6
“We expected nothing else but death.”
ANONYMOUS SAILOR
THE BATAVIA’S LONGBOAT, with Francisco Pelsaert and Ariaen Jacobsz aboard, bobbed in the ocean swells north of the Abrolhos, steering for the South-Land. She was quite a substantial craft—a little more than 30 feet long, with 10 oars and a single mast—but though her sides had been built up with some extra planking there was still not much more than two feet between them and the ocean’s surface. The boat could easily be swamped in heavy seas, and even the short voyage to the mainland over the horizon—which the skipper guessed was only 50 miles away—was not without its dangers.
Pelsaert’s original intention had been to search for water on the nearest stretch of coastline and bring back enough, in barrels, to supply the rest of the survivors for several weeks at least. This, in turn, would make it possible to send a boat north to fetch help. The chief problem with the plan was that the coast of Terra Australis was so poorly mapped that neither the skipper nor the commandeur had any real idea where to search; the VOC’s earlier encounters with the South-Land indicated that a river reached the coast about 360 miles north of their position, but locating supplies any closer than that would require luck as much as judgment, and there was no telling how long it would take to get them back to the Abrolhos.
Lurking at the back of Ariaen Jacobsz’s mind was the thought that if no fresh water could be found they would have to sail the longboat straight to Java, where the Dutch trading settlement of Batavia was the one place they could be sure of finding help. The Indies were nearly 2,000 miles away, however, and even if such a lengthy voyage was possible, it would be at least two months before any survivors in the archipelago could be rescued; by that time it seemed likely that many of them, if not all, would have died of thirst. No doubt others in the skipper’s entourage had reached the same conclusion, for all 48 of the people who had been part of Jacobsz’s party insisted on sailing with him. They took with them all the remaining food and water. In consequence, the longboat, which was designed for no more than 40, was dangerously overloaded.
The only people in the boat who really mattered were the sailors. All the senior officers of the Batavia—the skipper, the three steersmen, and the high boatswain, Evertsz—were on board, and they alone had the experience and skills required to keep a small vessel afloat on the open ocean and navigate to and from the Abrolhos. Of the other 43 passengers and crew, the great majority were surely able seamen; in addition, Jacobsz’s cousin, the bos’n’s mate, and Harman Nannings, the Batavia’s quartermaster, were probably on board. Only six of those who sailed from the Abrolhos—three men, two women, and a child—had no apparent knowledge of the sea. Zwaantie Hendricx was one; Ariaen had kept her close to him ever since the wreck and had no intention of leaving her behind now. Zwaantie was accompanied by a young mother (she is not named in Pelsaert’s journals) and her two-month-old baby, who had been born somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Also on board were Hans Jacobsz, a joiner; Claes Jansz, the Batavia’s chief trumpeter; and Francisco Pelsaert himself.
They sighted the South-Land on the afternoon of 8 June, their first day at sea. The coast was bleak and utterly forbidding: flat; featureless; devoid of water, trees, or vegetation; and protected by an unbroken line of cliffs that stretched as far as could be seen in either direction. Huge breakers crashed endlessly against the rocks, churning the sea white with foam and making any approach to land extremely hazardous. By now night was only a few hours away, and Jacobsz did not dare remain inshore; instead, he steered back out to sea for several hours, turning east again at midnight and coming back upon the coast a few miles to the north at dawn. The sun rose to reveal an identically awe-inspiring cliffscape, and they sailed north along it for a whole day without finding anywhere to land.
Pelsaert and Jacobsz had, in fact, chanced upon the South-Land coast at its most desolate. From Houtman’s Abrolhos the shoreline remains almost unremittingly hostile all the way to what is now Shark Bay, 200 miles to the north. Along the way, the cliffs rise precipitately to heights of up to 750 feet. There are almost no safe landing places, and the hinterland is parched and almost uninhabited.
A few decades later, another Dutchman, Willem de Vlamingh, sailed along this stretch of coast and described it as “an evil place”:
“The land here appears very bleak, and so abrupt as if the coast had been chopped off with an axe, which makes it almost impossible to land. The waves break with so great a fury that one should say that everything around must shake and become dismembered, which appears to us a truly terrible sight.”
Pelsaert was of the same opinion. The cliffs, he noted gloomily, were “very steeply hewn, without any foreshore or inlets as have other countries.” Worse, the land behind them was uniformly unpromising: “a dry, cursed earth without foliage or grass.” There was no sign of any water.
To make matters worse, another storm blew up toward evening on 9 June, and the longboat was caught dangerously close to the coast. Jacobsz and Pelsaert had been searching for a landing place when the wind rose in the west, and they were driven steadily toward the cliffs. For a while it seemed they would all be tipped into the surf to drown, but eventually the skipper got them clear. Even then, however, it took continued effort from the steersmen to keep the boat clear of the shore, and they passed a miserable night and the whole of the next day battling the rising seas.
By the second evening, Jacobsz and his sailors were exhausted, soaked, and chilled, and still the gale showed no sign of abating. The wind started to gust out of the northwest, setting up a dangerous chop that slapped against the built-up sides and sometimes swilled into the longboat. The little yawl they had towed from the Abrolhos was taking on water too, and as it grew dark they were forced to cut the smaller boat adrift and bail their own craft frantically. They were so tightly packed there was little room for such energetic work, and before long the situation had become so desperate that Jacobsz ordered them to tip much of their food and spare equipment overboard. Two small barrels of fresh water in the bottom of the boat were spared.
With most of the supplies gone, the boat rode a little higher in the water and there was more room to bail. Gradually the danger of swamping receded, and on the morning of 11 June the storm blew itself out. But the swell remained as high as ever, and the current pushed them ever farther north.
For three more days they searched fruitlessly for a landing spot until, after a week at sea, they had reached latitude 24 degrees south. The longboat was now about 300 miles from the Abrolhos and one-sixth of the way to Java, and their own supply of water had nearly gone. Only strict rationing—half a pint per person per day—had made it last so long, but now they had enough for no more than another day or so. There could no longer be any question of turning back. They would die themselves if they could not find water farther up the coast.
At length, on the afternoon of 14 June, Pelsaert managed to get a party of men ashore at a place where he had spotted smoke rising from the mainland, but there was nothing to be found. Next day they tried again, this time on the North-West Cape, where they found a way inside the reefs and into calmer water. Here at last there were beaches and dunes. It was the first time Jacobsz had been able to land the boat, and with many more hands available to search for water, the commandeur split his party into two. One group was set to digging in the dunes while the other went to hunt among the rocks inland.
The dunes yielded only brine, but the men who had ventured inland had better luck. They chanced upon the remains of an Aboriginal fire, with discarded crab shells scattered all about, and close by found dozens of tiny pools among the rocks. It was rainwater, which had fallen during the storm a few days earlier; had they reached the spot a few days earlier or later it would not have been there. As it was, they gathered up enough to quench their thirst and still fill the nearly empty barrels with another 80 kannen of liquid (about 17 1/2 gallons), enough for at least another six days at sea.
There was nothing further to be found, and on 16 June they made their way back to the open sea. Pelsaert had intended to run into “the river of Jacop Remmessens,”*34 in the most northerly part of Eendrachtsland, which a Dutch ship had chanced upon in 1622; it lay on the far side of the Cape, still another hundred miles away, but the wind was now blowing from the east and forcing them away from the coast. It soon became apparent that they could not stay close to land, and as they were now more than 360 miles from the Abrolhos, with only enough water for themselves, Pelsaert and Jacobsz at last made the decision to head for Batavia. It was a serious step; there was every chance it could be interpreted as a deliberate act of desertion, and to protect himself the commandeur required all those on board to sign an oath signifying their agreement with his resolution. When that was done, Jacobsz swung the tiller. The longboat came about, and the skipper pointed her bow north into the Timor Sea.
There were few precedents for what the people from the Batavia were about to attempt: a voyage of about 900 miles across the open ocean in an overloaded boat, with few supplies and only the barest minimum of water. Jacobsz and Pelsaert had some advantages: good winds, fair weather, and a boat adapted to the open sea. But, even so, the Batavia’s longboat took on water continually, and none of those on board dared move too much for fear of overturning the boat. There was no shelter from the heat of the day. Before long, one of the sailors in the boat confessed, “we expected nothing else but death.”
The men who sailed in the longboat recorded few details of the privations they endured. Even Pelsaert, who kept up his journal throughout the voyage, confined himself to brief daily notes about the weather, the boat’s estimated position, and the distance run. But 160 years later, Captain William Bligh undertook a similar—though considerably longer—voyage after being cast adrift by the Bounty mutineers. He sailed 4,600 miles west across the Pacific with 18 men and their supplies crammed into a 10-man launch, leaving a detailed account that gives some clues as to what Jacobsz, Pelsaert, and their men must have gone through to survive.
Bligh was in command of an experienced crew of able seamen and did not have women or children to worry about. He also sailed across a part of the Pacific rich in islands, and only rarely for days on end across an empty sea. Nevertheless, his men suffered badly from overcrowding, as the people from the Batavia must also have done. They found it necessary to swap places in the boat every few hours and devised a system whereby men took turns on the tiller while others gingerly exchanged seats. Bligh also established a definite routine. The men in the Bounty’s boat were divided into three watches, as they would have been on board ship, to ensure there were always people alert to the danger of being swamped by an unexpected wave. Some of those who were off duty bailed; the others rested or slept. At noon they shot the sun and calculated their position. It seems likely Ariaen Jacobsz would have done the same.
A good captain—and William Bligh, for all his faults, was a fine one in this respect at least—also understands that men facing the likelihood of death need hope as much as they need water. Studies of shipwreck survivors have shown that men who do have hope outlive those who may be physically as strong or stronger but give way to despair. A stubborn determination to make land, perhaps see a wife or family again, has helped many sailors to survive long periods in open boats. Religion is another comfort; even the most agnostic man tends to turn to prayer in the middle of the ocean. Nevertheless, it is leadership—provided by a man who displays competence, remains confident, and tries to keep up the spirits of his men—that most often means the difference between life and death for sailors cast adrift. There were two such potential leaders in the Batavia’s longboat, the skipper and the commandeur; but from what we know of the two men—Pelsaert no sailor and still ill, Jacobsz not only an excellent seaman but loud and assertive—it seems certain that it was the skipper who performed this vital function in the longboat.
Thus Ariaen found some measure of redemption on the Timor Sea. Whether he still planned to mutiny is difficult to say. Jacobsz had no idea he was suspected of plotting against the Company, and without Jeronimus at his side the resolution he had displayed in the Southern Ocean may well have drained away. Cornelisz, as we have seen, retained some faith in him and hoped the skipper would murder Pelsaert during the voyage north, tip his body over the side, and then sail to Malacca for assistance. But though the Portuguese might indeed have supplied a rescue ship, when they heard about the VOC money chests waiting in the Abrolhos, it seems unlikely that Jacobsz could have disposed of the commandeur even if he had wanted to. There were, perhaps, half a dozen mutineers in the longboat; but they must have been heavily outnumbered by the loyalists. The three steersmen, for example, had never been part of Jacobsz’s conspiracy and were unlikely to stand by while Pelsaert was murdered and the boat diverted to the Malay coast. Besides, it would have been impossible, in the crowded longboat, to kill the merchant without being detected, and a struggle might have tipped the boat, and its passengers, into the sea. Frightened, thirsty sailors seldom make good material for mutiny, and as they neared the Indies the chances are that Jacobsz and Jan Evertsz spent more time husbanding their remaining stores than scheming against the commandeur.
The voyage from the North-West Cape had taken them 11 days—long enough for the remaining stocks of food and water to run dangerously low. Most of the bread had been tipped overboard during the storm, and what was left must have been severely rationed; the people in the boat would have endured severe hunger pangs at first, and then the dull feeling of emptiness that marks the onset of starvation. Rain fell on three occasions while they were at sea, marginally reducing their dependence on the water casks, but they were forced to cut the water ration even so. Thirst tormented everyone on board, but the knowledge that the boat was making rapid progress—they were sailing up to 90 miles a day—must have helped to sustain morale during the voyage.
The Javan coast was sighted on the afternoon of 27 June. They had completed the crossing only just in time; when the longboat made its landfall, only one kannen of water (less than two pints) remained of the 70 they had scooped up from the rock pools of the North-West Cape. Some caution was still required—the island’s southern littoral was not under Dutch control, and the local people might be hostile—but next morning they replenished their barrels from a waterfall and sailed and rowed on toward Sunda Strait, where the trade routes and the monsoon winds converged and Dutch ships congregated on their way to and from Batavia. Remarkably, all 48 of those who had left the Abrolhos in the longboat had survived the journey; even the babe in arms was still alive. Light winds delayed them, but they reached the southwest tip of Java on 3 July and found, to their intense delight, four VOC ships waiting in the Strait; one of them was the Sardam, the little jacht that had sailed with them all the way from Texel to the Cape. Four days later they were in Batavia.
The VOC’s headquarters in the Indies had been a town of little moment until Cornelis de Houtman arrived there one day in November 1596. It was then a community of perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 people, situated at the mouth of the Tiliwung River and protected by nothing more than a bamboo wall. The Javanese inhabitants, who called their town Jacatra, were subjects of the Sultan of Bantam, 50 miles to the west. They made their living from fishing, agriculture, and trade, and their town also boasted a small Chinese community, which controlled the arak-brewing business and a good deal of the general commerce besides. De Houtman purchased some supplies, and thereafter Dutch ships began to call regularly at the port, which was marginally healthier and a good deal cheaper than Bantam itself.
Gradually Dutch influence grew. In 1610 the local ruler, or pangeran, gave the VOC some land in the Chinese quarter and permission to construct a stone warehouse and a walled compound on it; within a few years, this building became one of Jan Company’s largest factories, or warehouses, in the Far East. Relations between the Gentlemen XVII and the pangeran were generally excellent, so, in 1618, the Company built a new hospital and a little ship repair yard just outside the town. It was also decided to move most of the business traditionally transacted at Bantam along the coast to Jacatra.
At this point, to the great displeasure of the VOC, the English East India Company began to build its own warehouse outside the walls. If the Jacatran ruler’s intention was to play the rival Europeans off against one another, he succeeded all too well. The Dutch attacked the English factory and burned it to the ground; the English retaliated by assembling such a substantial fleet outside the town that the whole Dutch community was forced to flee east to the Moluccas. That was far from the end of the matter, however; a few months later the VOC counterattacked in force, unleashing 2,000 troops against Jacatra, burning it down, and leveling the few buildings left standing in the ruins. The pangeran, who had sided with the English, was overthrown, and the old settlement was rebuilt as the fortress of Batavia.
The new town, founded on 30 May 1619, was protected by a modern castle on the coast, nine times bigger than its predecessor and built of white coral slabs. The castle had four bastions, known as Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, and Pearl, prompting the local Javanese to nickname the settlement kota-inten, “Diamond City.” The name stuck, not least because the trade that soon began to pour through the gates made it one of the wealthiest places in the Indies.
Old Jacatra disappeared; new Batavia looked Dutch. The houses were built of brick, much of it imported all the way from the Netherlands in the bilges of retourschepen sailing out in ballast, and they were tall and thin and roofed with tiles, just as they were in Amsterdam. The streets were lined with trees and ran in dead-straight lines, and there were churches, schools, and even canals built in the European style. The whole town, indeed, made few concessions to the tropics; most of the Dutch who lived there smoked and drank to excess, as they did at home*35; there was a tremendous preoccupation with rank and social status; and despite the humidity and heat, soldiers and merchants alike still dressed in the heavy black wool clothes that were the fashion in the Netherlands. The native Javanese were not allowed within the gates.
For all this, even newcomers such as Zwaantie Hendricx could never really think of Batavia as a European town. In many respects, indeed, it was thoroughly oriental. There was an extensive Chinese quarter and a whole street packed with gambling dens, which was closed to Europeans after dark. One in four of the citizens were Chinese, and, of the remainder, two-thirds were Asian slaves. The European population amounted to about 1,200 soldiers and a few hundred merchants, clerks, and artisans; there were very few Dutch women at all, and almost all the men took local mistresses or wives. The wildlife, too, was alien. Rainforest crept up almost to the gates; there were monkeys and rhinoceroses in the jungle, and tigers sometimes stalked and killed slaves in the sugar fields outside the walls. To make matters worse, Bantamese bandits often prowled in the vicinity, attacking and robbing those unwise enough to venture any distance from the town. Batavia thus existed in a sort of splendid isolation. Newcomers arrived by sea, stayed sometimes for years without seeing anything of the country they were in, and departed the same way they had come.
The community within the walls was singularly one-dimensional. Virtually the entire white population worked directly for the VOC. Over the years, the Gentlemen XVII did make repeated efforts to entice emigrants from Europe to settle in the Indies as “free-burghers”—private citizens who would, it was hoped, provide the sort of infrastructure a real community required—but since the newcomers suffered appallingly from disease and were never allowed to profit from the trade in spices, they made up no more than a tiny fraction of the population. The few would-be settlers who did make the journey rarely stayed for long. Drained and depressed by the muggy pall that hung limply over the whole settlement, they found the town intolerable. Disease was rife, the canals swarmed with mosquitoes, and the midday heat was so intense that even Jan Company did not require its clerks to be at their desks at noon. They worked from 6 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 6 p.m. instead.
The ruler of Batavia was the governor-general of the Indies. He was a senior merchant, sent out from the Dutch Republic by the VOC, who controlled—either directly or through local subordinates—not only the town itself, but all the Company’s factories and possessions from Arabia to the coast of Japan. The governor-general was charged not only with ensuring the profitability of the spice trade but with diplomatic and military affairs as well, and his powers within Batavia itself rivaled those of any eastern potentate. A Council of the Indies, made up of eight upper-merchants of wide experience, offered advice and played some part in the decision making, but it was rare for its members to stand up to a man on whom they themselves largely depended for advancement. Since it took a minimum of 18 months to send a request to the Netherlands and receive an answer, strong governors could and did defy even the Gentlemen XVII for years.
There were only two significant restrictions on the power of an able governor. One was the law—Dutch statutes applied throughout the VOC’s possessions, and legal affairs were in the hands of the fiscaal, a lawyer sent out from the Netherlands. The other was the ever-changing size and strength of the Company’s military forces. Like every other European power active in the Eastern oceans, the Dutch were permanently short of ships and men, and each governor-general was aware that if his factories and forts ever were attacked—whether by native armies, the English, or the Portuguese—his forces were so meager that the loss of a single ship, or a company of soldiers, might determine the outcome of the battle. The soldiers and sailors of the VOC understood this, too, and were much harder to control than they had been in the Netherlands. Men fought, drank, and whored their way through five years’ service in the East with little fear of punishment, and they were capable of causing considerable disruption within Batavia itself.
Only a governor of strong character could adapt to the debilitating conditions, deal with his own men and the local rulers, and still increase profits for the Gentlemen XVII; but in 1629, when the emaciated crew of Pelsaert’s longboat finally stumbled ashore in Java, it happened that just such a man had charge of all the VOC’s possessions in the East—a governor who was at once stern, unbending, humorless, God-fearing, honest, and austere. His name was Jan Coen, and he was the architect of the Dutch empire in the Indies.
Coen was a native of the port of Hoorn, in the North Quarter of Holland, and had served the Company since 1607, standing out so starkly among the self-serving private traders who peopled the VOC hierarchy in the East that he was promoted very swiftly. He was an upper-merchant at the age of 25 and governor-general by 1619, when he was only 32. Unlike many of the merchants serving in the East, Coen believed in using military force to expand the VOC’s dominions and had no compunction in unleashing the Company’s armies against both native rulers and his European rivals. He had already all but driven the English East India Company out of the Spiceries, founding Batavia along the way, and conquered the Banda Islands,*36 securing the world’s supply of nutmeg for the Dutch. The Gentlemen XVII held him in the highest regard, even tolerating the blunt and caustic criticisms of their own tightfisted lack of ambition that were a feature of Coen’s frequent letters home.
Nevertheless, as Pelsaert would have known, the governor’s unprecedented ruthlessness had caused the VOC all sorts of trouble in the last decade. The most notorious of several incidents had occurred in 1623 on the spice isle of Ambon, when the VOC wrongly suspected its English competitors of plotting an attack on the Dutch factory. Fifteen East India Company merchants were arrested, along with several Japanese mercenaries. The men were tortured until they confessed—one had flames played along the soles of his feet “until the fat dropt and put out the candles”—and then were executed. When news of the “Amboina massacre” reached London, the outcry that erupted was so violent that the Gentlemen XVII were forced to promise that Coen would see no further service in the East. Privately, however, the Company knew that it could not do without him. Within three years it had sent its most notorious servant back to the Indies, sailing under an assumed name, to begin a second term as governor-general.
Coen had returned to Batavia in September 1627 to find the city under threat. The Bantamese, whose lands lay to the west, had fallen quiet, but to the east of the Dutch enclave lay the much larger empire of Mataram, “an oriental despotism of the traditional kind” whose sultan controlled three-quarters of Java. The VOC—with its gaze fixed firmly on the spice trade—had little interest in its neighbor, which was a purely agricultural society with a barter economy, but Mataram coveted Batavia. Its ruler, Agung, was a conqueror who dreamed of ruling huge tracts of the Indies. He had already subdued several smaller sultanates and taken the title “Susuhunan,” which means “He to whom everything is subject.” Now he began to plan to overthrow the Dutch.
Within a year of Coen’s return, the Susuhunan attacked. In August 1628 Agung laid siege to Batavia with an army of more than 10,000 men, and the governor-general was compelled to order the evacuation of the southern and western quarters of the town. To deny Batavia to the enemy, Coen was forced to burn most of the settlement down and withdraw to the fortress, where he and his garrison endured a three-month siege that ended only when the Mataramese ran out of supplies. The siege was not lifted until 3 December, and the Dutch knew that Agung would almost certainly return the following August, when his next harvest had been gathered in. Thus, when Pelsaert’s emaciated, bone-weary sailors reached their destination—having no doubt sustained themselves during their ocean voyage with visions of feasting and debauchery in the taverns of the town—they found it lying in ruins and the inhabitants preoccupied with the prospects of a fresh attack.
In these straitened circumstances, news that a brand-new retourschip and her cargo had gone aground on an unknown reef was a particularly devastating blow. The Batavia, her money chests, and Pelsaert’s trade goods were together worth at least 400,000 guilders, the equivalent of about $30 million today, and the 280 people abandoned in the Abrolhos could have helped to swell Coen’s depleted garrison. The merchants of Jan Company had always understood that a small proportion of their ships would inevitably be lost on voyages to and from the Netherlands, but, even so, the wrecking of the Batavia was a serious disaster.
Pelsaert and Jacobsz must have appreciated this. Both men would have known that their future careers, and perhaps even their liberty, now rested in the hands of the most implacable man ever to serve the VOC—someone who “could never forget misdeeds even when they resulted from understandable human weakness, and whose heart was never softened by the sufferings of his opponents.” Only the previous month, Coen had vividly demonstrated his willingness to punish all those who transgressed his fearsome standards, no matter what their station, by flogging a girl named Sara Specx in front of the town hall. Sara was the half-Japanese daughter of the VOC fleet commander Jacques Specx, and her crime had been making love in the governor’s apartments.*37 Because she was only 12 years old, and her lover, who was the nephew of the town clerk of Amsterdam, no more than 15, even the fiscaal and the Councillors of the Indies had begged Coen to show compassion; but though there was evidence to show that the intercourse had been consensual and the lovers wished to marry, the governor-general had remained unmoved. He had the boy beheaded and was only narrowly prevented from having Sara drowned. The skipper and the commandeur knew that they could expect no mercy from such a man.
The longboat had arrived in Batavia on a Saturday. No work was permitted in the citadel on Sundays, but as soon as the Council of the Indies reconvened on 9 July the commandeur was summoned and asked to account for the loss of his ship. Pelsaert cannot have relished this audience with Coen, and he delivered what can only be described as a partial account of the whole episode, emphasizing that his navigators had repeatedly assured him that the ship was still well clear of land, and stressing his own determination to find water for the castaways. The decision to head for Java was presented as a regrettable necessity rather than a matter of self-preservation, and the commandeur was also careful to give the governor-general some cause for guarded optimism. The most precious trade goods had been landed in the archipelago, he reminded his interrogators, and even in the midst of the evacuation of the ship he had seen to it that buoys were placed at the wreck site to indicate the positions of valuables that had vanished overboard.
Jan Coen, it seems, was not overly impressed by this account, but one thing did count in the Pelsaert’s favor. On Coen’s last voyage out to Java, the governor-general had learned all about the dangers of the South-Land’s coast; he had nearly run aground on it himself. “When we chanced upon the Land of the Eendracht,” Coen had written in a letter home,
“we were less than two miles away from the breakers, which we noticed without being able to see land. If we had come to this spot during the night we would have run into a thousand dangers with the ship and crew. The ship’s position fixed by the mates was 900 to 1,000 miles away, so that land was not expected at all.”
This near disaster had occurred in September 1627, and the governor must have recognized that there were clear parallels between his own narrow escape on board the Wapen van Hoorn*38 and the loss of the Batavia. The fierce currents of the Southern Ocean had swept both vessels much farther east than they had realized, to the confusion of their skippers, and it was only Coen’s good fortune in coming onto the South-Land during the day, rather than in the middle of the night, that had saved him. Since the governor-general was, for all his harsher qualities, at least scrupulously fair, he thus forbore—for the time being—from any criticism of the commandeur. Instead, he offered Pelsaert one chance to redeem himself.
According to the records of the Council of the Indies,
“It was put forward by His Hon. to the Council, since it was apparent that it was possible that some of the people and also some of the goods might be saved and salvaged, whether . . . they should be sent thither with a suitable jacht . . . and it was found good to despatch the Sardam, arrived here from the Fatherland on the 7th inst.; to provide the same with provisions, water, extra cables and anchors, and to send back thither Francisco Pelsart, commandeur of the wrecked ship Batavia . . . in order to dive for the goods, with the express order to return hither as soon as possible after having done everything for the saving of the people and the salvaging of the goods and cash.”
Coen’s proposal was immediately endorsed by the other members of the council, Antonio van Diemen and Pieter Vlack. Directions were given for the Sardam to be rapidly unloaded and prepared for the voyage south, and while this was being done the governor-general wrote out his instructions to the commandeur.
At first glance, the orders that Pelsaert eventually received were reasonably straightforward, but they carried undertones of threat and had been drafted carefully to ensure that the commandeur had no excuse for any second failure. The Sardam was to sail to the Abrolhos as rapidly as possible, it was explained, and once there she would save not only any survivors but also as much money and equipment as possible, “so that the Company may receive some recompense to balance its great loss.” Time was not a consideration; Pelsaert should be prepared to spend “three, four or more months” at the wreck site if need be. Even if he had to wait for the southern summer to arrive before completing salvage operations he should do so, establishing a temporary base on the South-Land itself if storms drove him from the islands.
The commandeur was to be supplied with six divers, Coen went on—two Dutchmen and four men from Gujerat—and the Sardam’s crew was to be kept to a minimum, apparently in the hope that a large number of survivors might yet be found. In the event that no sign of the Batavia’s people could be found, the jacht was to sail on to the South-Land and scour the coast for traces of the passengers and crew. Above all, Pelsaert was cautioned, it was his duty “to salvage the cash, which is an obligation to the Company and on which your honour depends.” Failure to carry out these orders, it was definitely implied, would not be tolerated.
Ariaen Jacobsz had not been present at the council meeting to hear the commandeur’s attempt to place the blame for the disaster on his shoulders. He may still have been recovering from the rigors of their recent voyage or may simply not have been asked to attend; at any rate, it would appear that once they had arrived in the Indies, Pelsaert kept his distance from both the skipper and the boatswain, Evertsz.
The commandeur had evidently come to suspect both men of complicity in the assault on Creesje Jans long before the Batavia was wrecked. How he guessed they were involved we do not know for certain, but it certainly appears possible that Lucretia had recognized Evertsz as one of the masked men who had attacked her by his height or size, or strong North Quarter accent; and once that connection had been made, shipboard gossip, or something a little more definite than that, seems to have alerted Pelsaert to the role played by the skipper. Cornelis Dircxsz, the Alkmaar man who alone of those approached by the high boatswain had declined to have anything to do with the attack, is so carefully cleared of any involvement in the crime in the ship’s journals that it is at least possible it was he who eventually informed on his companions. Whatever Pelsaert’s motives and his evidence, however, it is clear that shortly after his arrival in Batavia he denounced both Jacobsz and Evertsz to his superiors. On 13 July Ariaen was suddenly arrested and thrown into the dungeons of Castle Batavia. Jan Evertsz followed him into the cells.
No record of the high boatswain’s arrest survives, but it is evident the allegations that he faced were serious, and every attempt was made to extract the truth from him. Justice, in Evertsz’s case, would have meant interrogation at the hands of the fiscaal, Anthonij van den Heuvel, or one of his subordinates. Sitting or lying, probably tightly bound, in a chamber deep within the citadel, the high boatswain would have been confronted with Pelsaert’s charges and the evidence against him and asked to confirm whether they were true. Denials were rarely taken at face value, and if the case was deemed serious enough, Evertsz would undoubtedly have been tortured in an attempt to make him talk.
This procedure was perfectly legal, though Dutch law did stipulate that a confession extracted under torture was not in itself enough to secure a conviction. Instead, the prisoner would be allowed to recover his senses and then asked to confirm the admissions he had just made. Only a “freewill confession” of this sort, made no more than a day after torture was applied, was acceptable as evidence of guilt. Naturally, however, the retraction of confessions made under duress was not the end of the matter and generally led only to the application of even harsher tortures, as Torrentius the painter had already discovered. Since the end result was almost inevitably the same, the Dutch insistence on freewill confession was thus something of a legal fig leaf.
Few men were capable of resisting the attentions of the torturer for long, and the high boatswain of the Batavia was not one of them. Before long a full confession of his involvement in the attack on Creesje Jans came tumbling from him. Given all that Evertsz knew about the skipper’s role in events on board the ship, and particularly his plans for mutiny, it is tempting to wonder exactly what he said during his interrogation at Castle Batavia. No evidence survives, but while it seems not at all unlikely that Jacobsz’s name came up in connection with the “very great insolences, yea, monstrous actions, that were committed on the mentioned ship,” the one surviving account—by Councillor Antonio van Diemen—confirms only that Evertsz was subsequently hung for the assault and makes absolutely no mention of Jeronimus Cornelisz. Whether this detail implies that the high boatswain was simply unaware of Jeronimus’s closeness to the skipper, that he contrived not to mention the planned mutiny in order to avoid still greater punishment, or that he was even more afraid of the under-merchant than he was of being tortured is unclear.
More is known of the charges brought against the skipper. The minutes of the Council of the Indies observe that there were two of them:
“Because Ariaen Jacobsz, skipper of the wrecked ship Batavia, is notorious through allowing himself to be blown away by pure neglect; and also because through his doings a gross evil and public assault has taken place on the same ship . . . it has been decided by His Hon. [Coen] and the Council to arrest the mentioned skipper and bring him to trial here in order that he may answer those accusations made to his detriment.”
Unlike Evertsz, the skipper does not seem to have been put to the torture. Perhaps he was protected by his rank; perhaps the governor-general and his council were simply less convinced of his guilt than they were of the high boatswain’s. In truth, however, there was really no need to rely on Pelsaert’s accusations in this case. It was beyond dispute that Jacobsz bore responsibility for the faulty navigation that had piled the Batavia onto a reef; and as the officer of the watch on the night in question he had been doubly responsible for the disaster. Whether or not he had had anything to do with what had happened to Creesje Jans, the skipper could be held indefinitely just for hazarding his ship.
The Sardam cleared Batavia on 15 July, a Sunday. The crew had set out one day before the date ordered by Coen, so anxious was the commandeur to be on his way.
Three of the men who had sailed north with Pelsaert were with him on the jacht. Two were steersmen, Claes Gerritsz and Jacob Jansz Hollert; their navigational skills would be needed to help relocate the Abrolhos, whose position at this time was still most uncertain. The third was the Batavia’s upper-trumpeter, Claes Jansz Hooft. The trumpeter was on the Sardam for an altogether different reason. He had left his wife, Tryntgien Fredericx, on Batavia’s Graveyard and must have been desperately anxious to rescue her.
The voyage from the islands to Batavia had taken 30 days, and even though the jacht would be sailing against the prevailing winds, she was a fast ship and Pelsaert probably hoped to reach the wreck site around the middle of August. By then it would be 10 weeks since his ship had gone aground, and the commandeur must have recognized that the people he had abandoned on Batavia’s Graveyard could only have survived by finding water. He knew, however, that heavy rain had fallen in the area three days after he had left—memories of the violent gale of 10 June would have been all too vivid for the people in the longboat—and he no doubt hoped to discover some, if not all, of the remaining passengers and crew alive.
The Sardam made reasonable time. The ship was south of Java by 17 July, and three weeks later, on 10 August, they reached latitude 27 degrees 54 minutes and found themselves less than 50 miles from Batavia’s Graveyard, which lies at 28 degrees 28 minutes south. What followed was more than a month of intense frustration. In the chaos that ensued after the loss of the Batavia, Ariaen Jacobsz and his steersmen had obtained no more than rough bearings for the wreck site. Calculating latitude required a navigator to “shoot the sun.” Persistent bad weather in the Abrolhos had made this very difficult, and the position given by the skipper was no more than an estimate. In consequence, Pelsaert knew only that the Batavia lay at about 28 degrees south, and since he had almost no idea of the wreck’s true longitude, it followed that the best way of finding the Batavia was to zigzag east along Jacobsz’s estimated line of latitude until the Abrolhos were sighted. The skipper had, however, miscalculated by about a third of a degree, placing the retourschip and the islands around 30 miles north of their true position. In most circumstances this would not have been an error of any moment, but when it came to searching for a few lumps of low-lying coral amid the endless swells of the eastern Indian Ocean it was a significant mistake. Pelsaert and the crew of the Sardam spent the last two weeks of August and the first half of September cruising fruitlessly to and fro some way to the north of Houtman’s Abrolhos.
It was not until 13 September that they at last chanced on the most northerly part of the archipelago. They were then no more than 17 miles from the wreck site, but the weather soon closed in and the Sardam had to spend another two days lying at anchor, riding out the storm. On 15 September the winds had abated somewhat, but the jacht made no more than six miles into a strong southeasterly and it was not until the evening of 16 September that Pelsaert at last sighted Hayes’s islands on the horizon. Night was falling and the sailors were all too aware that there were reefs about, so they anchored for the evening and got under way again at dawn. Soon the Sardam was only a few miles from the islands, her men lining the decks and climbing into the rigging to look for signs of life. At last, at about 10 in the morning, they found it: “smoke on a long island west of the Wreck, [and] also on another small island close by.” Pelsaert could hardly contain his joy.
There was still someone alive on Batavia’s Graveyard.