5
“Everything that has been done is not my fault.”
JERONIMUS CORNELISZ
IT WAS AS THOUGH THEY HAD BEEN CAST up on the edges of the world. Even today, on sullen afternoons, the islands of the Abrolhos are monochrome and listless—so drab they seem to suck the color from the sky. It is as if the archipelago lies somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, and the steel-tinged light suffusing it has filtered through a hundred feet of water. Deprived of sun, the sparse vegetation turns the color of old parchment; the clouds are dull and specked with quartz; even the sea is grey. The only thing alive there is the wind.
The gales blow endlessly throughout the southern winter, tearing up from the Roaring Forties and billowing so hard that they bend the low scrub double. Wind cracks and rattles canvas and whistles in the gaps between the coral. From May until July, the islands are swept repeatedly by storms, which rage for up to 10 days at a time, pile up surf against the reefs, and smash anything in their path, sending spray 30 or 40 feet into the air. The winds can rise to hurricane force—as much as 80 miles per hour, enough to ground the islands’ seabirds and knock the breath from any man who walks into them. They are made unbearable by the fact that there is virtually no shelter anywhere in the Abrolhos. On Batavia’s Graveyard, only a slight depression on the northeast shore affords any protection from this elemental fury.
The climate in the islands, which can be stifling in summer, is generally mild throughout the winter, which is the rainy season. The monthly rainfall from June until August is roughly four inches, but from September this figure drops to less than half an inch a month. Even when it rains, moreover, the water hardly ever pools on the ground in the Abrolhos. It trickles through the coral and back into the sea, leaving all but a handful of the 200 islets in the group quite dry and lifeless.
Batavia’s Graveyard, which lies in the northernmost part of the archipelago, is like this. It is a barren strip of coral rubble, 500 yards long, less than 300 yards across, and roughly triangular in shape. Its widest part stretches almost north to south along the edge of the deep-water passage discovered by Ariaen Jacobsz on the morning of the wreck; from there, the island tapers rapidly and almost to a point as it runs southeast. It is low and flat and featureless and can be crossed from side to side in less than 3 minutes, or circumnavigated in a little under 20. There are no hills, no trees, no caves, and little undergrowth; the highest point is only six feet above sea level; and though there are two small beaches on the western side, and some sand has found its way inland, this soil is nowhere more than two feet deep. Most of the ground is nothing more than shingle, slick in places with deposits of guano and treacherous to walk on. Although it is home to thousands of seabirds and several colonies of sea lions, Batavia’s Graveyard has no pools or wells, and thus no native land animals. It is dead, desolate, and utterly unwelcoming.
When the first of the Batavia’s men came ashore in the archipelago, they found no sign of any human habitation. The Abrolhos were too far from the Australian coast, almost 50 miles, to have been visited by Aborigines; nor had any Europeans landed there prior to 1629. Nevertheless, nearly 300 of the 322 people who were on board the retourschip when she ran aground had survived the stranding of the ship—a remarkably high proportion in the circumstances—and by the evening of 5 June, the ragged beginnings of a settlement had been established in the islands.
By now it was nearly two days since their ship had run onto the reef, but the survivors were still split into three groups. The majority, about 180 men, women, and children, had been put ashore on Batavia’s Graveyard. A further 70 men, including Jeronimus Cornelisz, remained stranded on the wreck, and the skipper had based 50 sailors and both the boats on his little islet close to the wreck. Ariaen’s party included not only Pelsaert but all of the Batavia’s senior officers. Between them, they controlled most of the food and water and all of the charts and navigational instruments that had been salvaged from the ship.
These dispositions were no accident. Jacobsz had displayed a good deal of bravery in the aftermath of the wreck, risking his life repeatedly to save the people on the ship. But he also understood with perfect clarity that none of them would ever see the Netherlands again if the boats could not reach Java to fetch help. He and his officers had the skills to sail them there; the people on Batavia’s Graveyard did not. In his own mind, therefore, Ariaen felt justified in doing what he could to improve his own chances of survival.
The survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard thus found themselves with neither leadership nor adequate supplies. The great majority—at least 100—were common soldiers and sailors of the VOC, and another score were either petty officers or idlers such as coopers, carpenters, and smiths. Creesje Jans was there, with about 20 other women, almost all of whom were wives of members of the crew; and of the remaining 50, more than half were youths and children. Most of these were cabin boys aged 14 or 15, but several were even younger than that, and one or two were babes in arms who had actually been born on board Batavia. Fewer than two dozen members of the group were officers, and, of these, seven were inexperienced VOC assistants who would have been only in their early twenties, and 11 merely Company cadets.
All this left at best half a dozen men to control and lead more than 170 frightened, cold, and hungry people, perhaps a quarter of whom were foreigners with an imperfect grasp of Dutch. To make matters worse, this tiny handful of officers could no longer rely on fear of the VOC to back up their orders. Authority was now a matter of persuasion, compromise, and cooperation—something none of them would have experienced before.
The caliber of the men on the island left a great deal to be desired. The only officer of any rank was Frans Jansz, the surgeon, whose popularity among the crew was no substitute for his inexperience of command. Nevertheless, in the first few days after the wreck, it would appear to have been Jansz who began to organize the survivors and who set about establishing a council to lead them, as was required by the customs of the VOC.
Jan Company was run by councils and committees. The Gentlemen XVII controlled the business as a whole, and each chamber had its own board of directors. In Java, even the governor-general worked through the Council of the Indies, and the highest authority in any VOC flotilla was not the fleet president, acting alone, but the Brede Raad, or Broad Council. While the ships were at sea, every upper-merchant and skipper in the squadron was entitled to a seat on this council, which dealt not only with any questions of broad strategy but also with criminal offenses. Because it was commonplace for the vessels of a fleet to become separated on their way out to the Indies, however, each retourschip also had its own ship’s council, with a normal membership of five. This council would typically consist of the skipper and the upper-merchant together with the vessel’s under-merchant, upper-steersman, and high boatswain, but the raad that was now set up on Batavia’s Graveyard was, necessarily, very different.
In all likelihood, the surgeon’s main supports would have been the predikant and the one real figure of authority on the island—the provost, Pieter Jansz. It had been the latter’s task to administer discipline on board ship, although his authority derived largely from the skipper and he actually ranked somewhere below the cooper and the carpenter in the Batavia’s hierarchy. It might be conjectured that the remaining members of the council would have been a petty officer, representing the sailors on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Salomon Deschamps, Pelsaert’s clerk, who was the most senior VOC employee actually on the island. This group would probably have turned to Gabriel Jacobszoon, the corporal of the 70 or more soldiers in the survivors’ party, for assistance; his men were a natural counterbalance to the sailors on the island. But even with the corporal’s support, the council lacked natural authority and probably struggled to keep order in the face of any real opposition from the men.
The need for such a body had been starkly demonstrated during the first day on Batavia’s Graveyard. At first the survivors’ chief emotions must have been relief, curiosity about their new environment, and considerable uncertainty as to what they should do next; but it would have taken only a short time to explore the island, and by the afternoon of 5 June the first pangs of hunger and thirst had unquestionably driven at least a few people to take what they needed from their limited supplies.
In some respects this was a natural reaction; the survivors knew that there was more food and water on the wreck and did not realize that foul weather, and the rioting soldiers and sailors still on board, had prevented Pelsaert and Jacobsz from salvaging more barrels from the stores. Nevertheless, once it became clear that some people were helping themselves to the barrels on the island, others would have hurried to secure a fair share for themselves. Already the once-disorganized mass of people on the island had begun to coalesce into small groups, half a dozen to a dozen strong, bound by some sort of common tie—soldiers, sailors, families, men who came from the same town, and others who had messed together on the ship. Emboldened by their numbers, these groups, it would appear, demanded what they wanted from the stockpile. A good deal of the food and most, if not all, the water, was thus consumed within 24 hours of the survivors’ arrival on Batavia’s Graveyard.
By evening on the second day, 6 June, the people on the island had begun to realize their mistake. There had been no more rain; a thorough search of the whole island had revealed no wells; and Pelsaert’s one attempt to bring more water had failed in circumstances that suggested there would be no others. The survivors were already suffering from thirst but, without boats, they had no means of leaving Batavia’s Graveyard to search for water. All 180 of them were trapped on an arid prison—one that, without another rainstorm, would quickly kill them.
As the drought continued into a third day, and then a fourth, the survivors’ agonies became intense. Without water, their bodies swiftly became dehydrated; after a day or so, saliva thickened into an unpleasant paste, and soon after that their mouths ceased to produce it altogether. Thereafter the symptoms only became worse: tongues hardened and swelled; eyelids cracked; the eyes themselves wept tears of blood. Throats became so dry that even breathing seemed difficult.
Ten of the people on the island died. The old and young would have been the first to weaken, but after four or five days without water all of the survivors would have been affected to a considerable degree. They clung to life by adopting the strategies that shipwrecked men and castaways have always turned to. Most, from the predikant down, drank their own urine; a few threw aside their caution and gulped seawater; a third group chewed incessantly on lead pellets in the vain hope that they could generate enough saliva to afford at least some relief. It is very likely, though the sources do not mention it, that they also killed seabirds and sea lions in order to drink their blood.
None of these methods of relieving thirst are particularly effective. Drinking one’s “own water,” as Gijsbert Bastiaensz put it, would have helped the survivors to reduce the risk of dehydration, but urine contains so many salts that it is worse than useless for quenching thirst. So too is seawater, and though it can be safely drunk in small quantities, one and a half pints—which contains the equivalent of an adult male’s daily requirement of salt—is the most that should be consumed in a single day. But the Batavia’s survivors had no way of knowing this. So potent is the folklore on the subject, which insists that drinking seawater leads invariably to madness, that they, like most shipwrecked sailors, no doubt refused it until they were already so dehydrated that it would have done them much more harm than good.
After three or four days without water, sheer desperation forced the people on the island to try to get fresh supplies from the wreck. There was not yet enough driftwood to build a raft, but the predikant’s servant-girl, whose name was Wybrecht Claasen, was a strong swimmer, and she volunteered to try to reach the ship without one. The Batavia was almost a mile away, but it was possible to wade across at least part of the shallows, and after two attempts the girl contrived to reach the reef. She hauled herself onto a rock within hailing distance of the ship, calling for a rope, and the people on the wreck hurled over a line. Claasen tied the rope around her waist and was hauled on board through the breakers—“not without great danger to her life,” as one of those watching from the island observed.
Remarkably, the maid did manage to return safely to Batavia’s Graveyard. It does not seem possible that she brought much water with her, but even a small amount would have helped to revive them and, in any case, her exploit was important from a purely moral point of view. It was the first real triumph the survivors had enjoyed since they had reached the island, and an important sign that they could take matters into their own hands, rather than waiting passively for death. In that respect, at least, the worst of their ordeal was now over.
Nevertheless, many more of the Batavia’s passengers and crew would have died of thirst within another day or so had it not been for a squall that mercifully struck the island on the fifth day, 9 June. In no more than an hour or two, the survivors collected so much fresh water in pieces of sailcloth spread out on the coral that they more than replenished their supplies. The rain continued through the night, and though it never fell more than intermittently thereafter, from then on there was always just enough to provide a modest ration for them all.
The position of the people on the wreck could not have been more different. The 70 men stranded on the Batavia had plenty to eat and drink; indeed the free access they now enjoyed to the private quarters in the stern, where the officers had kept their personal supplies, meant that most were better fed and watered than they had been for years. On the other hand, the ship herself was partly filled with water and, under the constant assault of the surf, she was rapidly disintegrating.
The Batavia held together for eight days, until, on 12 June, the breakers finally destroyed her. Long before that, however, it had become difficult to find a place on board that was still safe and dry, and the survivors’ discomfort was only increased by the certainty that when she did break up they would all be tipped into the booming surf. The majority of those left on board—Jeronimus Cornelisz among them—could not swim; these men must have taken Ariaen Jacobsz’s advice and built crude rafts or piled loose planks and empty barrels on the deck to be certain that they would have something to hang onto when the moment came.
Even the stronger swimmers could hardly have been confident of reaching shore. They had watched while the men who had jumped overboard on the night of the wreck were smashed against the coral and drowned, and knew that it took luck to get across the reef alive. So for a week they sat and waited for the ship to disappear beneath them, and while they waited, most of them drank. They were, one of their number later recalled, “left in such a desolate state.”
The destruction of the Batavia, when it finally occurred, happened so rapidly that the men on board were taken by surprise. Battered to the point of disintegration by the surf, the ship’s port side burst open and “the wrecking went on so quickly and easily that it was like a miracle.” As the waves rushed in, anyone caught down below must have drowned almost immediately. Even the men on deck hardly had time to reach their life preservers before they found themselves afloat. For most the end was quick; the breakers held them under or knocked them senseless on the coral so that they drowned. The lucky ones were swept right over the reef into the calmer waters beyond, but only 20 of the 70 men on board managed to float or swim ashore.
Jeronimus Cornelisz was not among them. When the Batavia’s upperworks disintegrated, his fear of drowning had prompted him to shimmy, apparently alone, along the retourschip’s bowsprit. The forward section of the ship had then broken away, with him still in it, and somehow drifted safely to the shallows. The under-merchant stayed there, clinging to his spar, for two more days, until the bowsprit fell apart beneath him. Then he floated to the island in a mass of driftwood, the last man to escape Batavia alive.
Jeronimus staggered ashore on Batavia’s Graveyard cold, wet, and utterly exhausted. He had been 10 days on the wreck, the last two of them alone, exposed to biting southeast winds and in terror for his life. Now he was jelly-limbed and spent, in desperate need of hot food and a place to rest.
The people of the island ran to meet him on the beach and half-helped, half-carried him into their camp, where he was gratified to find that he was treated with great deference and respect. Frans Jansz and his councillors came to greet him, and he was pressed to take dry clothing and something to eat. Then, when he had filled his stomach, he was urged to rest.
Cornelisz slept for hours in a borrowed bed and awakened to the sound of many voices. The campsite on the northeast quarter of the island had by now grown to quite a size, and it was alive with activity. The first crude tents had already been erected from spars and scraps of canvas cast up on the coral, and small groups of survivors were busy hunting birds or spreading strips of sailcloth to catch rain. Others scavenged washed-up bits of planking from the ship for fires.
The destruction of the Batavia had substantially increased this bounty. The survivors’ coral islet lay directly in the path of the winds blowing from the wreck site, and large quantities of driftwood now appeared, along with barrels from the stores. Over the next few days, 500 gallons of water and 550 gallons of French and Spanish wine were washed ashore, together with some vinegar and other victuals. The barrels were manhandled up the beach and left, under guard, in a central store; the spars and planks were gathered by the carpenters, who set to work to turn them into skiffs and rafts.
The appearance of these additional supplies was welcome, but one look at the meager contents of the store tent convinced Jeronimus that Batavia’s Graveyard would not support a large population for too long. With the arrival of the survivors from the wreck, the number of people on the island had grown to 208 men, women, and children. Even living on half rations, they would consume nearly three tons of meat and 1,250 gallons of water a month, enough to empty the stores in a few days. To make matters worse, the natural resources of the cay were already almost exhausted. During their first week on the island, the survivors had killed and eaten hundreds of birds, and so many sea lions that the colonies that had once crowded the beaches were all but gone, slaughtered for their meat. The rains were still intermittent and could hardly be relied on, and while they waited for the rafts to be completed there was still no way of leaving the island. Their position was precarious in the extreme.
It was for this reason, more than any other, that Cornelisz was welcomed when he came ashore. It was now the middle of June, and the people of Batavia’s Graveyard had seen nothing of Francisco Pelsaert for well over a week. For a few days Frans Jansz and his councillors had dared to hope that their commandeur would return with barrels full of water, but by now it had become only too clear that Pelsaert had left the Abrolhos and was unlikely to return. With the upper-merchant gone, Jeronimus, his deputy, was the natural leader of the Batavia survivors. It was no surprise that the surgeon turned to Cornelisz for help.
Within a day or two the under-merchant was elected to the raad. As the senior VOC official in the archipelago, he was entitled to a seat on the ship’s council, and his education and quick wit made him so much more articulate than his fellow councillors that they deferred to him, at least at first. The scant surviving evidence suggests that Cornelisz quickly came to dominate the group.
Jeronimus enjoyed his new position of authority, and his willingness to join the raad is easily explained. On Batavia, he had possessed no real power, but on Batavia’s Graveyard he was listened to attentively, and the orders that he gave were scrupulously obeyed. He had the luxury of a large tent to himself, and the commandeur’s own clothes—which had been salvaged from the wreck—were placed at his disposal. The under-merchant thus acquired by right the very things he had once planned to seize by mutiny. In his private quarters, surrounded by his requisitioned finery, Cornelisz became a man of consequence at last—the ruler, in effect, of his own small island kingdom.
Assured of the respect and deference he craved, Jeronimus threw himself into the business of survival. For a few days he was everywhere, striding about in Pelsaert’s sumptuous clothing, issuing an endless stream of orders and working energetically to improve the camp. He sent out hunting parties, supervised the erection of more tents, and oversaw the completion of the boats. The Batavia survivors were grateful for his efforts. “This merchant,” wrote Gijsbert Bastiaensz, “in the beginning behaved himself very well.”
In truth, however, Cornelisz soon tired of his exertions. He might adore the rigmarole of leadership, but he had no time for the responsibilities that it entailed. The work was hard, the detail bored him; and though he had enjoyed his welcome as a savior, he remained utterly self-centered. The fact was that the under-merchant did not care whether the people he was protecting lived or died. On Batavia, where his shipmates had stood in the way of his plans for mutiny, he had been willing to kill them all to seize the ship. On Batavia’s Graveyard, the same men had become mere mouths to feed, and he was still prepared to see them dead if he thought that it would benefit himself.
By the beginning of the latter half of June, moreover, Jeronimus’s inherent ruthlessness had been buttressed by a sobering discovery: rumors of his planned mutiny were circulating on the island. The man who had unveiled the plot was Ryckert Woutersz, one of Jacobsz’s recruits, who had taken considerable risks on the retourschip at the skipper’s behest, “sleeping for some days with a sword under his head” while he waited for the call to action. Outraged to discover that Ariaen had fled the archipelago without him, Woutersz determined to betray his master, “telling in public what They had intended to do, [and] complaining very much about the skipper.” For some reason the man’s initial allegations had been more or less ignored; perhaps the other survivors were too much racked by thirst to care about his stories, or they simply did not believe him. Now that the situation on the island had improved, however, fresh whispers had begun to sweep the camp. Jeronimus’s name, it seems, had not been mentioned; Woutersz may not even have known of the under-merchant’s involvement. But Cornelisz guessed that it might yet emerge. It was not the sort of matter he could afford to ignore.
Alone in his tent, Cornelisz took stock of his position with cold-eyed detachment. To begin with, he had to assume that Pelsaert and the skipper were by now on their way to the Dutch settlements on Java. Ariaen, he hoped, might yet find some opportunity to murder the commandeur, tip his body overboard, and change course to some other European port—possibly Portuguese Malacca. In that case the Batavia survivors would perhaps be rescued by foreigners and the revelation of the mutiny would cease to matter.
Nevertheless, as Jeronimus knew, there was every chance that Jacobsz and Jan Evertsz would get no opportunity to dispose of Pelsaert. In that case, much would depend on the skipper’s skill. The chances of an open, overloaded boat completing such a lengthy ocean voyage were poor, but Ariaen was a first-rate seaman and it was at least possible that he would reach the Indies. If he did, the Company would certainly dispatch a rescue ship, most probably a jacht, to recover its money chests and pick up any survivors. Provided that Jeronimus could stay alive long enough for the jachtto reach them—perhaps another month or two—he might yet find himself stepping ashore in Java.
In most circumstances, that too would be a welcome outcome, but Ryckert Woutersz’s allegations were a problem. Jeronimus was, he knew, immune to normal criticism in the Abrolhos; the Batavia’s men had no wish to risk angering the leader of the council by taking issue with him. But his power was not absolute, and while the other members of the council could band together to outvote him, any suggestion that he had planned to mutiny would be catastrophic. Such a thing could not be laughed off or forgotten, and if there ever was a full investigation of the matter, Cornelisz’s actions on the retourschip might prove to be his death sentence. The Dutch authorities would be bound to take the allegations seriously, and they would not hesitate to torture any suspects who fell into their hands. There was every likelihood that the truth would be uncovered in this way, and the ringleaders, including Jeronimus, exposed and executed. No matter what else might occur, therefore, Cornelisz himself could not risk going to the Indies.
What, then, was he to do if a Dutch rescue ship arrived? To a man as ruthless as Cornelisz, the answer appeared obvious. A jacht might carry a crew of no more than 20 or 30 sailors, so few they could be overwhelmed in a well-planned attack. Given the support of enough determined men, he could make himself the master of a rescue ship. There would be no need then to go to Java. Instead he could pursue the plan he had conceived in the Southern Ocean: turn pirate, make a fortune, and retire to some foreign port to enjoy the fruits of his endeavor.
Even if there turned out to be no rescue and no voyage, Cornelisz could see advantages to freeing himself from the restraints he labored under in the Abrolhos. As things stood, there were distinct limits to his power and authority. His suggestions might always be respected, and his orders generally obeyed, but there were still four other councillors on the raad, and he could be outvoted. The matter was made more serious by the fact that Jeronimus’s colleagues did not share his views on the need to hoard their limited supplies. Frans Jansz and the other councillors, the under-merchant had begun to think, would kill them all with their ridiculous insistence on eking out a ration to every man, woman, and child on the island. That was something he could not allow to happen.
Sometime during the third week of the month, therefore, Jeronimus made up his mind to instigate the mutiny that he had planned on the Batavia. The circumstances were, of course, now very different. There was no longer any ship to seize; the under-merchant’s closest ally, Ariaen Jacobsz, had deserted him; and—most importantly—it would no longer be nearly such an easy matter to control the majority of loyalists in the crew. But the Cornelisz’s goals had hardly changed. Jeronimus sought wealth, power, comfort, and security, and he was prepared to go to any lengths to secure himself these luxuries.
It took the under-merchant perhaps a week to recruit the men he needed to seize power on the island. Exactly how he managed this was never revealed in any detail. The survivors’ situation—stranded, short of food and water, and apparently abandoned by the VOC—no doubt made his task easier than it would otherwise have been, and the fact that up to a dozen of the sailors and soldiers who had been ready to mutiny on the retourschip had found themselves trapped on Batavia’s Graveyard was a significant advantage. But he also had his own abilities to call on—a quick, if perverse, mind and a pathologically charming tongue.
The Jeronimus of Pelsaert’s journals remains at best a half-drawn figure: ruthless and deadly, certainly, yet also someone whose real personality has always been obscured by layer upon layer of lies and special pleading. But he was, it seems, a truly charismatic figure—able to persuade a varied group of men that their interests were identical to his—and his talk of the wealth and luxury that might yet lie within their grasp certainly made enticing listening for men trapped in the grey surrounds of Houtman’s Abrolhos. Cornelisz was obviously and genuinely clever, and so vital that he stood out among the failures, novices, and second-raters who peopled the Batavia’s stern. He was also self-assured and eloquent in a way that awed men who were neither. The rabble of the gun deck and the educated assistants of the stern alike seem to have found him irresistible. Long before the end of June he had gathered about two dozen followers around him and felt ready to put his plans into action.
Most of Jeronimus’s men had been with him on the Batavia. The most valuable of them were a handful of army cadets, men such as Coenraat van Huyssen and Gsbert van Welderen who had sailed for Java in the comparative luxury of the stern and discovered they had little taste for life on Batavia’s Graveyard. They were young—no more than 21—and inexperienced, and so were unlikely to dispute the under-merchant’s leadership. And since they knew how to handle weapons, the common people on the ship instinctively deferred to them. Several soldiers, led by lance corporal Jacop Pietersz, had also been part of the conspiracy on the retourschip. The best of these were German mercenaries, who were also mostly strong and young; Jan Hendricxsz, from Bremen, was 24, and Mattys Beer, of Munsterbergh, was no more than 21. These men, along with several of their comrades, may well have seen action in the Thirty Years’ War,*29 gaining invaluable military experience along the way. The third and smallest group of mutineers consisted of a few men from the gun deck, mostly sailors whom Jacobsz had recruited but had been unable to take with him on the longboat. The skipper’s good friend Allert Janssen, who had been among the party that assaulted Creesje Jans, was the leading member of this group.
The Batavia mutineers had concealed their true numbers so effectively that it is now impossible to say with any certainty which of the other members of the under-merchant’s gang had been recruited on the ship. It seems likely that Rutger Fredricx, a 23-year-old idler from Groningen, was among the first men to be approached—he was the Batavia’s locksmith, and his skills would have been invaluable to mutineers who needed to imprison or restrain up to 200 of their colleagues. One or two of the VOC assistants were also aware of the conspiracy, and since they must have worked closely with Jeronimus on board the retourschip it may be that they, too, were among the earlier recruits. The remainder of the under-merchant’s followers appear to have been approached after the Batavia was wrecked. They would probably have been recruited from among the friends of the existing mutineers, or those who complained most bitterly about the discomforts of island life.
One of the assistants was of particular importance to Jeronimus. His name was David Zevanck, and he came from a rural area a little to the north of Amsterdam. Zevanck, like the others, was still young, and there are indications that he came from a good family, one that owned property and had some pretensions to gentility. How he had come to sail with the Batavia remains unknown. As one of the ship’s clerks, he must have been an educated man, but there was also a hard edge to his character. He was physically strong and handy with a sword, and of all the people on the ship, he was perhaps the closest to Cornelisz in ambition, ruthlessness, and character. Now he became the under-merchant’s principal lieutenant, organizing the men for him and ensuring that his orders were obeyed.
Beginning in the third week of June, Cornelisz began to plot rebellion, “acting very subtly and gradually, so that in the first 20 days it could not be perceived.” The under-merchant detached his followers from the other survivors, billeting them in two tents together with their weapons, and he collected all the other swords and muskets on the island into a central store that he alone controlled. Next, he prevented the ship’s carpenters from putting into action a plan to build their own small rescue vessel from the wreckage of the retourschip, and he began to look for ways of reducing the number of people on Batavia’s Graveyard. The latter was a necessary precaution, he and Zevanck agreed—both to conserve the limited supplies and to reduce the risk that their conspiracy might be uncovered. As things stood, the mutineers were still outnumbered about six to one by the other men on the island. The intention was to reduce the disparity by half.
The under-merchant’s solution to this problem was simple but effective. He sent his followers to explore the islands, using the first of the little skiffs that the carpenters had built from fragments of driftwood. Their purpose was not so much to find freshwater wells and new colonies of sea lions—which was what the people of Batavia’s Graveyard were told—as to provide the under-merchant with detailed information about conditions elsewhere in the archipelago. From Cornelisz’s point of view, it made little difference whether his men located additional supplies or not. What he needed was merely an excuse to send parties of survivors to the other islands in the group.
Within a day or two, the mutineers returned, reporting to Jeronimus that they had found nothing of any value in the Abrolhos. Like Pelsaert and his sailors, the under-merchant’s men had searched the two large islands to the north without finding any sign of water. They had also visited a pair of smaller islets, one less than half a mile away on the western side of the deep-water channel that ran along one side of Batavia’s Graveyard, and the other a little farther to the south. The closer of the islets was a long, thin, sandy spit that ran north to south for nearly a mile and was crowned with a narrow ridge covered in coarse grass and low vegetation; it was home to large flocks of birds and hundreds of sea lions—so many that the boats’ crews took to calling it Seals’ Island—but the few pools discovered at its southern tip were brackish and undrinkable. The other, which was the islet where Ariaen Jacobsz had set up his temporary camp, was just as desolate. The mutineers found nothing there but a few empty biscuit barrels, and the cay itself, which they named Traitors’ Island in bitter remembrance of the men who had abandoned them, was a mere pancake of loose coral. Its one resource was driftwood, which littered the entire southern shore.
Neither of these islands could possibly support more than a handful of people for any length of time, but the under-merchant did not care. “He said that the number who were [on Batavia’s Graveyard] together, about 200, must be reduced to a very few,” Gijsbert Bastiaensz recalled, and Cornelisz glibly announced that his men had made important discoveries. “Those people coming back again had got enough information that there was not any consolation there for any Human Beings,” remarked the predikant, “but the Merchant ordered them to say that there was water and good food for the people; whereupon some others were ordered to go, and others went of their own accord to know truthfully if there was Water.”
One group of about 40 men, women, and children were taken to Seals’ Island. They were provided with a few barrels of water and promised that fresh supplies would be ferried to them whenever they were needed. A smaller party, 15 strong and commanded by the provost, Pieter Jansz, traveled to Traitors’ Island. They took with them all the tools they needed to make rafts on the islet. Jeronimus had promised them that they could make their way to the larger islands to the north as soon as the boats were ready.
Shortly afterward, towards the end of the third week of June, it was announced that the “High Land” to the north was also to be colonized. These two large islands had now been searched for water twice without success—by Pelsaert on 6 June and by Zevanck and his men a fortnight later—but the survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard did not know this, so there were no protests when a third detachment, 20 strong, was sent to hunt for hidden wells. Almost all of the members of this party were troops who had remained loyal to the Company; they included “some of the boldest soldiers,” the predikant believed. Jeronimus saw to it that they were only lightly equipped and ensured that they were issued neither weapons nor a boat. The men were told to light signal fires when—or if—they found fresh water and were promised that they would be picked up when the fires were seen. In fact, Cornelisz had no intention of returning for them and hoped that they might die of thirst.
The group sent to the High Land included two young cadets, Otto Smit and Allert Jansz, but its real leader seems to have been a private from the small town of Winschoten in Groningen whose name was Wiebbe Hayes. Nothing at all is known about Hayes’s background, age, or military experience, but we know that the under-merchant had picked him out from among the 70 or more private soldiers on the Batavia, which implies that he possessed a certain presence. Unknown to Jeronimus, however, Hayes was also a man of considerable ability, and his character and sense of purpose seem to have been unusual for a private soldier of this time. It appears unlikely that he was a member of the grauw, the impecunious and uneducated rabble who had peopled the lower decks of the Batavia, and possibly he, like Coenraat van Huyssen and David Zevanck, came from a comfortable background and had somehow fallen on hard times. It was not entirely unknown for the children of respectable but impoverished parents to enlist with the VOC as ordinary soldiers, but if Hayes did come from such a family, he plainly had even less money and influence than men who could at least secure themselves commissions as cadets.
In any event, Wiebbe was able to keep his men alive on the High Land for almost three weeks. The soldiers soon discovered—as had Pelsaert and Zevanck before them—that there were apparently no wells on the smaller and more easterly of the two islands, but they did find small puddles of rainwater among the coral, and these sustained them while they completed their exploration. After several days, they moved west onto the larger cay, waiting for low tide and stumbling across the mile of mudflats that separated the islands to begin the search again. There they found abundant wildlife but no water, and once again they had to scour the ground for little pools of rain. Again, they found just enough to keep them alive. They continued this precarious existence for 20 days, searching endlessly for wells, hunting for food, and keeping watch for rafts from Batavia’s Graveyard that never came.
The first part of Jeronimus’s plan was now complete. The dispatch of landing parties to the four outlying islands had reduced the population of Batavia’s Graveyard by one-third, to somewhere between 130 and 140 people, and nearly four dozen able-bodied men and two dozen boys had been lured onto other cays where they posed no threat and would most likely die. Cornelisz and his followers were still outnumbered by the loyalists among the crew, but the under-merchant guessed that few of the 90 other adult males still with him on Batavia’s Graveyard had much stomach for a fight. He now guessed he could survive until a rescue ship arrived. The trick would be to seize it when it came.
The notion of capturing a jacht was certainly enticing, but Jeronimus knew that it would be no easy task. A frontal assault was out of the question; even the smallest VOC craft had cannon, boarding pikes, and muskets enough to fend off an attack. Nor was it likely to be possible to surprise and seize a ship at anchor in the archipelago, since the attackers’ boats would be seen approaching from a distance.
A better way, the under-merchant thought, might be to lure the jacht’s crew onto land. If a boatload of sailors from a rescue ship were to come ashore on Batavia’s Graveyard, they would be outnumbered by Cornelisz’s men. And if the mutineers could cut the landing party’s throats, they would probably leave themselves no more than 20 men to deal with on the ship.
Jeronimus, we know, believed that this idea had merit. But he also saw at once that it could not succeed while there were so many people on the island. For one thing, the supplies of food were still so low that they might all starve before a rescue ship arrived. For another, most of the Bataviasurvivors were still loyal to the VOC; there was every chance that they would try to warn their rescuers of the danger they were in. Once again, the solution to the problem struck the under-merchant as self-evident. The people in his way would have to die.
Most leaders would have balked at the idea of slaughtering 120 of their own men, women, and children, but Cornelisz regarded the prospect with his customary detachment. He was the leader of the ship’s council and thus invested with the power of the VOC. In his warped view those who opposed him, or were likely to, were mutineers themselves. As for the remainder of the survivors, those on the other islands, perhaps he simply believed that they would soon be dead, and never bothered to consider what might happen if they lived.
The killing began in the first week of July.
Jeronimus had waited several days for the opportunity to spring his mutiny. He wanted, first of all, to snuff out dissent, and since the members of the raad, were the most likely source of opposition, that meant finding a pretext to dissolve the existing council. The chance to do this arose when the under-merchant was informed that a soldier named Abraham Hendricx had been caught tapping one of the barrels in the stores. Under interrogation, Hendricx confessed to having crept into the store tent several times before, and to sharing his bounty with one of the retourschip’s gunners. In the survivors’ straitened circumstances, the theft was punishable by death. The gunner’s culpability was, however, harder to establish, and there seemed to be a good chance that the raad would spare his life. Jeronimus, it seems, decided to exploit this fact by demanding that both the guilty men be executed, fully expecting to be met with opposition.
“On 4 July, when Abraham Hendricx, from Delft, had tapped a Wine barrel several times and drank himself drunk—and had also given up some to a gunner, Ariaen Ariaensz, so that he also became drunk—Jeronimus proposed to his council, which he had called together, that they were worthy of death without grace or delay, and must be drowned forthwith.
“The council consented insofar as it concerned Abraham Hendricx, because he had tapped the barrel, but insofar as it concerned the other, Ariaen Ariaensz, they made difficulties and would not vote to sentence him to Death. Whereupon Jeronimus burst out, and said, ‘How can you not let this happen? Nevertheless, you will soon have to resolve on something quite else.’ At which words each one became afraid, and could not understand what he meant by that.”
Precisely what Cornelisz intended became clear enough next day, 5 July, when the under-merchant suddenly dissolved the raad and removed all the other councillors from their posts. This extreme, but not illegal, move allowed him to “choose for his new council such persons as accorded with his desires, to wit, Coenraat van Huyssen, cadet; David Zevanck, assistant; and Jacop Pietersz Cosijn, lance corporal.”
With this council of mutineers in place, Cornelisz at last felt secure. Zevanck and the others could be relied on to follow his instructions, and the other people on the island were unlikely to take issue with their edicts, so long as they were dressed up with a veneer of legality.
The under-merchant proved this point immediately by executing Hendricx*30 and accusing two carpenters named Egbert Roeloffsz and Warnar Dircx of plotting to make off in one of the little homemade yawls. The latter charge seems to have been based on nothing more than island gossip, but the new raad had no compunction in passing death sentences on both men and, significantly, there was no sign of dissent among the rank-and-file survivors. Roeloffsz and Dircx were killed later the same day by two of Jeronimus’s men, Daniel Cornelissen and Hans Frederick, both cadets. “Daniel,” the Batavia journals relate, “has pierced the foresaid Warnar with a sword; of which he boasted later, saying that it went through him as easily as butter . . . [and Hans Frederick] has let himself be used very willingly [and] has also given two or three hacks to Warnar.”
Cornelisz thus contrived to rid himself of not one but three possible opponents within a day of seizing control of the ship’s council. He was, however, perfectly aware of the overriding need for caution in the methods he employed. He and his men were still heavily outnumbered, and it was important to proceed so that the people of the island did not suspect that their numbers were being systematically reduced. Some better way had to be found of disposing of the strongest loyalists covertly, so that even their friends did not realize they had gone.
Batavia’s Graveyard itself was useless for such purposes. It was so small that a missing man would soon attract attention, and so barren that a body would be difficult to hide. Cornelisz’s solution was simple but effective. He announced that he was sending reinforcements to assist Wiebbe Hayes in the search for water. Several small parties—three or four people at a time—were to leave for the High Land in the coming week. These men, it was made clear, were likely to be gone some time. They were to remain with the soldiers until water had been found.
The Batavia survivors saw nothing unusual in such a plan. Jeronimus had made no secret of his desire to reduce the numbers on Batavia’s Graveyard, and it was obvious, from the absence of signals, that Hayes and his men had been unable to find water; they would no doubt welcome some assistance. Since there were no rafts to spare, it also made sense for the reinforcements to be rowed north by boatmen who would—of course—return alone. Only the under-merchant knew that the oarsmen would be chosen from the ranks of the most determined mutineers.
Cornelisz’s scheme was put into action immediately. The first party of reinforcements consisted of two soldiers and two sailors, who were to be rowed to the High Land by Zevanck and six of his strongest men. Four of the mutineers were Company cadets, and they were reinforced by Fredricx, the locksmith, and a soldier, Mattys Beer. Cornelisz’s followers thus outnumbered their intended victims by almost two to one.
The little group set off on a raft from Batavia’s Graveyard, rowing along the deep-water channel until the island had almost vanished in the distance. As soon they were well away from any help, the unsuspecting loyalists were set upon and taken by surprise. Their hands and feet were tightly bound and three of them were tipped overboard to drown. The fourth, a Company cadet called Andries Liebent, begged for his life and he was spared on condition that he pledged his loyalty to the mutineers. No one on Batavia’s Graveyard seems to have thought it odd that Liebent had returned, and the trap was judged to have worked so well that it was used again only two days later, when Hans Radder, a cadet, and the Batavia’s upper-trumpeter, Jacop Groenwald, were drowned. These men were enemies of Mattys Beer, who had maliciously denounced them to Jeronimus as “cacklers.” The pair were trussed up by Zevanck and his friends and held under the water while they drowned. Again, however, Zevanck spared an intended victim. This man was an assistant from Middelburg by the name of Andries de Vries, who was only in his early twenties and begged loudly for mercy. “Having been bound, he was set free and his life was spared for the time being,” the Batavia’s journals note. But De Vries, like Liebent, had to pay a price to save his life: he was sworn to serve Jeronimus and to do as he was told.
Thus far, Cornelisz’s schemes had all succeeded admirably. The under-merchant had quietly recruited at least a score of determined men to do his bidding. He had successfully reduced the numbers on Batavia’s Graveyard, limiting the demand on his supplies and dividing his potential enemies into four separate camps, none of which had any contact with the others. He had silenced dissent by dissolving Frans Jansz’s raad and made his principal lieutenants councillors in its stead. Then he had begun to murder the Batavia survivors—the very people he was sworn to protect. By the end of the first week of July, he had killed eight of them, five covertly and three publicly, as thieves, and there seemed to be no reason why he could not deal with the remainder in the same manner, at least until the ranks of loyalists on the island had been so thinned that it would hardly matter if he revealed himself. As for the 14 men with Pieter Jansz, the 20 who had gone with Hayes, and the 45 whom he had ferried to Seals’ Island, they posed no immediate threat and could safely be ignored.
Hayes’s party was, it seems, the only one to cause Jeronimus concern. The survivors who had gone to Seals’ and Traitors’ Islands were mixed groups of men, women, and children, unlikely to put up much of a fight, but the men on the High Land were all soldiers—tough, self-reliant, and capable of making trouble. It was perhaps for this reason that the under-merchant had sent Wiebbe’s party as far away from Batavia’s Graveyard as he could and left the men without a boat on islands where he knew that they would struggle to survive. As days and then weeks passed without signals from the High Land, Cornelisz may have assumed that his enemies had died of thirst. That would have been to his advantage, but his plans did not depend on it. He was content to leave Hayes where he was for the time being—so long as he did not find any water.
In any normal circumstances, the discovery of wells on the High Land would have come as a huge relief to the survivors of a wreck. Jeronimus’s scheme for the capture of a rescue ship, however, depended on dividing the Batavia’s people into different camps, which he could deal with one by one. If water were found, however, the survivors would expect Cornelisz to gather all four of his parties at the wells, with the inevitable result that the mutineers would once again find themselves in a small minority. This was something that the under-merchant could not allow to happen.
The discovery of several cisterns on the High Land, which occurred on 9 July, thus threw his schemes into utter disarray. The under-merchant watched in disbelief as first one beacon, then a second, then a third, flared into life along the shoreline of Hayes’s islands. These signal fires confirmed that Wiebbe was still alive, 20 days after he and his men first went ashore, and informed the people of Batavia’s Graveyard that the longed-for water had been found. They were also the agreed sign that rafts should be sent to pick up the landing party.
For the first time since he had come ashore, Cornelisz found himself in a quandary. The signals could not be concealed—the beacons were clearly visible from the survivors’ camp—and yet they had to be ignored. Jeronimus had no intention of permitting Hayes and his troops to leave the High Land, but by refusing to send rafts to rescue them, he and his councillors gave the men and women of Batavia’s Graveyard the first clear indication that the councillors of the raad did not have their best interests at heart. Wiebbe, too, would doubtless realize that something was wrong, and it would no longer be easy to surprise him. To make matters worse, the soldiers could now survive indefinitely on their island, while Cornelisz and his men remained dependent on the intermittent rains for their own supplies of water. Hayes’s fires were thus not merely signs but portents—an indication that Jeronimus’s plot was beginning to unravel.
Almost as soon as the signal beacons were lit, indeed, Jeronimus noticed a flurry of activity on Traitors’ Island. He and his followers could see the people there struggling to launch two small, handmade boats from the north side of their coral cay. Pieter Jansz was the first man aboard, and he was followed by his wife and child. Then came a German soldier, Claes Harmanszoon of Magdeburg, whose wife was also with him, and a woman named Claudine Patoys, who took a child with her. The other members of the party were all men: a mixed group of soldiers and sailors, almost all Dutch. They picked up rough paddles carved from driftwood and began to propel their rafts through the shallows, heading north.
Cornelisz knew at once where they were going. He had lured the provost and his men onto their barren islet with the assurance that they could sail on to the High Land when the soldiers there found water. It had been an empty promise, of course, but evidently Jansz had been watching out for signal fires, looking for any opportunity to leave his miserable base, and now he was making for Hayes’s Island. The prospect of reinforcements reaching the soldiers on the High Land infuriated the under-merchant. While Jansz’s rafts were still some way off, he summoned the members of his council for a hasty consultation. Together, they decided to attack.
Traitors’ Island was only half a mile away, and there was little time to waste. Zevanck and Van Huyssen ran to gather their familiar accomplices—Gsbert van Welderen, Jan Hendricxsz, and Lenert van Os—and hurried to the beach where they kept their boats. Two other members of Jeronimus’s gang came with them—they were Lucas Gellisz, a young cadet from The Hague, and Cornelis Pietersz, a common soldier from Utrecht—but this, it seems, was as many as their fastest yawl could carry. The seven men seized oars and steered southwest to intercept the rafts.
Pieter Jansz must have been alarmed to see the mutineers. The provost may well have guessed that Zevanck and his friends intended violence, for the murders of Hans Radder and Jacop Groenwald had taken place within sight of Traitors’ Island, but he soon realized that he could not evade the yawl. His clumsy rafts were so much slower than the neat rowing boat the Batavia’s carpenters had built that Zevanck and his men had little difficulty in catching him.
The rafts were in the middle of a stretch of deep water when the mutineers caught up with them. As the yawl came within hailing distance, Zevanck raised his voice and called out to Jansz, demanding to know where he and his companions were going. Then he ordered the provost to change his course and make for Batavia’s Graveyard instead.
While this was happening, the mutineers’ yawl had swung alongside the provost’s raft, and Gellisz, Pietersz, Hendricxsz, and Van Os swarmed from one to the other, armed and full of menace. Three or four of Jansz’s men attempted to escape by hurling themselves into the sea, where they quickly drowned. The rest offered little resistance, and in less than a minute Zevanck’s men had relieved the provost of his command. Soon both the rafts were heading for the under-merchant’s island.
Jansz must by now have become seriously concerned for the safety of his family, but there was little he could do to protect them. He and his men watched uneasily as Zevanck jumped into the shallows and ran up the beach to where Jeronimus was standing by the entrance to his tent. The two men consulted for a moment, then Zevanck turned and hastened back toward the rafts. “Slaet doodt!” he was shouting. “Kill!”
Lucas Gellisz had got into the water and was holding the rafts steady. Hendricxsz, Pietersz, and Van Os were still on board. Quickly, the three men drew their swords and cut down the provost and his child. Two, perhaps three, of the remaining men were also killed, as was Claudine Patoys’s child, but for once the mutineers had found themselves outnumbered, and four of Jansz’s party threw themselves over the side into water that came up to their waists. Two of them were sailors—friends named Pauwels Barentsz and Bessel Jansz, who both came from the little port of Harderwijk in Gelderland. The other pair were soldiers Claes Harmanszoon and Nicolaas Winckelhaack. These men had apparently not realized that Cornelisz himself had ordered the attack, for they staggered out of the sea loudly imploring the under-merchant for protection. Jeronimus gazed down as the four men sprawled at his feet, soaked and breathless, panicked, desperate. “Give them no quarter,” he declared.
Jan Hendricxsz had come running up the beach behind the men, his sword still in his hand. Now he lunged at Pauwels Barentsz, carving a great wound in his side. Barentsz fell backward onto the sand as Andries Jonas—another of Cornelisz’s followers and, at 40, the oldest of the mutineers—loomed over him and thrust a pike right through his throat, turning the sailor’s screams to blood-flecked gasps and pinning him down while he died. Hendricxsz, meanwhile, slashed at Winckelhaack, killing him immediately, after which he wounded Bessel Jansz. Rutger Fredricx came to join him, “striking the mentioned Bessel with his sword until he was dead”; then the locksmith, alone, slew Harmanszoon as he fled back through the shallows. That left only the three women on the rafts. Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen bundled them into the yawl and sculled out into the channel, where the water was more than 100 feet deep. They then pushed Jansz’s wife, and Harmanszoon’s, and Claudine Patoys into the sea where—weighed down by their wet skirts—they drowned.
The massacre of the provost’s party, which took place in full view of the 130 survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard, brought the under-merchant’s plot into the open for the first time. For three weeks or more, the people of the island had accepted Cornelisz as their leader without question; now they saw him as he really was. Jeronimus may well have tried to justify his actions; it is possible he argued that Pieter Jansz had been a traitor to the Company for fleeing to the High Land in defiance of the orders of the council. But, if so, it did him little good. Even the most trusting of the retourschip’s crew understood that the killings they had witnessed were nothing less than cold-blooded murder—and mutiny against the authority of Jan Company. And although the VOC loyalists still outnumbered the under-merchant’s gang by about four to one, they were powerless to stop them. Cornelisz controlled all the weapons on the island, and only his followers had access to the swords, daggers, and axes in the stores. The island was so small and barren that there was nowhere to hide, and the boats were always guarded. Moreover, by a bitter irony, Jeronimus himself was now the living embodiment of the Gentlemen XVII in the Abrolhos. As the leader of the raad, he claimed the allegiance of all of the survivors. Any attempt to oppose him—even the least dissent—might itself be classed as mutiny against the VOC. Those who had watched as Pieter Jansz was hacked to pieces now understood that such actions would be punished with the utmost severity.
It was, then, hardly a surprise that at least another dozen men declared for Cornelisz over the next few days. Most appear to have joined the under-merchant in the hope of saving their own lives; a few were no doubt attracted by the prospect of better rations and freer access to the boats and stores. The majority of these opportunists were idlers or soldiers from the orlop deck, but at least one was an officer—an assistant from North Holland named Isbrant Isbrantsz. Frans Jansz, too, now that he had seen what Jeronimus was capable of, threw in his lot with the mutineers.
As it transpired, the new recruits played only minor roles in events on the Abrolhos, although they would sometimes be required to join the others in a show of force. Jeronimus, it seems, never really trusted them and frequently demanded some demonstration of their loyalty. For their part, the camp followers feared Cornelisz almost as much as did the other people on the island.
The first mutineer to be tested by the under-merchant was a German soldier named Hans Hardens. He came from Ditmarschen, a province close to Denmark’s border with the Holy Roman Empire. Having taken service with the VOC for a five-year term, Hardens had boarded the Batavia with his wife, Anneken, and his six-year-old daughter, Hilletgie. All three of them had survived the voyage and the wreck and found themselves together on Batavia’s Graveyard.
Hardens, so far as one can tell, had played no part in the conspiracy on board the ship, but he had gravitated towards Cornelisz’s circle in the month after the wreck, apparently in the hope of feeding and protecting his wife and daughter. In time he became one of the more active mutineers, though he was hardly the most violent. Nevertheless, there was something about him that gave Jeronimus pause. The soldier may have been too slow to obey an order, too free with his opinions, or perhaps too friendly with Frans Jansz. He invited Hardens and his wife into his tent and—while they ate and drank together—sent Jan Hendricxsz to strangle their little girl.
Hilletgie Hardens was the first child to be killed on Batavia’s Graveyard, but if her death was intended to test Hans Hardens’s loyalty, Jeronimus must have been satisfied with the result. No matter what his private grief, Hardens knew he had no choice but to stick to his allegiance to the mutineers, especially if he was to have any hope of protecting his wife. Three days after his daughter’s murder, Hardens swore an oath of fealty to his comrades: a solemn vow, a “written unbreakable agreement, the greatest oath that anyone can take, to be faithful in everything.”
The brutal killing of the little girl perhaps affected the Batavia survivors more than any of the other early murders. The other victims had at least been tried by the ship’s council, while Pieter Jansz and his men had arguably been guilty of disobeying Zevanck’s orders. Awful though their deaths had been, there had at least been some sort of explanation for them. Hilletgie’s murder seemed senseless in comparison, for not even Cornelisz argued she had been guilty of a crime. The girl’s death thus marked a significant deterioration of conditions in the archipelago. From then on, none of the retourschip’s passengers and crew could be certain they were safe. Showing loyalty to the under-merchant, obeying orders and working hard were no longer any guarantee of Jeronimus’s favor. He and his followers had begun to murder indiscriminately.
Matters were very different for the under-merchant’s gang, who now felt a sense of liberation. The first days of the mutiny cannot have been easy for David Zevanck and his friends. Their work was difficult and dangerous, and the risk of discovery was very real. By the middle of July, however, the assistant and his friends had gained considerably in confidence, parading openly about the island, fully armed, and taking what they wanted for themselves. “The whole day long it was their catch-call, ‘Who wants to be boxed on the ear?’ ” remembered Gijsbert Bastiaensz.
“So we all of us together expected to be murdered at any moment, and we besought God continuously for merciful relief . . . O cruelty! O atrocity of atrocities! They proved themselves to be nothing more than highwaymen. Murderers who are on the roads often take their belongings from People, but they sometimes leave them their lives; but these have taken both, goods and blood.”
Among their many privileges, Cornelisz’s most trusted men enjoyed better rations than the other Batavia survivors, eating cask meat instead of sea lion and bird, and drinking wines and spirits rather than rainwater. They had better clothes and larger tents, and their access to the boats gave them a freedom of movement that was denied to the loyalists. Significantly, the mutineers also experienced—for the first time in their lives—complete freedom from the constraints that had previously governed them. In the United Provinces they had generally been men of little significance and few resources, who struggled to make a living and were subject to the rule of law. In the Abrolhos they had status and wielded power over men and women who were their nominal superiors. They felt, moreover, little fear of retribution. Cornelisz’s position in the archipelago appeared to be unchallengeable, and the prospect of arrest and punishment remote.
Jeronimus had perhaps derived some satisfaction from crushing Hardens, for he next turned his attention to Andries de Vries. The young Zeelander was lucky to be alive, having escaped death by drowning at the beginning of the month, but he had yet to demonstrate his loyalty to the men who had spared his life. On 10 July Jeronimus gave De Vries that opportunity. He was told to prove his worthiness by killing on the under-merchant’s orders.
The chosen victims were people in the sick tent. There were 11 of them in all—useless mouths, Cornelisz observed, who were so weakened by scurvy and fever that they would offer no resistance. De Vries crept into their tent by night and cut their throats, one by one, while Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen stood over him to make quite sure he carried out his task. Three days later the assistant was compelled to return and slaughter another four or five men who had taken sick in the interim.
From then on, to fall ill on Batavia’s Graveyard was to receive a death sentence. First Jan Hendricxsz and Allert Janssen slit the throat of Jan Pinten, the island’s only English soldier, while he lay in bed; then a sick cabin boy went the same way. A few days later, De Vries and Janssen conspired to end the life of Hendrick Claasz, a carpenter. These killings also took place by night. The only invalids to be spared were associates of the mutineers: Hans Frederick, who had already helped to kill one man and may have been one of Hendricxsz’s associates, and Olivier van Welderen, who was Gsbert’s elder brother.
Having disposed of the sick, Jeronimus turned his attention back to the stronger survivors. On the evening of 12 July the under-merchant sent his favorite killer, Hendricxsz, out to rid him of Passchier van den Ende, a gunner, and Jacop Hendricxen Drayer,*31 who was a carpenter. These men were to be confronted by the old allegation that they had stolen something from the stores.
It was, it seems, a typically blustery Abrolhos night, for the shrieking of the wind and the snap and crack of canvas walls masked the sound of Hendricxsz’s approach. Van den Ende and Drayer only realized he was there when the flaps of their tent were suddenly thrown back and the German soldier emerged from the darkness like a vengeful angel, flanked by Zevanck, Van Os, and Lucas Gellisz.
The sailors realized at once that their lives were forfeit:
“[Jan] went into their tent and asked Passchier if he had any goods hidden there . . . . He answered weepingly, ‘No,’ and begged that he might be allowed to say his prayers, because he thought that it would cost him his life. But Zevanck said, ‘Get on with it.’ Thus Jan Hendricxsz threw him to the ground and cut his throat.
“The other one, Jacop Hendricxen Drayer, begged bitterly for his life, whereupon Zevanck and the others went to Jeronimus and said that Jacop was a good carpenter and should he not be spared. But Jeronimus answered, ‘Not at all, he is only a turner and furthermore he is half-lame. He must also go. He might become a babbler now or later.’ ”
With that, the murderers returned to Drayer’s tent. Remarkably, the hapless turner was still there, waiting for them. Perhaps his injured leg made it useless for him to attempt to flee; perhaps he genuinely hoped for mercy. If so, one glance into Hendricxsz’s blank eyes would have informed him of his error.
Disposing of a crippled man should not have taken long, but for all his disability, Drayer proved almost impossible to kill. Hendricxsz pushed him to the ground, and Van Os sat astride the turner’s hips while his friend stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. The dancing flame of Zevanck’s lantern set a shadow play of murder flickering against the canvas walls, but even with the benefit of light the German could not find Jacop’s heart. First one knife hit a rib and snapped in two, then a second broke uselessly in half. Hendricxsz seized another pair of daggers and drove them deep into his victim’s neck, but anger had made him careless and his thrusts missed Drayer’s windpipe, arteries, and veins. The two knives sliced through muscle and struck bone; their blades splintered on the turner’s spinal column and the mutineer found himself holding another pair of useless hafts. Jacop was still alive, and Hendricxsz, breathing heavily, had to thrust slippery fingers into the spreading pool of blood beneath the body, fumbling for a sliver of broken knife with which to slit his victim’s throat.
For Jeronimus’s mutineers, the glut of killings in the first half of July substantially improved conditions on Batavia’s Graveyard. By the 14th of the month, they had disposed of almost 50 men, women, and children, almost a third of whom had been too ill to put up any sort of fight. These deaths had reduced the population of Batavia’s Graveyard to about 90 people, of whom almost half were either active mutineers or hangers-on who had pledged loyalty to Cornelisz in the hope of saving their own lives.
By now, the mutineers’ chief enemy was boredom. The Batavia journals tell us almost nothing about how they passed the time from day to day. Some were set to catching fish and birds; others, evidently, must have mounted guard, watching the campsite and the boats. We know they sometimes fashioned makeshift weapons such as morning stars—lethal clubs manufactured from strips of lead that had been bent in half, studded with long iron nails and threaded through with a short length of rope so that they could be swung at the heads of future victims—and that Jeronimus occasionally invited a few men to his tent. There, amid overflowing bales of trade goods and company stores purloined from the wreck, the under-merchant plied his followers with wine and showed off their most prized possession—Pelsaert’s case of valuables, which had been landed on Traitors’ Island and abandoned there when the commandeur left in the overloaded longboat.
Inside the case were four bags of jewels, worth nearly 60,000 guilders, which the merchant would allow his men to run through their fingers, and a large agate cameo, almost a foot from end to end, which Pelsaert was taking to India at the request of an Amsterdam jeweler called Gaspar Boudaen. The cameo had been carved in the Eastern Roman Empire early in the fourth century, possibly on the orders of Constantine the Great; it depicted a classical scene, and the commandeur believed that it would find favor at the Mogul court. Boudaen had mounted it within a golden frame studded with precious stones, creating a piece so rare and valuable that even the Gentlemen XVII had not been permitted to inspect it before it was loaded onto the Batavia. Pelsaert had anticipated selling the jewel at a profit of perhaps 50 percent; the VOC was to receive more than a quarter of its value as commission, but in all likelihood the commandeur had also arranged to keep a portion of the sale price for himself. The cameo had thus been central to his hopes of earning a fortune trading luxuries and “toys” with the Great Mogul, and now it assumed an equally important place in Jeronimus’s plans.
While he watched his men caress the agate, the under-merchant spoke seductively of the wealth that they could earn from piracy. The mutineers were captivated by the stories that their leader spun. They were, said Andries Jonas, later, willing to do Cornelisz’s bidding, “for they were led into thinking that they would all be rich for life.”
While the under-merchant’s men lay back and dreamed of wealth and luxury, life for the remaining loyalists became a waking nightmare. They all existed in a constant state of fear. Trapped on a tiny island with a group of ruthless murderers, there was little they could do to save themselves. They were thousands of miles from everything they knew and just as far from help. They were unarmed, with nowhere to hide and no way to escape. Life on Batavia’s Graveyard thus became a matter of waiting for one’s turn to die.
The apparently arbitrary nature of the killings only made things worse, for it was impossible to know who would be the mutineers’ next victim. The under-merchant’s followers had grown accustomed to murder and needed little excuse, or none, to kill again. Standing out in any way—being too loud or too quiet, or failing in some task—could only hasten the inevitable moment when Zevanck or Jan Hendricxsz would appear, ready with some trumped-up charge and brandishing a sword.
Days in the Abrolhos were bad enough—but the nights were worse. Most of the murders took place after dark, when the islands seem to bulge with wind and even the endless thunder of the surf is drowned out by the calls of terns and mutton birds,*32 whose endless keening sounds exactly like the screams of human babies. By mid-July the moon had waned, so that the only illumination came from stars pulsing feebly from behind the scudding clouds, and the survivors had grown wary of approaching lights. Once the bobbing firefly of a watchman’s lantern, threading its way through the little settlement, had been a symbol of security. Now it could, and often did, mean death. Lying in their makeshift beds, shifting uneasily on the tilting plates of fan coral that littered the ground, the loyalists caught their breath whenever lamps approached. They waited for the sickly yellow glow to pass their tents and leave them alive, knowing all the while that one day it would not.
In the mornings, when Jeronimus arose, he could look west across the half-mile of deep water that separated him from Seals’ Island and see the figures of the men and women he had landed there moving about their own camp, almost opposite his own. He had left them unmolested for the best part of a month, while never doubting they should go the way of Pieter Jansz’s men eventually. By the middle of July, with the provost and the sick safely out of the way, he felt ready to attack.
There were still 45 survivors on the cay. Without supplies from Batavia’s Graveyard they would have struggled to find sufficient food and water to feed themselves, and many of them must have been ill and exhausted. Their leaders—Cornelis Jansz, a young assistant from Amsterdam, and Gabriel Jacobszoon, the corporal—had no more than 10 or 12 men under their command. The other members of the party were either boys (perhaps two dozen of them) or women with young children.
It is not clear how much these people knew of Cornelisz’s activities, but the murders of 9 July would have been clearly visible to anyone watching from the other side of the deep-water channel, and if Jansz and Jacobszoon really had no contact with the small boats that now ventured out to fish, they must have wondered why. It seems that the assistant and the corporal at least guessed what Jeronimus was planning, for they, like the provost’s men, had begun to construct rafts. Three or four were being assembled on the west side of their island, out of sight of Batavia’s Graveyard. The boats were just about complete when, on 15 July, the under-merchant’s men appeared, paddling a yawl across the channel separating the islands, heading directly for their campsite.
Jeronimus, who was growing rapidly in confidence, had sent no more than seven of his men to tackle the people of Seals’ Island. Zevanck and Van Huyssen were to lead the attack; with them went Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, Cornelis Pietersz, and a Swiss cadet called Hans Jacob Heijlweck. The last member of the party was the surgeon, Jansz, who had thus far played no part in any killings. It seems likely that Jeronimus ordered him to go, and that Jansz felt it wise to demonstrate his loyalty by obeying.
Cornelisz had issued precise instructions—“Kill most of the people,” he had said, “children as well as some men, and leave alive for the time being only the women who are there”—and for once Zevanck showed no interest in creating any pretext for his crimes. This time there were no accusations of treachery, no mention of any stolen goods. The mutineers had been issued with swords, daggers, and morning stars. They landed, drew their weapons, and attacked.
Van Os was among the first to leap ashore. “Lenert, immediately after he arrived, has stabbed one boy right through the body, and another through his buttock, and also Jacop de Vos, tailor, right through his side,” one account of this episode explains, “and as soon as they have come there Jan Hendricxsz has stabbed to death five cabin boys and two men.” The other mutineers split up, chasing and cutting down their unarmed opponents throughout the camp. Some of the men, including the corporal, had wives and families to protect, and they were probably among the first to die. The rest made for the rafts or hid. Eight men, including Cornelis Jansz, reached the boats and managed to escape, eventually finding their way to the High Land to the north. Several of the surviving cabin boys hid themselves among bushes in the middle of the island. The rest took to their heels and ran, heading north along the mile-long cay so nimbly that the murderers could not keep up.
Zevanck tackled this problem with his usual brutality. The mutineers had captured one of the cabin servants during their initial assault—he was Abraham Gerritsz of Amsterdam, the young deserter whom Pelsaert had rescued from Sierra Leone. Now he was dragged in front of the assistant. “Boy,” Zevanck explained, “you must help lustily to kill, or be in a fix yourself.” Gerritsz proved “very willing” to comply, though he perhaps obeyed more out of fear than real blood lust; in any case, he soon managed to catch another child of about his age, 15. The fleeing youth was wrestled to the ground, and, after a short struggle, Gerritsz pinned him down and killed him with a knife. The remainder of the boys—15 in all—could not be found, and eventually the mutineers gave up the search and turned their attention back to the camp.
The initial attack had left at least four men and six boys dead. Half a dozen more were badly wounded and now lay sprawled on the coral, no longer able to defend themselves. Zevanck and his friends dragged these men into the sea and held their heads under the water until they drowned. Four pregnant women—one of them Laurentia Thomas, the corporal’s wife—were found among the tents but spared in compliance with Jeronimus’s orders; and once the under-merchant’s men had satisfied themselves that there were no other rafts on which the few survivors could escape, the remaining youths were also left to be dealt with another day. The mutineers returned to Batavia’s Graveyard pleased with their day’s work, having reduced the population of the nearby cay by nearly half. The boy Gerritsz went with them, another recruit to the under-merchant’s cause.
Jeronimus wasted little time in resolving the problem of the fleeing cabin boys. A few days later he dispatched a second party to Seals’ Island, on this occasion waiting until after dark to be certain of catching the surviving members of the corporal’s party in their tents. Once again the mutineers were led by David Zevanck, but this time there were eight of them, including Mattys Beer, Gsbert van Welderen, and a youth from the small town of Bommel named Jan Pelgrom. The killers landed close to the camp without being seen and crept silently toward the tents, spreading out as they went so as to be able to enter each of them simultaneously. Then, at the assistant’s signal, they attacked.
One of Zevanck’s men that night was Andries Jonas, the old soldier from Luyck:*33
“On the 18 July, Andries Jonas has been ordered by Jeronimus to go, together with David Zevanck and another [six] men, with the little yawl to Seals’ Island, in order to kill there the remaining four women and about 15 boys who had not been killed on the previous murder of 15 July.
“Therefore Zevanck has asked whether he had a knife; Andries Jonas answered that he had a knife but it was not very sharp. Whereupon Zevanck handed him his own knife, saying, ‘Cut the throats of the women.’
“So willingly, without objection, Andries has gone to Mayken Soers, who was heavily pregnant, has taken her by the hand and led her a little to one side and said to her, ‘Mayken, love, you must die,’ and thrown her underfoot and cut her throat; that being done, he saw that Jan van Bommel was trying to kill Janneken Gist (the wife of Jan Hendricx from The Hague); therefore he went to help . . . and stabbed Janneken to death with his knife; the other two women were killed by the others.”
While this was going on, Van Welderen and Beer had crept into the tents with three or four of the other mutineers and caught the surviving cabin boys asleep. The mutineers set upon the youths with daggers and clubs, bludgeoning and stabbing them where they lay. A dozen of the boys were killed outright, or mortally wounded and dragged down to the sea to drown, but three managed to escape. Dodging their assailants’ blows, they ran into the darkness and disappeared along the ridge.
These boys survived until 24 July, when they foolishly emerged within sight of Batavia’s Graveyard. Cornelisz noticed them, and sent Stone-Cutter Pietersz with three men to flush them from their hiding places. This time the youths did not escape; the lance corporal captured them alive and herded them into his yawl. On the way back to Batavia’s Graveyard, on the under-merchant’s orders, he and Isbrant Isbrantsz forced one of the boys to throw his two companions overboard. The survivor, a child named Claes Harmansz, was spared. Like Gerritsz, he became a mutineer.
Jeronimus’s actions in the latter half of July 1629 suggest a man driven to commit ever more perverse atrocities by a burning need for novelty and stimulation. The under-merchant apparently felt jaded by the endless murders he had ordered, and—like some Roman tyrant—sought out fresh diversions to assuage his boredom. It was not as if he really needed more followers; his position on Batavia’s Graveyard was by now unassailable, and he was never to rely upon Andries De Vries or even Andries Liebent in the way he trusted Jan Hendricxsz or Mattys Beer. Rather, he seems to have taken special pleasure in exploiting weakness and corrupting youth.
De Vries, Liebent and the surgeon Jansz had already been forced to slaughter companions and friends in order to save themselves. Now Jeronimus and his men had forced Claes Harmansz, Isbrant Isbrantsz, and Abraham Gerritsz to become killers too. The under-merchant was, perhaps, intrigued by the changes that came over his followers once he had turned them into murderers; he seems to have found the conflicting emotions of guilt and exultation a fascinating study. And though he had always distanced himself from the violence that had engulfed the archipelago, he now seems to have become obsessed with the idea of experiencing the same sensations for himself.
Evidence for this contention can be found in an incident that occurred a few days after the first killings on Seals’ Island. For several nights Cornelisz and his companions had had their sleep disturbed by the endless wailings of a baby, the child of a girl from the lower deck named Mayken Cardoes. Mayken had saved her infant from the wreck and nursed it devotedly, even breast-feeding when the water on the island had run out and she herself was close to dying of thirst. But for all her frantic efforts the infant proved impossible to quiet, and she was unable to prevent it from awakening the merchant and his friends.
For Jeronimus, the crying baby seemed the perfect subject for his planned experiment, and he resolved to murder it. It was typical of Cornelisz that he chose to kill with poison—an apothecary’s weapon, and something he, alone of all the people in the Abrolhos, was able to prepare—and equally telling that he preferred to proceed by stealth. Mayken was brought before him and asked for details of the baby’s illness. One can readily imagine her accepting the under-merchant’s offer to concoct a medicine to soothe it.
The poison that Jeronimus produced, using materials that had been salvaged from the wreck, was an old alchemical compound called mercurium sublimatum. Cornelisz administered it on 20 July and watched with interest to observe its effect. He must have been disappointed to discover that though the potion quickly silenced the child’s crying, it failed to kill it altogether, merely inducing a sort of coma “so that it could neither live nor die.”
This failure left the under-merchant in a difficult position. It would, of course, have been easy enough for Jeronimus to have finished the helpless infant off, but for some reason he retained his old aversion to killing with his bare hands. He chose, instead, to blood another of the minor mutineers who had thus far evaded his responsibilities.
Cornelisz’s chosen instrument on this occasion was another of the island’s weaklings: Pelsaert’s trusted clerk, Salomon Deschamps of Amsterdam. Deschamps, who was the most senior VOC officer in the Abrolhos after Jeronimus himself, was a coward who had done nothing to prevent the under-merchant from seizing control of the islands, “permitting the evil to take its course without saying anything against it, shutting his eyes and dissimulating in order to prolong his own life.” Indeed, as soon as Cornelisz had seemed securely established, he had transferred his allegiance to the mutineers. Now the clerk was made to pay for this betrayal.
“On 20 July, at night, he was fetched out of his tent by Jacop Pietersz, who took him into Mayken Cardoes’ tent, where David Zevanck, Jan Hendricxsz and Cornelis Pietersz of Utrecht were, who said to him that they were not certain of his faithfulness [and] therefore took a Young Suckling child from the lap of the foresaid mother, Mayken Cardoes, and said to him, ‘Deschamps, here is a Half dead child. You are not a fighting Man, here is a little noose, go over there and fix it so that we here on the Island do not hear so much wailing.’ Then he, Deschamps, without protest, has taken the child outside the tent and has strangled it, an act of very evil Consequence.”
Mayken Cardoes’s baby was the first of the Batavia survivors that Cornelisz attempted to murder himself, and it would also be the last. Yet by the time Deschamps had squeezed its barely begun life from it, the infant had become the 105th person to die at the under-merchant’s hands. By now fewer than 60 people were still alive on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Jeronimus was close to doing what he had set out to do: “to have murdered or destroyed all the people until the amount of 45 or less.”
Of all the families on the island, by far the largest was the predikant’s. Gijsbert Bastiaensz and Maria Schepens had been blessed with a total of eight children, seven of whom had sailed with them on the Batavia. In an age in which half of all the children born in Europe died before reaching adulthood, Bastiaensz had been exceptionally fortunate to lose only one child in infancy. Even more remarkably, the predikant’s wife, his servant girl, Wybrecht Claasen, and all seven of the children had survived the many rigors of the voyage: running aground on the Walcheren Banks, the long journey to the Abrolhos, the shipwreck, five waterless and agonizing days on Batavia’s Graveyard, the maid’s struggle to fetch water from the hulk, and finally 20 days of terror at the hands of Jeronimus Cornelisz.
Bastiaensz enjoyed a certain status, it was true—one that had guaranteed him and his family good rations on the ship, and some protection on the island, too—but under the circumstances, the fact that he still had all his family around him must have seemed perfectly miraculous to the rest of the Batavia survivors: proof, if any were required, that the predikant truly was a man of God.
Of the minister’s children, four were boys. The eldest, who had been given his grandfather’s name, was called Bastiaen Gijsbertsz; he was 23 years old, and since he was sufficiently well educated and mature to do useful work, he had been given the rank of VOC assistant and spent the voyage helping Pelsaert with his clerical work. His brother Pieter Gijsbertsz was four years younger, but though certainly old enough to join Jan Company he had not done so; it is possible that—since Bastiaen was evidently unsuited to life as a predikant—Gijsbert’s second son was destined for the clergy. The other boys were still of school age: Johannes was 13 and Roelant, the youngest child of all, was only 8.
The minister’s daughters were Judick, Willemijntgie, and Agnete. Judick was the second child; she was 21 and thus of marriageable age. In so large a family she must have spent a good deal of her time helping her mother with the younger children, although Willemijntgie, at 14, was also nearly grown-up. The youngest girl, Agnete, had celebrated her 11th birthday shortly before they had reached the Cape.
On an island where women were outnumbered 9 or 10 to 1 by men, Judick could not help but attract attention, the more so because there were no more than three unmarried women on Batavia’s Graveyard. Soon she was being courted by Coenraat van Huyssen, the young cadet who was by now the murderer of half a dozen people. Being good-looking and a minor member of the nobility, as well as a leading member of Cornelisz’s blood council, Van Huyssen had some claim to be the most eligible of the island’s many bachelors, and unwelcome though his attentions were in most respects, they at least saved the girl from being molested by the other mutineers. She did not discourage him. Matters moved swiftly, and within a month of their arrival in the Abrolhos Van Huyssen was proposing matrimony—but with an ugly caveat. Since the couple could not legally be married in the islands (the consent of the groom’s parents, at home in the Dutch Republic, would be required to make the match binding), Coenraat agreed to be content with a mere engagement—so long, that is, as Judick consummate their betrothal on the spot.
The preacher and his daughter now found themselves in an impossible position. “Coenraat van Huyssen from Gelderlandt,” scribbled Bastiaensz,
“a member of the Council of those Murderers, besought my Daughter in Holy Wedlock. But said he would make a Betrothal with her and marry her legally before all the World, [and] that he would do at the first opportunity; many words were said about this matter, too long to narrate, for Judick and I deliberated thus: that it was better to be kept legally by one Man, in such a time, than to be mis-used. Therefore he made a betrothal vow with her, and all that went with that.
“I begged that she should go and live with him the next day . . . but the other Murderers, coming in front of the Tent, said that it had to happen that night and immediately, otherwise they were ready to kill us . . . . She has been with him in that respect, but she has not been abused, as she has told me. What could one do against it?”
As her father had predicted, Judick’s relationship with Van Huyssen was enough to safeguard her from harm, but even if the mutineer’s feelings for the girl were genuine, she had no power to protect the other members of her family. For two weeks now Cornelisz had eased his boredom and sated his men’s increasing blood lust every second or third day. The general pattern was one of increasing violence. Drownings had given way to stabbings and cut throats, and the sheer scale of the murders had increased, too—from the 15 people killed on 9 July to the 23 dispatched on Seals’ Island nine days later. In the three days since the latter massacre, however, the one incident of note had been the under-merchant’s poisoning of Mayken Cardoes’s child. This was not enough for some of the mutineers. The daily routine of catching, preparing, and eating food held limited appeal for men who had come to enjoy the power of taking life, and by the end of the third week of the month Zevanck and the others were anxious to kill again. The largest (indeed the only real) target left to them was the family of Gijsbert Bastiaensz.
Judick was now inviolate, and Cornelisz had decided the predikant himself might also be worth sparing; though their theologies could not have been more different, Jeronimus could still see uses for a man of God. Maria Schepens and her six remaining children were a different matter. On the evening of 21 July, Bastiaensz and his eldest daughter were lured away from their quarters by an invitation to dine with Van Huyssen and Cornelisz in the jonker’s quarters. While they were being entertained with a meal of cask meat and red wine salvaged from the wreck, David Zevanck and Jacop Pietersz gathered seven of the principal mutineers. Together, they made their way to the minister’s tent. It would be “a pleasant outing,” the Stone-Cutter declared, to “put the predikant’s folk out of the way.”
By now they were well-practiced killers, and the murders had been carefully planned. Earlier in the evening a group of Cornelisz’s men had dug a grave pit, large enough to hold eight bodies, not far from the tents. Zevanck and Pietersz had also decided to kill the family in their tent, where there would be less chance of any of the children contriving to escape. To this end the men exchanged their swords for knives and hatchets, which were better tools for killing at close quarters.
Pietersz and Andries Jonas were the last to arrive in the survivors’ camp. They found Zevanck and Jan Hendricxsz waiting; with them were Lenert van Os, Mattys Beer, Cornelis Pietersz, Andries Liebent, and a Dutch soldier called Wouter Loos. Inside the tent, the preacher’s family was cooking dinner. A kettle full of sea lion’s meat hung boiling over the fire.
The first men to approach were Zevanck and Hendricxsz, the most brutal of the mutineers. Zevanck crept to the entrance of the tent and called for Wybrecht Claasen. In a second or two the servant girl emerged, walking almost straight onto Hendricxsz’s dagger. The German soldier stabbed her once and left her dying on the shingle. Meanwhile Zevanck forced his way into the tent with the main body of the mutineers. It was so crowded that Pietersz and Jonas, the late arrivals, had to wait outside.
Maria Schepens and her children must have known they were dead the moment they saw the axe in David Zevanck’s hand, but once again the young assistant felt the need to justify his actions. There was an oil lamp hanging in the tent; he took it, lifted it above his head and called out, “Here has been reported hidden goods of the Company that we will search for.” He paused, then added ominously: “And we will get them.” At this, the other mutineers began to hunt through the few possessions in the tent until, after a moment or two, the lamp blew out—Zevanck no doubt extinguished it himself—and in the pitch-black crush the murdering began.
There were 14 people in the tent: 7 of Jeronimus’s men and 7 members of the preacher’s family, one victim to each man. The mutineers laid about themselves with hatchets. Lenert van Os caved in Maria’s skull with several blows, while Mattys Beer bludgeoned Willemijntgie. Wouter Loos pushed Bastiaen to the ground “and has beaten the eldest son underfoot with an adze, until he was dead,” while Zevanck, Van Os, and Beer between them accounted for Pieter, Johannes, and Agnete. The only child not killed or wounded in the initial flurry of blows was the youngest; eight-year-old Roelant was so small that he ducked through the legs of his attacker, Beer, and fled in terror, searching desperately for a way out of the tent. He almost got away; Beer dared not turn and swing at the boy for fear of striking one of his companions. But Zevanck and Cornelis Pietersz were standing close behind him, and one or other of them brought his hatchet down hard upon the child and killed him.
In only a few moments the killing ceased. Then the murderers became aware that one of their victims was still alive, and moaning in pain. It was Maria Schepens, “who was not then quite dead.” Mattys Beer bent over her as she lay prostrate on the ground and finished her off with several more blows to the head. The groans stopped. It was over.
They cleared the tent. Andries Liebent made off with the meat from the dead family’s kettle and took it back to his own quarters. The other murderers dragged the bodies to the pit that had been prepared and hurled them in, so that they lay huddled together in a single bloodstained mass.
It was still only midevening and the mutineers’ blood was up. The group split up and went in search of other prey. Jan Hendricxsz went to the tent of Hendrick Denys, one of the Company bookkeepers, ordered him out onto the shingle, and, when he showed himself, “battered in [his] head, with an adze, in front of his tent, so that he died immediately.” Meanwhile, Zevanck summoned Andries Jonas, who had not yet killed that night. “Go and call Mayken Cardoes out of her tent and cut her throat,” he told him.
Cardoes guessed well enough what was happening when Andries arrived outside her quarters. “Mayken,” Jonas said, “are you asleep? Come, we’ll go for a walk.” It was not a request but an order, and the girl had little choice but to obey. She emerged hesitantly from her tent. “Andries,” she begged him, “will you do me evil?” “No, not at all,” he said, but they had only walked a little way along the shore when he seized her without warning and forced her backward onto the coral. Fumbling for his knife, Jonas crouched over her; he reached down and tried to cut her throat, but she was struggling so violently beneath him that he could not manage it. After a few seconds he abandoned the attempt and instead leaned back, pinning her down with one hand while he tried to stab her with the knife held in the other. Desperately, Cardoes thrust out an arm and tried to seize the blade as it descended. She caught the tip of it, but the knife was traveling with such force that the blade sliced straight through the palm and emerged from the back of her hand, wedging itself firmly between the bones.
Jonas tugged hard at the haft, but the knife was stuck fast and he could not remove it. He could feel the unfortunate girl still thrashing about beneath him, attempting to free herself with her one good hand, so he let go of the knife and tried to strangle her instead. Even then he could not subdue her, but the sound of their struggles had alerted Wouter Loos, and he ran to Jonas’s aid. Exhausted, wounded, and pinned against the coral, Cardoes had no chance against two soldiers. Loos stoved her skull in with an axe and they hurled the corpse into the pit that had been dug for the bodies of the minister’s family. It was little more than a day since they had murdered the girl’s child.
Still David Zevanck had not had enough. Back in the mutineers’ camp he summoned Allert Janssen, who like Jonas had taken no part in the killing of the predikant’s family, and ordered him to kill the under-barber, Aris Jansz of Hoorn. Like Andries Jonas, Janssen employed a pretext to get the surgeon out of his tent and away from the camp, saying, “Aris, come outside, we have to go and catch four small birds for the merchant.” It was by now well after dark, and Jansz can hardly have believed that this was true, but like Mayken Cardoes he was too scared to refuse. The barber-surgeon and his murderer walked down to the beach, Aris slightly ahead of Allert, and just as they reached it Janssen drew his sword and stuck his victim a sudden blow across the shoulder. At this signal a second mutineer, Cornelis Pietersz, loomed out of the darkness; he had been hiding close by, and now joined in the attack, swinging at Jansz’s head. Remarkably, both men’s swords were so blunt that the surgeon was hardly wounded by their blows. Instead of falling to the ground as they had expected, Jansz took to his heels and vanished into the night, splashing away into the shallows to the east of the island. Janssen and Pietersz went after him, calling one to the other as they searched and no doubt cursing their luck, but their victim had the sense to drop down and let the water hide him, and they could not find him in the darkness. After a few minutes’ fruitless wading to and fro, the two mutineers managed to persuade themselves that Jansz had been critically wounded and was sure to die. “So they said to one another, turning back, ‘Hij heves al wel’ ”—“He’s had it”—and set off together, dripping, to report to Zevanck.
Bleeding somewhat, but otherwise not badly hurt, Aris kept himself hidden until he was quite certain that the mutineers were gone. Then, slowly and with great care, he worked his way around the island to the beach where Cornelisz’s men kept their skiffs. The boats were poorly guarded—probably Zevanck and the others had not imagined that someone might come at them out of the sea rather than along the island paths—and no one saw him as he untethered a little homemade raft and dragged it silently into the water. When he was well clear of the island, Aris clambered aboard, and began to pull for Hayes’s Island to the north.
Thus, by the end of the third week of July, the situation in the Abrolhos was relatively clear. Jeronimus and his gang of mutineers had secured absolute control over Batavia’s Graveyard. Nevertheless, their base, the island itself, was so devoid of natural resources that their position in the longer term was not absolutely assured. They remained dependent on the rain for water and on salvaged, and thus limited, supplied for everything else, from clothing to weaponry.
Meanwhile, Wiebbe Hayes and his original party of 20 men had somehow contrived to survive on the two largest islands in the archipelago. There had been no direct contact between the under-merchant and the soldiers for more than a month, but thanks to the arrival of the survivors from Seals’ Island, and then Aris Jansz, Hayes had a very good idea what the mutineers were doing and understood the danger he was in. Jeronimus, on the other hand, had no real inkling of the soldiers’ situation. He realized they had been forewarned and reinforced by several refugees, but neither he nor his council knew whether Hayes’s men were comfortably established on their island, or so short of food and water they were simply dying by degrees.
The under-merchant knew, however, that the situation had changed in one critical respect. Wiebbe might have no swords or guns, but now he did possess two boats. Cornelis Jansz’s little homemade boat and Aris Jansz’s skiff were not a danger in themselves; they could never carry enough men for Hayes to launch a worthwhile attack. But they could make things very difficult for the mutineers if Pelsaert reached his destination and returned to rescue them.