7
“What a godless life is that which has been lived here.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
GIJSBERT BASTIAENSZ SETTLED HIMSELF DOWN on the sand and stared disconsolately out to sea. It was now August in the archipelago, and the mutineers had kept him hard at work since the murder of his family some weeks earlier. The predikant was employed as the island’s boatman, launching the mutineers’ flotilla in the morning and hauling the skiffs and rafts back onto the little beach when their crews returned from a day’s fishing. For the remainder of the day he was merely required to remain near the landing place, and for the most part he spent those hours on the strand, seeking consolation in his Bible.
Gijsbert had not been allowed to mourn his murdered family. The day after his wife and children had been killed, the mutineers had found him “weeping very much,” and ordered him to stop. “Said that I ought not to do so,” the preacher noted. “Said, that does not matter; be silent, or you go the same way.” Nor did Bastiaensz receive, in Jeronimus’s kingdom, the respect and special treatment normally accorded to a minister. He not only worked, as everybody had to work, but ate the same meager rations as the other people on Batavia’s Graveyard. And, like them, the predikant heard Zevanck and the others freely discuss who they would kill next and how, and he feared daily for his life:
“Every day it was, ‘What shall we do with that Man?’ The one would decapitate me, the other poison me, which would have been a sweeter death; a third said, ‘Let him live a little longer, we might make use of him to persuade the folk on the other Land to come over to us.’ . . . And so, briefly, this being the most important thing, my Daughter and I, we both went along as an Ox in front of the Axe. Every night I said to her, you have to look tomorrow morning, whether I have been murdered . . . and I told her what she had to do if she found me slaughtered; and that also we must be prepared to meet God.”
Gijsbert was rarely allowed to preach. Religious affairs in the Abrolhos were now in the under-merchant’s hands, and—having made himself the ruler of the island—Jeronimus felt free to drop his old pretense of piety. To his followers, he openly espoused the heretical beliefs that had once been furtively discussed at Geraldo Thibault’s fencing club, so that “daily [they] heard that there was neither devil nor Hell, and that these were only fables.” In the place of these old certainties, Jeronimus preached the heterodox doctrines of the Spiritual Libertines, which he used to justify his actions and assuage the guilty consciences of his men.
“He tried to maintain . . . that all he did, whether it was good or bad (as judged by others), God gave the same into his heart. For God, as he said, was perfect in virtue and goodness, so was not able to send into the heart of men anything bad, because there was no evil or badness in Himself; saying that all he had done was sent into his heart by God; and still more such gruesome opinions.”
Even this summary of the apothecary’s views, written—as it was—after the fact by someone who scarcely began to comprehend such heresies, only scratches at the surface of Cornelisz’s beliefs. As a Libertine, Jeronimus held to a theology based on the central tenets of the Free Spirit as they had been set down in the fourteenth century. One of these beliefs, as written in a medieval manuscript, was that “nothing is sin except what is thought of as sin.” Another explained that “one can be so united with God that whatever one may do one cannot sin.”
What the other mutineers made of Cornelisz’s ideas it is difficult to say. The majority of them were barely educated men, and they could not have been expected to grasp the subtleties of the Libertine philosophy. But the general thrust of the apothecary’s thought was easy enough to understand; and his men had every reason to accept it, since it promised to absolve them from wrongdoing. Some of them evidently did embrace the new theology; it is certainly possible to hear garbled echoes of Jeronimus’s thinking in the pronouncements of his men. Still, the under-merchant was no prophet. There is no sign that Cornelisz much cared whether he made converts, and, as we have seen, his own grasp of the Free Spirit’s doctrine was incomplete. Though it seems likely that Jeronimus did think of himself as a Libertine, he also used the philosophy to further his own ends.
One of the under-merchant’s aims was to strengthen his own position by removing his followers from contact with the one authority in the islands that might have had the power to restrain them: the Dutch Reformed Church. By silencing the predikant, Cornelisz shielded the mutineers from the fear of criticism and divine retribution; and by introducing his men to a new theology he in effect began to create a new society in the Abrolhos—one in which his followers owed personal loyalty to him and were bound together not only by their crimes, but also by their rejection of conventional authority.
Once Cornelisz had assumed control of Batavia’s Graveyard, the mutineers were urged to reject the rules and laws that had until then restricted them. They were incited to blaspheme and swear—which was strictly prohibited by VOC regulations—and absolved from the requirement to attend religious services. Above all, they were encouraged to ridicule the predikant. On the one occasion that Bastiaensz did call on the men to pray, one mutineer shot back that they would rather sing; and when the minister beseeched God to take all those on the island “under His wings,” he looked up to find Jeronimus’s men capering about behind his tiny congregation. The mutineers were flapping the bloody, severed flippers of dead sea lions above their heads and sneering at his piety. “No need,” they hooted, “we are already under them.”
Jeronimus’s methods did help to bind him and his men together; nevertheless, it is clear that the under-merchant did not entirely trust the mutineers. Surrounded as he was by heavily armed soldiers, Cornelisz must have been painfully aware that he owed his position not to any military prowess—indeed, his actions all suggest that he himself was a physical coward—but to his unusually clever tongue; and he may have doubted he was strong enough to resist a real challenge to his authority. So, on 12 July, he required all two dozen of his followers to sign an “Oath of trust,” swearing loyalty to each other; and he also took oaths separately “from the Men he wanted to save, that they should be obedient to him in every way in whatever he should order them.” A second oath, sworn on 20 August, reinforced these vows. This one was signed by 36 people, including the predikant.By then the mutineers’ ranks had been swollen by fear.
It did not take long for a hierarchy to emerge among Jeronimus’s men. In theory they were equal, “assisting each other in brotherly affection for the common welfare,” but in fact Stone-Cutter Pietersz, the lance corporal, became the under-merchant’s second-in-command. Pietersz’s elevation no doubt owed a good deal to his influence among the soldiers, but since he was far junior to Cornelisz in rank, and a relatively colorless personality to boot, it was likely also because Jeronimus found him easy to manipulate. The corporal was certainly less of a potential threat than David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen, who were both self-confident, if junior, members of the officer class. Zevanck had not only led but orchestrated many of the killings on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Jeronimus had struggled to control Van Huyssen’s hotheadedness on the ship. The apothecary may have thought it wise to keep both men somewhat at arm’s length and invest more authority in the malleable Pietersz.
Cornelisz and the corporal set themselves apart from the other mutineers in several ways. They determined who would live or die, but they themselves did not kill, leaving Zevanck and Van Huyssen to carry out their orders. They were the only men to adopt new titles—Jeronimus renouncing the rank of under-merchant for that of “captain-general” of the islands, and Pietersz promoting himself all the way to “lieutenant-general”—and wasted no time in creating liveries to match their grandiose new ranks. Cornelisz, who had already requisitioned Pelsaert’s clothing, led the way, transforming the commandeur’s existing finery into a series of comic-opera uniforms. “He gave free rein to his pride and devilish arrogance,” the Batavia journals observed:
“The goods of the Company which they fished up . . . were very shamefully misused by making them into clothes embroidered with as much passementerie*39 as possible, [and Cornelisz] set the example . . . by changing daily into different clothes, silk stockings, garters with gold lace, and by putting on suchlike adornments belonging to other persons. Moreover, to all his Followers whom he could best trust, and who were most willing to murder, he gave clothes made from red laken*40 sewn with two or more bands of passementeries. And created a new mode of Cassock, believing that such evil vain pleasure as this could last for ever.”
The other mutineers soon followed suit, each man outfitting himself according to his status. The old Company ranks still counted for something on the island—assistants and cadets seem to have been treated more respectfully than ordinary soldiers and sailors—but even among the rank and file, some mutineers were more equal than others. The men the captain-general depended on most, and summoned most frequently, were the tried and tested killers who could be relied on to tackle and subdue full-grown men. This murderous elite included Jan Hendricxsz, Gsbert van Welderen, Mattys Beer, and Lenert van Os. The likes of Andries Jonas, whose victims were mostly pregnant women and young boys, enjoyed a lesser status, and the dozen or so men who signed Jeronimus’s oaths, but never took part in the killing, were no doubt looked down on by their murderous cohorts.
The elite mutineers seem to have enjoyed their work. Men such as David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen had been of minor consequence on board the Batavia; now they reveled in their status as men of consequence, possessed of the power of life and death. Others, including Jan Hendricxsz—who butchered between 17 and 20 people—and Lenert van Os—who slaughtered a dozen—were efficient killers, seemingly unburdened by conscience, who enjoyed moving among Cornelisz’s inner circle. Nevertheless, killing, in itself, was not the prime motive of the rank and file. These men murdered because the alternative was to become one of the victims, and because the favor of the captain-general meant improved rations and access to the island’s women.
There had not been many more than 20 females on the Batavia when she had left the Netherlands, and most of those were already dead—drowned, killed by thirst after the ship was wrecked, or cut down in the massacre on the rafts or on Seals’ Island. The mutineers had ruthlessly exterminated those too old or too pregnant to interest them. The handful of young women who remained were gathered on Batavia’s Graveyard, where Jeronimus and his men took their pick.
There were seven of them in all. Creesje Jans and Judick the preacher’s daughter were the only women from the stern. The others came from the lower deck: Anneken Bosschieters, the sisters Tryntgien and Zussie Fredricx, Anneken Hardens and Marretgie Louys, all of whom were probably married to soldiers or sailors among the crew. Tryntgien’s husband had found himself with Pelsaert on the longboat, and Anneken Bosschieters’s had gone with Wiebbe Hayes, leaving them without protectors. Hardens’s husband, Hans, was a soldier and a minor mutineer, and it is a mystery why he did not act to stop her from being corralled with the others. But he did not, and the women from the lower deck were set aside “for common service,” which meant simply that they were available to any of the mutineers who wished to rape them.
Jeronimus’s men were not entirely indiscriminate. Some of the officers behaved relatively well, and Coenraat van Huyssen, in particular, seems to have remained faithful to his fiancée, Judick. But many of the mutineers were less punctilious. It was normal for the women kept for “common service” to have had relations with two or three of the mutineers at least, and those who had been with only one man were envied. “My Daughter has been with Van Huyssen about five weeks,” noted Bastiaensz. “He has protected her very well, so that no disaster has befallen her, other than that she had to remain with him; the other Women were very jealous of her, because they thought that too much honour was accorded her.”
Of all the seven women, Creesje Jans was by far the most desirable, and Jeronimus claimed her as his own. Almost as soon as he took power in the island, the captain-general had Lucretia taken to his tent, where rather than assaulting her he made every effort to seduce her. For nearly two weeks, he wrote her sonnets, poured her wine—tried everything, in fact, to persuade her that he was not a monster. Cornelisz’s remarkable behavior suggests that he wanted to possess her not just physically but mentally—and that he also possessed a great capacity for self-delusion, for she resisted stubbornly, just as she had resisted Ariaen Jacobsz, and eventually Jeronimus gave up his attempts at gallantry. The story of what happened next somehow reached the ears of others on the island:
“In the end [Jeronimus] complained to David Zevanck that he could not accomplish his ends either with kindness or anger. Zevanck answered: ‘And don’t you know how to manage that? I’ll soon make her do it.’ He had then gone into the tent and said to Lucretia: ‘I hear complaints about you.’ ‘On what account?’ she asked. ‘Because you do not comply with the Captain’s wishes in kindness; now, however, you will have to make up your mind. Either you will go the same way as Wybrecht Claasen, or else you must do that for which we have kept the women.’ Through this threat Lucretia had to consent that day, and thus he had her as his concubine.”
Creesje therefore yielded in the end; but she did so unwillingly. Like the women kept for common service, the girl had acted to save her life, and as long as the captain-general was happy she at least assured herself of decent food and drink, and protection of a sort. The rest of the survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard—the menfolk and the boys—enjoyed no such assurance. Hungry, thirsty, ill, they lived in constant terror of their lives. Now that a good deal of the killing had been done, the mutineers’ existence on the island was increasingly routine, and they began to look for fresh diversions; attracting the attention of any of Cornelisz’s henchmen was unwise, and a few mutineers, perhaps unstable to begin with, became deranged.
The most extreme case was that of Jan Pelgrom, the cabin boy, whose “gruesome life” is vividly sketched in the ship’s journals. “Mocking at God, cursing and swearing, also conducting himself more like a beast than a human being,” Pelgrom lacked any self-control, “which made him at last a terror to all the people, who feared him more than any of the other principal murderers or evil-doers.” The boy’s sudden elevation—he had been one of the lowliest of the Batavia’s crew, and now found himself among the most powerful—practically unhinged him, and he took to racing around the island “like a man possessed,” spewing out challenges and blasphemies to anyone who would listen. “[He] has daily on the island run,” the journals observe, “calling out, ‘Come now, devils with all the sacraments, where are you? I wish that I now saw a devil. And who wants to be stabbed to death? I can do that very beautifully.’ ”
In this highly charged and dangerous environment, it is no surprise that the killings on the island did not cease with the murder of the predikant’s family on 21 July. Cornelisz and his blood council still sat in judgment on their dwindling band of subjects, and the captain-general continued to order executions.
What did change was the nature of the violence. For two weeks, Jeronimus’s men had killed—ostensibly at least—to limit the drain on their supplies. In reality they had also done so to remove potential rivals and ensure that there could be no challenge to their authority, but, whatever the motive, the murders themselves had been cold-blooded and considered. The slaughter of Gijsbert Bastiaensz’s wife and children changed that. The predikant’s family had, it would appear, been marked for death in the usual way; there were eight of them, not including Bastiaensz and Judick, and they must have been consuming a good deal of food and water. But the act of killing had roused David Zevanck and his men, and they had gone on to dispose of the unfortunate Hendrick Denys and Mayken Cardoes without orders from Jeronimus. Denys had been dispatched by Jan Hendricxsz, who was apparently in the throes of some sort of blood lust. Andries Jonas had been ordered to kill Cardoes, probably because he had taken no part in the general massacre and Zevanck wished to ensure that he shared responsibility for what had taken place that night. From this perspective, the murder of the girl can be seen as an attempt by Zevanck to assert control and ensure conformity within Jeronimus’s band. So far as can be ascertained, the deaths of these later victims had not been planned; both killings were atypical, and, when they occurred, one phase of the mutiny ended and another one began.
From that day on, the captain-general killed to kill. A handful of Jeronimus’s later murders were intended to settle scores or punish dissent, but increasingly they were ordered out of boredom or to defuse tension among the mutineers. There was no real need for further bloodshed; the number of survivors on the island had been satisfactorily reduced, rains continued to fall, and by now enough fish and birds were being caught to provide everyone with food. But life had become so worthless on Batavia’s Graveyard that a dispensation to kill became simply another way for Cornelisz to reward his followers. In the end he and his men were slaughtering for mere entertainment.
By the last week of July, the captain-general had already begun to set himself apart from the men whose support he had depended on at first. The law that death sentences could be passed only by the council, sitting in solemn judgment, was ended; the gardener Jan Gerritsz and a sailor, Obbe Jansz—drowned by Zevanck, Van Huyssen, and Gsbert Van Welderen on 25 July—were the last men to be executed in this way. From then on, Jeronimus ordered further murders merely on his own authority, and in an increasingly casual and arbitrary way.
On 6 August, for example, Cornelisz found himself dissatisfied with the work done by one of his carpenters:
“Jan Hendricxsz was called by Jeronimus in the morning when he was standing in the tent of Zevanck, and he gave him a dagger which he carried in his own pocket, with the words, ‘Go and stab Stoffel Stoffelsz, that lazy dog who stands there working as if his back is broken, through the heart.’ Which Jan Hendricxsz did with two stabs so that he was killed immediately.”
On other occasions, Cornelisz continued to make his men murder as a test of their loyalty. Rogier Decker, a 17-year-old cabin boy, had been the under-merchant’s personal servant on board the Batavia. As such, Decker apparently enjoyed some degree of protection on the island. He was not one of the mutineers—at least he had not signed the oath taken on 16 July—but one day “when he was frying some fish in his tent,” Jeronimus unexpectedly appeared. The cabin boy was taken to the captain-general’s tent, given a beakerful of wine for courage, and handed Cornelisz’s own dagger. Jeronimus then told him to stab another carpenter, Hendrick Jansz, who could be seen nearby. Decker carried out the order without protest, but the boy knew for certain that he himself would have been killed had he refused to do it. No attempt was ever made to explain why the blameless Hendrick Jansz was chosen as Decker’s victim, and perhaps there never was a reason; but now that he was blooded, the servant boy became a full-fledged mutineer, and he signed the oath of 20 August with the others.
Pelgrom did not have to be told to kill; he begged the captain-general for the opportunity. Even the boy’s companions seem to have found his intense desire to be a murderer strange and perhaps a little wearing, but Cornelisz evidently approved of it. He did nothing to curb Pelgrom’s daily rampages around the island and twice attempted to oblige the boy by finding him a victim. Jeronimus’s first choice was Anneken Hardens, one of the women kept for common service. Perhaps she had failed to give satisfaction or was chosen to help keep her husband, Hans, in line (the mutineers, it will be recalled, had already strangled the couple’s daughter, Hilletgie). In any case, Pelgrom was brought to the under-merchant’s tent one night and told that he could kill her. Andries Liebent and Jan Hendricxsz were to assist him. Jan, it seems, “was very glad, and he went quickly,” but he was also small and weak for his age and in the end Hendricxsz and Gsbert van Welderen had to strangle Anneken, using her own hair ribbon, while Liebent and Pelgrom held her legs.
The cabin boy would not give up. For two more weeks he pestered Cornelisz continually, until Jeronimus at last gave way. By this time the number of people on the island had been reduced to the point where only a small group of useful artisans remained alive alongside the mutineers themselves. One of their number was Cornelis Aldersz of Yplendam, a boy kept busy mending nets. On 16 August, when almost a week had passed without a murder on the island, Jeronimus decided that they could do without him.
As soon as he heard that Aldersz was to die, Pelgrom “begged so very much that he be allowed to do it” that Cornelisz agreed. Once again, however, the boy found himself frustrated by his puny body:
“Jeronimus said to him, ‘Jan, here is my sword, which you have to try on the Net-Maker to see if it is sharp enough to cut off his head.’ Whereupon he was very glad. Zevanck, hearing the same, maintained that he was too light for that. Meanwhile Mattys Beer came, who asked if he might do it, which was granted to him. So he took the sword. Jan would not willingly give it because he wanted to do it himself, but [Beer] tore it out of his hands and took it immediately to Gillis Phillipsen*41 in order to file it sharp. Meanwhile Jan was busy blindfolding the boy in the presence of Jeronimus, who said to [him]: ‘Now, be happy, sit nicely, ’tis but a joke.’ Mattys Beer, who had the sword under his cloak, [then] slew him with one blow, cutting off his head.”
Cornelisz, Zevanck, and Beer found this incident tremendously amusing. But Pelgrom, who had “daily begged that he should be allowed to kill someone, because he would rather do that than eat or drink,” did not share in their laughter: “When he was not allowed to cut off the head of the foresaid youngster, Jan wept.”
The decapitation of the net-maker was a mere diversion for the captain-general, a game played to pass the time one afternoon. But other murders that occurred at about the same time had a more serious purpose, for though the mutineers had won undisputed control of their little patch of coral, they could still not feel entirely secure. Even Jeronimus could not control every aspect of life on Batavia’s Graveyard, and, elsewhere in the archipelago, the soldiers who had been left to die of thirst on the islands to the north were still alive. Cornelisz, like so many dictators, was consumed by the fear that his followers might either cheat or challenge him, or defect to his enemies at the first opportunity.
The first man to fall foul of the captain-general in this respect was Andries de Vries, the assistant whose life had been spared by the mutineers. Andries had unwisely formed a friendship with Lucretia Jans, who, in the first weeks of July, was still resisting Jeronimus’s efforts at seduction. News of their relationship aggrieved Cornelisz; grimly, he forced De Vries to swear “that if ever in his life he talked to her [again], he would have to die.” On 14 July, the day after he had been forced to slit the throats of the remaining sick, Andries was caught by David Zevanck calling to Creesje “from afar.” Zevanck ran to tell Jeronimus, and the apothecary summoned Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, and Rutger Fredricx to his tent. The men were given a beaker of wine and a sword apiece, and at noon, in front of all the people on the island, they confronted the assistant. Andries guessed why they had come, and tried, uselessly, to save himself. What followed was in effect a public execution: “When De Vries saw that his life was forfeit, he fled into the water. But Lenert Michielsz, following him the quickest, chiefly hacked him to death.”
A second mutineer only narrowly avoided the same fate. The Batavia’s senior cooper, Jan Willemsz Selyns, was a hanger-on who had played only a minor role in the killings and had perhaps failed to show the necessary enthusiasm for Jeronimus’s schemes. On 5 August, Cornelisz sent Wouter Loos and Hans Jacobsz Heijlweck to dispatch the cooper in his tent; but Loos, who had felt no compunction in hacking Mayken Cardoes to death two weeks earlier, liked Selyns, and instead of killing him he begged the captain-general to spare the artisan’s life. Jeronimus, surprisingly, gave way, and nothing more was heard of the matter; but that afternoon, when the under-merchant ordered the murder of another potential defector, Heijlweck was among the four men chosen for the task, and Wouter Loos was not.
The new object of Cornelisz’s suspicions was Frans Jansz. The surgeon appears to have retained a good deal of influence in the archipelago—no doubt because of his involvement in the first survivors’ council—and for a while he and David Zevanck had competed for the captain-general’s favor. Zevanck won this contest, becoming Jeronimus’s chief executioner; but the assistant did not forget Jansz and was irritated to find him “in the way” on more than one occasion. The surgeon, meanwhile, retained a certain degree of independence. He was not one of Jeronimus’s band (that is, he did not sign the oath of 16 July); but he took part in some of its operations, and as he was still the most senior member of the Batavia’s crew in the islands, the mutineers could not ignore him altogether. Exactly what Jansz said, and did, in the survivors’ camp after Cornelisz supplanted him was never written down and is now lost. What we do know is that the under-merchant did not trust him and decided to remove him because “he would not dance exactly to their pipes.” The four men chosen to kill him accepted the commission eagerly. They were Lenert van Os, Mattys Beer, Heijlweck, and Lucas Gellisz.
By now they were well schooled in the art of murder. The surgeon was taken to one side “on the pretext of searching for seals,” and when he was well away from any source of help, his executioners fell on him together. Their attack was unusually violent, indeed excessively so, and suggests a certain personal antipathy: “Lenert Michielsz first stabbed him with a pike right through his body; after that, Hans Jacobsz [Heijlweck] smote his head with a Morning star, so that he fell down, and Mattys Beer has cleft it quickly with a sword.” Each of these blows would have been fatal on its own, but Lucas Gellisz wanted to make certain, and he “stabbed Mr Frans in his body with a pike,” finishing him off. “Which Gruesomeness,” it was subsequently observed, “he could just as well have omitted, because the man was already so hacked and stabbed.” The four men watched the surgeon die, then went to tell Cornelisz that Jansz would not, after all, be running off to Wiebbe Hayes.
As it turned out, Jeronimus had every reason to fear Hayes and the soldiers he had abandoned six weeks earlier. The captain-general’s scouts—like Pelsaert and the sailors in the longboat before them—had spent very little time on the two large islands to the north of Batavia’s Graveyard. They had gone ashore for perhaps an hour or two, found each in turn as rocky and barren as the rest of the archipelago, and seen no evidence of pools or wells. But the scouts had made a serious mistake in reporting to Jeronimus that the High Land could never support life. Both cays were, in fact, far richer in resources than the islands controlled by the mutineers.
The smaller of the two land masses, which lay farthest to the north, was two miles from end to end and about a mile and a half across. At its center stood the only hill in the entire archipelago, a modest hummock rising 50 feet above the sea; in consequence it was called the High Island. Its neighbor, just under a mile away to the southwest, was larger still—more than three miles long and not far short of two miles wide. Hayes and his troops established their base there, and in time it became known as “Wiebbe Hayes’s Island.” The two isles were connected by the mile-wide muddy causeway that Wiebbe had used to cross from one to the other.
Had Pelsaert and the skipper had the sense to explore the archipelago with any thoroughness, they would surely have transferred the survivors of the wreck to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, which offered far more in the way of natural resources than Batavia’s Graveyard and could have supported the whole company for months. Like the smaller islets in the archipelago, it was surrounded by rich fishing grounds and alive with nesting birds, but to the soldiers’ surprise, it also turned out to be full of new and unknown hopping animals, which they called “cats”—“creatures of miraculous form, as big as a hare.” These were tammars, a species of wallaby indigenous to the Abrolhos, and as the soldiers soon discovered, they were easily caught and delicious cooked.
Most significant of all, the island turned out to have wells. They were not easily located, and both Pelsaert and Jeronimus’s scouts might be forgiven for having failed to uncover them, but in the end Hayes’s men discovered them by searching under the limestone slabs that lay scattered on the ground throughout the island. They appear to have found at least two good wells, one near the coast and the other toward the middle of the island, and possibly more; one cistern had 10 feet of water in it and an entrance large enough for a man to climb down into it. Between them they contained so much fresh water that it would hardly have been necessary to ration it.
Life on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island was thus far easier than it was on Batavia’s Graveyard. “The Lord our God fed us so richly that we could have lived there with ten thousand men for a hundred years,” wrote Cornelis Jansz, who had reached Hayes from Seals’ Island, with the pardonable exaggeration of a man who had survived the desert islands of the south to find himself living in a land of plenty. “Birds like doves we could catch, five hundred in a day, and each bird had an egg, as large as a hen’s egg.” They hunted wallabies, slaughtering “two, three, four, five, six or even more for each person,” and found fishing spots where they could haul in “40 fish as large as cod” in only an hour.
Wiebbe Hayes must have wondered why all contact with Batavia’s Graveyard had ceased as soon as he and his men were put ashore on the High Island, and become still more perplexed when the signal fires he lit to announce the discovery of water went unanswered. Lacking boats, he and his men could hardly investigate, however, and they may have remained ignorant of events elsewhere in the archipelago until the second week of July, when the first parties of refugees staggered ashore with horrifying tales of murder and massacre to the south. Over the next few days, at least five different groups made the difficult passage across more than four miles of open water, sitting on little homemade rafts or swimming behind planks of wood. The new arrivals included the eight men who somehow escaped the general massacres on Seals’ Island, and nearly 20 who contrived to slip away from Batavia’s Graveyard itself in groups of four and five. Between them, these men more than doubled the strength of Hayes’s force and kept him and his soldiers well informed concerning Cornelisz’s activities.
The news that Jeronimus’s men had gone to Seals’ Island and massacred all the people that they found there was particularly disturbing. It must have been obvious that the mutineers would eventually turn their gaze on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, and that when they did the unarmed loyalists would find themselves at a fatal disadvantage. It was imperative that they organize themselves, construct makeshift defenses, and improvise some weapons.
Wiebbe Hayes proved equal to the challenge. The soldiers’ leader is a shadow figure in the Batavia journals, remaining out of sight on his own island while the main action develops to the south. Nevertheless he must have been an able and inspiring leader. He and his men had already survived for three weeks on the High Island and its neighbor, and they eventually found the water that Pelsaert’s experienced sailors had missed. Although a private soldier, Wiebbe not only led the original expedition to the islands, but then integrated the various groups of refugees who found their way to him, so that by the middle of July he was in command of a mixed party of almost 50 people. His forces included not only VOC assistants but also company cadets who were nominally his superiors; yet there is no suggestion that any of them ever questioned his fitness to command them. This confidence was justified, for Hayes now directed the construction of makeshift weapons and defenses that gave his men at least a chance against the mutineers.
With Wiebbe to rally and cajole them, the soldiers fashioned pikes from planks, tipping them with wicked sixteen-inch-long nails that had washed ashore with driftwood from the wreck. Like the mutineers, they improvised morning stars, and though swords and muskets were still lacking, there were plenty of fist-sized lumps of coral around, which could be hurled at the heads of any attackers. There is even a reference to the fact that “guns” were assembled on the island. What these were remains a mystery, but, supplied with rope, the soldiers could perhaps have cut branches from the stunted trees that dot the interior and turned them into catapults for larger rocks.
While the soldiers worked, Hayes selected his defensive positions. He recognized that the geography of the archipelago and the pattern of the shallows meant that the mutineers would have to approach his island across the mudflats that guarded the whole southern shoreline. This limited the risk of a surprise attack. A lookout post built midway along the coast, at the apex of a bay, provided him with a forward base and a clear field of observation. With sentries posted at intervals along the coast, it would have made sense to position the bulk of his troops farther inland, close to the wells, where they could rest and feel relatively secure.
With the arrival of the last party of refugees, Hayes found himself in command of 46 men and a boy. Collectively, these Defenders, as they now became known, gave him a significant numerical superiority over the mutineers that offset, at least in part, the inferiority of his weapons. The best troops included a group of Dutch and German soldiers, and Hayes had his two cadets, Allert Jansz and Otto Smit, to help command them. These men could probably be depended on, but the ranks of the Defenders also included a party of half a dozen French troops whose loyalty to the VOC, and thus general reliability, was perhaps more suspect. The balance of Hayes’s men were gunners, sailors, and civilians of limited military experience. It was impossible to say how well these men would fare in the face of a determined attack by well-armed mutineers.
Nevertheless, with his preparations complete, Hayes may have felt a certain optimism. He had numbers on his side; he could hardly be surprised; and his Defenders were well fed and well supplied with water. Morale was relatively high. He and his men also had sheer desperation on their side. It was only too plain, from the descriptions of the refugees, that Cornelisz would come, and that he would kill them all if given the chance. Surrender, even a negotiated peace, were hardly options. They would fight, when they fought, to the death.
Wiebbe Hayes was a competent soldier and a good leader. It was the Defenders’ good fortune that Jeronimus Cornelisz was neither. The captain-general had no military experience and, it would appear, little grasp of strategy. As soon as it emerged that Hayes and his men were still alive, Cornelisz must have known that they would have to be dealt with, for fear that they would alert a rescue ship. Yet it was not until the last week of July that Jeronimus resolved to move against them. By then Wiebbe had had at least two weeks to make his preparations; he and his men were a much more formidable enemy than they might have been a fortnight earlier.
Perhaps Cornelisz understood this. Probably he had become aware that the Defenders outnumbered the mutineers, and certainly he recognized the difficulty of launching an assault without the advantage of surprise. For these reasons the captain-general decided to begin his campaign by exploiting the well-known antipathy between the soldiers and the sailors of the VOC in order to divide Hayes’s party.
He wrote a letter, warning of treachery. The sailors on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, Jeronimus alleged, had plotted to betray their comrades. “They have in their possession (unknown to you) a Compass, in order to go thus secretly with the little skiff to the High land.*42” To “maintain justice, and punish the evil-doers,” he urged the soldiers to hand over all the sailors on the island for punishment: “Give to our hands Lucas the steward’s mate, Cornelis the fat trumpeter, Cornelis the assistant, deaf Jan Michielsz, Ariaen the gunner, squinting Hendrick, Theunis Claasz, Cornelis Helmigs and other sailors who are with Your Hons.”*43 If they would also return a boat—the one Aris Jansz had taken during his escape from Batavia’s Graveyard a few days earlier—the apothecary added, the soldiers and the mutineers could still be the very “greatest and truest brothers and friends”—and, indeed, look forward to enjoying “still more bonds and mateships.”
In composing this devious epistle, Cornelisz displayed his absolute conviction that his actions in the Abrolhos were not only justified, but sanctioned by law. He wrote as the head of the ship’s council, and apparently in the hope, if not the expectation, that his orders would be obeyed. He explained that the refugees who had saved their lives by fleeing to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island were in fact “evil-doers who deserved death on account of mutiny,” and he even commented on the “particular liking and trust” he had for Hayes himself. This was more than the self-delusion he had shown in wooing Creesje Jans. The letter was a product of Jeronimus’s certainty that he was the legally ordained leader of all the Batavia survivors and the conviction that his actions were inspired by God.
As his emissary, Jeronimus chose Daniel Cornelissen, the young cadet who had helped to drown several of the first victims of the mutiny. On 23 July the youth was rowed to Hayes’s Island, where he somehow made contact with the half dozen French soldiers among the Defenders. These men had been selected as the letter’s addressees, apparently in the hope that they would be better swayed by Cornelisz’s mendacity than the Dutch. But even the Frenchmen did not believe in the mutineers’ sincerity, and rather than receiving Cornelissen as an ambassador, they seized him and took him captive. The cadet was bound and brought to Hayes, who confiscated the letter and imprisoned him.
False diplomacy had failed. Now Jeronimus tried violence. Two or three days after Daniel Cornelissen’s disappearance, during the last week of July, Zevanck and Van Huyssen gathered 20 men and attempted to subdue Wiebbe by force. As Hayes had calculated, the mutineers’ boats were spotted while they were still well out to sea, and their crews had to slip and stumble their way across seaweed-strewn mudflats to reach the shore. The Defenders came to meet them with their homemade weapons, and there was some sort of encounter on the beach. Exactly what occurred was not recorded, but it appears that the mutineers’ reconnaissance was unsuccessful. Zevanck and Van Huyssen may have been surprised to meet with concerted resistance from a group of well-fed, well-armed men; in any case, they withdrew before either side could inflict casualties on the other, and scrambled back to their own camp to gather reinforcements. Taken by surprise themselves, they needed new ideas and a fresh approach. Unfortunately, they had neither.
Zevanck and Van Huyssen returned to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island on 5 August. On this occasion they brought with them their entire gang, but they had not improved their tactics. Once again the men from Batavia’s Graveyard made a long drawn-out approach across the mud; once again the Defenders were prepared for them. Hayes’s troops met the mutineers in the shallows, “up to their knees in water,” and prevented them from reaching land. The mutineers showed no more stomach for a fight than they had the previous week; again there were no casualties on either side. The second assault on Hayes’s Island was as unsuccessful as the first.
After that the captain-general made no more attacks on the Defenders for a while, and the civil war in the Abrolhos lapsed into an uneasy truce, which lasted for the best part of a month. A few of the Defenders had family on Batavia’s Graveyard, but Wiebbe Hayes showed no inclination to counterattack Cornelisz’s men, and in retrospect his caution seems perfectly justified; secure though they were in their well-prepared positions, Hayes’s troops would have been badly exposed to Jeronimus’s swords and pikes in more open fighting. For their part, the mutineers now knew that they could not inflict serious casualties on Wiebbe’s men without taking greater risks themselves. Some sort of new plan was evidently required.
The problem became urgent at the end of August, for time had turned against the mutineers. Each passing day increased the risk of the long-awaited rescue ship appearing, and as the wet season in the Abrolhos neared its end, their supplies of water dwindled. The more impulsive members of the captain-general’s gang—Van Huyssen and Andries Liebent among them—grumbled at the strict rationing they were expected to endure; they knew by now that the Defenders had abundant food and drink and declared that they would rather fight to take Wiebbe’s island than live in increasing misery on their own.
Under pressure to take action, Jeronimus himself began to plan a third attempt to ambush Hayes. Manipulative by nature, the captain-general greatly preferred deceit to frontal assaults. Rather than launch a third attack, he conceived the idea of a bogus offer of peace—“to come to an accord with them, in order, under the cloak of friendship, to surprise them by treason at an opportune time.” He would go, he said, to Wiebbe’s island bearing gifts.
Cornelisz’s scheme was more subtle than those of Van Huyssen and Zevanck, but hardly well thought out. He knew that Hayes’s troops required blankets and fresh clothing—after three months in the islands, their shirts and breeches were torn and dirty, and their shoes, which had been cut to pieces on the coral, had been replaced with rough clogs carved from planks of driftwood—while his men needed fresh water. There was cloth to spare on Batavia’s Graveyard, and he hoped that Wiebbe might exchange fresh meat and water for clothing and red wine. A parlay on the beach would give his men the chance to talk to the Defenders, sow seeds of dissension, and then, perhaps, persuade some of them to come over to the mutineers, “under cover, as friends, in order to help murder the others”; but Jeronimus never explained how the mutineers were to bribe their counterparts, or arrange a betrayal without Wiebbe realizing what was going on. Cornelisz’s cunning had once been an asset to the mutineers but now his inability to think things through, coupled with an invincible belief in his own rightness, would cost them dearly.
The parlay took place on 2 September. The day before, Gijsbert Bastiaensz had been sent to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with proposals for a peace treaty. The Defenders had received him kindly and expressed guarded interest in the plan; a time had been agreed for negotiations to take place. Now Jeronimus assembled his entire company—37 men and all their women—on a small islet opposite the Defenders’ main position and about 400 yards away across the mudflats. That done, he crossed to Hayes’s Island with only a small group of his most trusted lieutenants, leaving the remainder of the mutineers behind him.
What persuaded Cornelisz to take such an insane risk? The overtures that had been made on 1 September seemed to have been positively received, and the captain-general was confident that Wiebbe and his men were genuinely desperate for the clothing. He had returned from the reconnaissance of the previous day “saying joyfully to his folk that they now quite certainly had those [people] surely in his hands.” Possibly he was also convinced, by the ragged appearance of Hayes’s troops, that the Defenders were not much of a threat. But knowing Jeronimus, it seems likely that he was also fatally overconfident. The captain-general had complete faith in his own powers of persuasion and perhaps did not understand that the loyalists mistrusted every word he said. Having seen Zevanck and Van Huyssen fail to overwhelm Hayes by force, it may have seemed to him that he was teaching his companions a lesson in how to handle malcontents. And, of course, he retained the absolute conviction that his God was protecting him.
Cornelisz arrived on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with a bodyguard of five: David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, Gsbert van Welderen, Wouter Loos, and Cornelis Pietersz. His men struck the Defenders as “very skinny of hunger and thirst,” but, even in this diminished condition they were still dangerous, having committed 25 or 30 murders between them. They bore the promised supplies of laken and red wine. A party of Defenders came to meet them, and the bales of cloth were opened on the beach. While the men drank wine and passed samples of the cloth about, Wiebbe and Jeronimus conversed. The captain-general monopolized the negotiations, “deceiving [him] with many lies, saying he would harm none, that it had only been on account of the Water that he had fought against them, [and] that there was no need to distrust him because some had been killed.” While Hayes was thus occupied, however, Zevanck and the other mutineers were “walking hither and thither,” trying to strike up conversations with individual Defenders. As Cornelisz had instructed, they attempted to suborn Wiebbe’s men, promising them 6,000 guilders a man, and a share in the salvaged jewels, if they would change sides.
It proved to be a fatal mistake. The Defenders had anticipated treachery, and they were ready for it. Rather than listening to Zevanck and his companions, they fell upon them suddenly, and Jeronimus paid dearly for setting foot on Hayes’s Island without adequate protection. Hopelessly outnumbered, his bodyguard surrendered with hardly a fight. Cornelisz was taken prisoner and bound. Only Wouter Loos escaped, tearing himself free from his captors and making off in the mutineers’ skiff before he could be recaptured.
David Zevanck and his companions now had less than two minutes to live. A quarter of a mile away across a muddy channel, the remaining mutineers had realized too late what was happening. They seized their arms and made ready to attempt a rescue, but Hayes and his men saw them coming and backed away, dragging their new prisoners with them. As the Defenders reached their positions and turned to face another attack, Wiebbe took rapid stock of his situation. The advantage he had enjoyed in numbers had probably all but evaporated, for it must have required at least two men to guard each of the struggling mutineers and prevent their fleeing after Loos. Moreover, his enemies’ blood was up, and it would probably remain so while there was a chance for them to save their leaders. The logic was inescapable: he gave the order to kill the prisoners.
Jeronimus alone was spared; he was too important, both as a ringleader and a potential hostage, to be dispatched. But Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and Gsbert van Welderen were slaughtered where they stood, along with the unfortunate Cornelis Pietersz. The executions occurred in plain view of the other mutineers as they swarmed down to the beach of their little islet, and they had the desired effect. It was plain that the Defenders were well prepared to meet an attack, and any assault would only result in the death of Cornelisz himself. Shocked and demoralized by the unexpected turn of events, the remaining mutineers pulled back instead and retired in some confusion to Batavia’s Graveyard.
In the space of perhaps five minutes, the balance of power in the Abrolhos had shifted for good. The mutineers had lost their leader and his principal lieutenants, while Hayes had won the first real victory in the indecisive island civil war, immeasurably strengthening his men’s morale. The Defenders had secured the wine and clothing they had coveted, for the mutineers’ supplies had been abandoned on the beach when they were captured. Individual survivors were also affected by what had happened; Judick Gijsbertsdr, for instance, had lost both of her protectors; her father, left by chance among the loyalists by the swift collapse of his diplomacy, remained on Hayes’s Island, while her husband-manqué Coenraat, run through by Wiebbe Hayes’s nail-tipped pikes, lay dead on the beach.
Of all the Batavia’s people, none experienced a more dramatic reversal of fortune than Jeronimus Cornelisz. When he stepped ashore that day, the captain-general was the undisputed master of the survivors, gleefully wielding the power of life and death. His absurd costume of gold-trimmed laken had marked him as a man of great self-regard and consequence, compared with whom the ragged Defenders seemed to be no more than a rabble. Half an hour later, though, Cornelisz had at last experienced for himself something of the terror he had inflicted on Batavia’s Graveyard. He had been deposed, deprived of his authority, tightly bound, and no doubt harshly treated, too; worse, the aura of invincibility that had once surrounded him—and in which he himself certainly believed—had been unceremoniously stripped away.
The captain-general’s humiliation was compounded by the quarters that the Defenders found for him. For three months Jeronimus had dwelled in a large tent packed with looted clothes and treasure, taking his pick of the salvaged food and drink. Now he was hurled into a limestone pit some way inland and made to help feed Hayes’s men. Into the hole the Defenders tossed the birds they caught, for their prisoner to pluck for them, and at the bottom lived Cornelisz, spattered with guts and feathers. For every nine birds that rained down on him, eight had to be surrendered to Wiebbe Hayes. The ninth he was allowed to keep, as “salary.”
Still smarting from the disastrous setback of 2 September, the remaining mutineers regrouped on Batavia’s Graveyard and elected a new leader. The only remaining member of Cornelisz’s council—Stone-Cutter Pietersz, the ineffectual and unpopular lance corporal—was passed over. In his place, the 32 survivors of the under-merchant’s band elected Wouter Loos.
Loos was a professional soldier who came from the southern Dutch town of Maastricht. He was considerably younger than Jeronimus, being about 24 years old, but unlike Cornelisz and his cohorts he did possess some military ability; this, in the aftermath of a devastating defeat, no doubt helps to explain his election. He had long been one of Cornelisz’s favorites and had participated in several murders, but unlike the captain-general he took no great pleasure in killing for its own sake. Under his command, the massacres on Batavia’s Graveyard ceased, and the remaining people on the island*44 ceased to live in constant terror of their lives.
Nevertheless, in most respects Wouter’s regime differed little from Jeronimus’s. Strict rationing remained in force. The women from the lower deck were still “kept for common service,” and Loos himself shared Creesje’s tent, though he would always insist that he had neither touched nor slept with her. Judick Gijsbertsdr was also treated well after her lover Coenraat’s death; that is, she was left alone, and no other mutineer was permitted to rape her.
Like Cornelisz, Loos required the other mutineers to swear an oath of loyalty to him. This document, which was signed on 8 September, closely resembled the allegiances made to Jeronimus. At about the same time, a new ship’s council was elected. Nothing is known of its composition, but it was, in any case, entirely ineffectual, since Loos’s one real strategy was to continue the war against Wiebbe Hayes. He was encouraged in this by his men’s escalating complaints concerning rationing, but—since it was by now apparent that the Defenders were too strong and too well organized to be easily overrun—it is by no means clear exactly what Wouter hoped to gain by returning to the attack. The most likely explanation is that he planned to inflict sufficient damage to win concessions from the Defenders, particularly with regard to the supply of food and water. It is also possible that he hoped to raise the morale of his dwindling band by reminding them that they had a common enemy. In any case, Loos was determined to proceed. On Hayes’s Island, Bastiaensz was still trying to negotiate a truce—“I had made up a script,” he noted, “that they should have peace with each other, and that they [the mutineers] should not do any harm to the good ones.” But Wouter had no interest in such niceties. “They tore that in pieces,” Gijsbert wrote, “and have come at us.”
The fourth attack on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island began at about 9 o’clock on the morning of 17 September and continued in a desultory fashion for about two hours, for the sides were not well matched. The committed mutineers by now were rather less than 20 strong, and the deaths of Zevanck, Pietersz, Van Huyssen, and Van Welderen had deprived them of four of their best men. Of those who remained, only Loos and seven or eight other soldiers had much military experience. They were supported by a rather smaller number of gunners and sailors who were also useful fighting men, but the other active mutineers were either ill or little more than boys. The camp followers—another dozen or so men who had taken the oath of loyalty demanded by their new captain-general—had played no real part in events thus far, and some at least had signed under duress. Given the opportunity, some, if not all, of this last group might well defect to Wiebbe Hayes. They were certainly not trustworthy, and if they were included in the raiding party, they would all have to be watched. Some or all of them may in fact have been left behind on Batavia’s Graveyard.
The Defenders, on the other hand, still numbered 46 or 47 fighting men. Half of them were soldiers and the rest were able-bodied sailors; they were better fed and rested, and they also had the advantage of the higher ground. In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Loos’s plan was to balance the odds by depending on his muskets. The mutineers had managed to drag two guns from the wreck, and each of them, properly handled, could fire one round a minute. By keeping the action at long range they might hope to pick off the Defenders one by one. Hayes’s men, it seems safe to assume, simply took cover, perhaps sheltering behind slabs of coral. Neither side dared engage the other at close quarters, and so the action sputtered on intermittently throughout the morning.
By 11 o’clock the situation had begun to change. Four Defenders had been hit; three had severe flesh wounds, though only one, Jan Dircxsz, an 18-year-old soldier from Emden, had sustained a mortal injury. The mutineers, however, had suffered no losses at all, and it therefore seemed that Loos’s strategy was working. By keeping the action at long range, he slowly but surely had begun to even the odds against him. In a few more hours, with a little more application by his musketeers, he might hope to inflict more telling casualties; and if he did that, eventually the Defenders would surely have to break cover to attack him. When they did, the soldier thought, everything would come down to the matter of hand-to-hand combat, and his superior weapons might prevail. Some sort of resolution might be possible by midafternoon, and . . .
It was then that Pelsaert and the rescue ship sailed over the horizon.