madagascar for supplies, they would prey on the rich commerce of the Indian Ocean for a year or two, until they had accumulated sufficient loot to make every man on board wealthy. When that had been achieved, they would settle down to enjoy their money well out of the reach of the VOC.
So the skipper and the under-merchant sat back and waited for Pelsaert’s reprisals. The commandeur would act, Ariaen predicted, when Batavia sighted the Australian coast.
For the men of the retourschip, the great red continent was little more than a void on the charts they carried. “Terra Australis Incognita,” they called it: “the unknown South-Land.” Even in 1629, its very existence was based more on supposition than on fact. Early geographers, such as the Greco-Egyptian Ptolemy, writing in a.d. 140, had imagined a world divided into four gigantic continents. Europe, and what was known of Africa and Asia, was believed to occupy the northeast portion of the globe. This massive land mass seemed to require a counterbalance. From the earliest days, therefore, world maps showed a giant continent south of the equator, girdling the Earth and in many cases joining South America and Africa to China.
As the Portuguese and Spaniards pressed southward in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it gradually became apparent that the South-Land could not be as big as had been supposed. Ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn without sighting it and sailed northwest across the Pacific and east through the Indian Ocean without finding any trace of the mysterious continent. By the time the VOC was founded, almost the only place left to look was the great blank that still lay south of the Indies and west of the Americas.
Contemporary globes and maps continued to indicate the presence of Terra Australis in this area. Over the years, elements of fantasy had crept into descriptions of the South-Land, and in the sixteenth century faulty interpretation of the works of Marco Polo led to the addition of three nonexistent provinces to maps of the southern continent. The most important of the three was Beach, which appeared on many charts with the alluring label provincia aurifera, “gold-bearing land”; sailors often referred to the whole South-Land by this name. The other imaginary provinces were Maletur (scatens aromatibus, a region overflowing with spices) and Lucach, which was said as late as 1601 to have received an embassy from Java. The existence of these provinces was an article of faith for most Europeans; in 1545 the Spaniards had actually appointed a governor of the nonexistent Beach—a certain Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, who was one of the conquistadors of Chile. Even the more pragmatic Dutch did not entirely disbelieve, for their ships had occasionally stumbled unexpectedly across a coast that they believed must be part of Terra Australis.
In the first years of the VOC, the Company’s sailors had largely kept to the sea lanes established by the Portuguese. From the Cape of Good Hope, these ran north along the African coast to Madagascar, and then northeast across the Indian Ocean to the Indies. There were, however, significant problems with this route. The heat was frequently unbearable, the Portuguese unfriendly, and there were numerous shoals and shallows to negotiate along the way. Furthermore, once north of the Cape, contrary winds and currents made the voyage extremely slow; journeys of up to 16 months were not uncommon. Frequent hurricanes also occurred, which caused the loss of many ships. The Dutch persisted with the Portuguese route, unsatisfactory as it clearly was, only because they knew of no alternative.
Then, in 1610, a senior VOC official named Henrik Brouwer discovered an alternate passage far to the south of the established sea lanes. Heading south rather than north from the Cape of Good Hope until he reached the northern limits of the Roaring Forties, he found a belt of strong, consistent westerlies that hurried his ships toward the Indies. When Brouwer estimated that he had reached the longitude of the Sunda Strait, which divides Java and Sumatra, he had his ships turn north and reached the port of Bantam only five months and 24 days after leaving the United Provinces. He had cut about 2,000 miles from the journey, outflanked the Portuguese, more than halved the time taken to complete the outward voyage, and arrived in Java with a healthy crew to boot.
The Gentlemen XVII were suitably impressed. Faster voyages meant increased profits, and from 1616 all Dutch ships were enjoined to follow the “fairway” Brouwer had discovered. So long as the VOC’s skippers kept an accurate reckoning of their position, it was undoubtedly a far superior route. But the strong winds and fast currents of the Southern Ocean made it all too easy to underestimate how far east a ship had sailed. When this occurred, the vessel would miss the turn to the north and find herself sailing dangerously close to the barren coast of Western Australia.
There were several near disasters. In 1616 the East Indiaman Eendracht*25 unexpectedly encountered the South-Land after an unusually fast passage from the Cape, and sailed north along the coast for a few hundred miles. The charts her officers drew were incorporated into the VOC’s rutters, which henceforth indicated the existence of a small portion of the Australian shore, called Eendrachtsland; but it was by no means certain at the time whether this new coast was the South-Land or some smaller island. In any case, communication with Europe was so slow that news of the discovery took a long time to reach the ears of many skippers and when, two years later, another ship—the Zeewolf*26—chanced on what was almost certainly the North West Cape, her skipper was considerably alarmed “as we have never heard of this discovery, and the chart shows nothing but open ocean at this place.”
The Eendracht and the Zeewolf were fortunate to come on the coast in daylight and light weather. A clumsy, square-rigged East Indiaman encountering land by night or with a strong wind at her back could easily find herself ashore long before she could turn away. Only a few months before the Batavia arrived in Australian waters, another Dutch ship, Vianen,*27 had actually run aground on a sandbank off the northwest coast, and her skipper had to jettison a valuable cargo of copper and pepper to float her off.
In such circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that a ship would come to grief somewhere on the Australian coast sooner rather than later. In the event, the English East India Company—which in 1621 ordered its ships to follow the new Dutch route without really understanding its dangers or having access to even the fragmentary charts that the VOC possessed—was the first to lose a vessel. The ship in question was the East Indiaman Tryall, which sailed from Plymouth under the command of one John Brookes and struck an undiscovered shoal somewhere off the North West Cape shortly before midnight on 25 May 1623.
It might almost have been a dress rehearsal for the loss of the Batavia. As the Tryall filled with water, Brookes took the sounding lead and found less than 20 feet of water under the stern. Realizing that his ship could not be saved, he spent the next two hours loading as many of his employer’s “spangles” as he could into a skiff. At four in the morning, “like a Judas running,” in the words of his own first mate, Thomas Bright, the captain of the Tryall “lowered himself privately into the boat with only nine men and his boy, and stood for the Straits of Sunda that instant without care.” He was only just in time to save himself. Half an hour later, the ship broke up under the pounding of the surf, and although Bright managed to launch the longboat and save another 36 members of the crew, almost a hundred sailors were left to drown.
Brookes and Bright separately succeeded in reaching Java, where the first mate wrote a disgusted letter accusing his captain of stealing Company property and abandoning his men. For his part, Brookes composed a comprehensively mendacious report, claiming to have followed the established Dutch route to the Indies when he had in fact been sailing several hundred miles to the east of the accepted sea lanes. His error not only led directly to the loss of his ship; it also provided an early warning of the unknown dangers of the South-Land coast that Jan Company would have done well to heed.
The extreme difficulty that both the VOC and the English East India Company had in determining the position of their ships had its root in the most intractable navigational problem of the day: the impossibility of finding longitude at sea. Latitude, the measure of a ship’s distance from the equator, can easily be determined by measuring the angle that the sun makes with the horizon at its zenith. Calculating longitude is much more difficult. The prime meridian is a purely artificial creation in any case—in the 1620s the Dutch measured longitude west and east from the tallest peak on Tenerife—but, wherever it is said to lie, the sun passes directly overhead once each 24 hours on its way to lighting the whole 360 degrees of the globe in the course of a single day. In one hour, therefore, it traverses 15 degrees of longitude, and it follows that a ship’s position can be determined by comparing the time in a known location (such as a home port) with the local time at sea. This feat became possible only with the invention of dependable chronometers in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1629, Ariaen Jacobsz and his men tracked the passage of time with hourglasses, which were not remotely accurate enough for navigation.
Unable to determine their longitude precisely, Dutch sailors resorted to dead reckoning. They calculated their position from the color of the water, the appearance of seaweed, and birds circling overhead. Far out to sea, the only way of plotting progress on a chart was to estimate the distance run since the last landfall. The Dutch did this with a ship’s log—which in the seventeenth century meant tossing what was literally a chip of wood into the sea from the bows and timing it as it bobbed between two notches on the gunwale. From this they calculated their speed, and thus their approximate position.
The log was hardly a precision tool; the only way to time its progress along the side was to use a 30-second hourglass or a human pulse, and in any case it could not indicate the prevailing currents. Plotting a ship’s position correctly was thus all but impossible. Errors of 500 miles or more were commonplace, and it is in retrospect surprising that Dutch navigators did not find themselves cast up on the Australian coast more often than they did.
As they neared the end of their long journey, then, Jacobsz and his steersmen were trusting in dead reckoning and intuition to keep Batavia clear of the South-Land’s shores. The charts available on the ship were of at best limited use to them; the most up-to-date available, drawn in the summer of 1628, showed only broken fragments of the coast and the scattering of islands that the Dutch had occasionally encountered up to 60 miles off shore. Probably the skipper hardly bothered to consult them; in the early days of June he still believed he would not sight Terra Australis for another week or so.
In fact, a deadly obstacle now lay in the Batavia’s path. In 1619 the upper-merchant Frederick de Houtman—the brother of the man who had led the Eerste Schipvaart east in 1595—had stumbled on and lent his name to Houtman’s Abrolhos, the low-lying chain of reefs and islands that formed the principal obstacle to Dutch ships heading north along the Australian coast. He had been sailing from the Cape to Java in the East Indiaman Dordrecht (the same ship, groaning with age, was now a part of Pelsaert’s fleet) when he unexpectedly “came upon the south-land Beach” only six weeks out of Table Bay. Veering west and out to sea, the Dordrecht sailed north for 10 more days until De Houtman chanced on the islands of the Abrolhos where his charts indicated there should be only open sea. The surrounding reefs were plainly dangerous, and he did not survey them, merely sketching in their presence on his charts. The same islands were sighted by the Tortelduif*28 in 1624, but the skipper of that ship told few men what he had seen.
No other retourschip chanced on the Abrolhos before 1629, so Ariaen Jacobsz would have known nothing but the fact of their existence. No maps existed to tell him there were three groups of islands, stretched out south to north. No rutter recorded that even the largest of them was so low that the archipelago could not be seen from any distance, nor that it sprawled across almost a full degree of latitude, directly in the path of the Batavia. No instinct told Jacobsz that he should shorten sail by night and proceed cautiously by day.
When the ship struck, she therefore did so at full speed.