8
“The justice and vengeance of God made manifest.”
GIJSBERT BASTIAENSZ
PELSAERT STEERED THE SARDAM as close to the islands as he dared, tacking cautiously through the treacherous maze of shallows to the north. It was difficult work, and it was not until midday that the jacht came to anchor in a natural deep-water channel on the southeast side of the High Island, still two miles away from Wiebbe Hayes’s Island and about four from Batavia’s Graveyard. She was on the edge of further shallows there, and the commandeur could go no deeper into the archipelago.
Pelsaert had arrived in the Abrolhos not knowing whether he would find the Batavia’s people alive or dead. The sight of smoke rising from the islands in the group had caused him to hope—as Cornelisz had once predicted—that some, if not all, of them might still be saved. As soon as the Sardam had dropped anchor, he had one of the ship’s boats loaded with supplies of bread and water and rowed for the nearest land, which happened to be the southwest corner of the High Island. It was not far away, and as the Sardam’s men strained at their oars, the commandeur examined the beaches and the interior of the island for any sign of life. There was none to be found but, even so, he leapt ashore as soon as the boat grounded in the shallows, still confident that survivors would be found. The oarsmen followed—and as they did so, Pelsaert glanced back out to sea and saw a wonderful sight. “A very small yawl with four Men” was heading toward him as swiftly as her crew could manage. The men in the boat were still too far away for the commandeur to determine who they were, but he could now at least anticipate that the Batavia’s story would turn out well.
The sudden appearance of the jacht, coming as it did at the height of the climactic battle between the Defenders and the mutineers, had had a dramatic effect on the men fighting on both sides. For Wiebbe Hayes it seemed to be, quite literally, the product of divine intervention. Salvation had arrived when everything seemed lost, and he and his men greeted the ship’s arrival with frantic relief. For Loos and the other mutineers, Pelsaert’s return meant something altogether different: not life, but death; not rescue, but the certainty of retribution. All their plans had depended on dealing with Hayes’s men before the appearance of a rescue ship; now that strategy lay in ruins, and when the ship was seen they broke off the action almost at once and retired in some confusion to their camp. Hayes, meanwhile, ran for his own boats in order to warn the commandeur of what had happened in the archipelago.
While Pelsaert tacked slowly through the shallows, the mutineers on Batavia’s Graveyard were debating what to do. Wouter Loos—who had never held the men in thrall as Jeronimus had—lacked the captain-general’s demonic singleness of purpose. Without the advantage of surprise, the fight had gone out of him. But other members of Cornelisz’s band, including Stone-Cutter Pietersz, Jan Hendricxsz, and Lucas Gellisz, were not yet ready to surrender. “Come on,” Jan Pelgrom urged, “won’t we now seize the jacht?” Loos demurred—“No, I have given up the idea,” he replied—but Pelgrom found plenty of support for his idea, and within minutes a group of heavily armed mutineers were tumbling into the most seaworthy of their boats and pulling as quickly as they could for the High Island.
The Defenders and the mutineers raced to be the first to reach the Sardam. Wiebbe Hayes kept his skiffs on the north side of his island, safe from capture by the mutineers; to reach them he had to cross almost two miles of rough ground, thick with nettles and riddled with the burrows of nesting birds, and then row the best part of three miles from his mooring to the jacht. The mutineers’ boat splashing up from the south had an almost identical distance to travel. Neither party knew exactly where the other was, or who would be the first to find the jacht, and Pelsaert, on the High Island, was as yet unaware of either Jeronimus’s treachery or the danger he was in. The outcome of the mutiny itself thus hung in the balance.
Wiebbe Hayes’s task was to find Pelsaert, persuade him to believe his undeniably amazing account of what had happened in the islands, and then warn the people in the Sardam before the murderers could surprise them. The mutineers’ one hope was to get aboard the Sardam and attack before her crew realized they were in danger. Jeronimus had been quite right to predict that the rescue jacht would be only lightly manned, to leave room for large parties of survivors; she had left Java with a crew of only 26, and perhaps a quarter of those men were with Pelsaert in the boat. The remaining sailors, finding armed mutineers among them, might yet be overwhelmed; and if they were, Jeronimus’s gang would control the one means of escape from the Abrolhos. The Defenders would have to come to terms or be abandoned, and the mutineers might thus secure the freedom of their captain-general. As for Pelsaert—still standing on the beach trying to discern who was in the fast-approaching boat—his difficulty would lie in deciding whom he should believe.
It was a while before the commandeur at last made out the identity of the people in the yawl. They came “rowing round the Northerly point,” he later recalled, “and one of them, a man named Wiebbe Hayes, sprang ashore and ran towards me, calling from afar: ‘Welcome, but go back on board immediately, for there is a party of scoundrels on the islands near the wreck, with two sloops, who have the intention to seize the jacht.’ ” The Defenders’ leader had just sufficient time to gasp out a brief summary of events in the archipelago before the commandeur, suddenly alert to the danger he was in, made off to warn the Sardam. As he jumped into his boat, Pelsaert ordered Hayes to bring Cornelisz to him, “bound”; then he pulled like fury for the jacht.
Hayes and his men had won their race with the mutineers, but not by much. Pelsaert was still some distance from the Sardam when he “saw a sloop with people rowing come round the Southerly point of the High Island.” It was the mutineers’ boat, coming on with steady strokes, and the commandeur had barely enough time to scramble up the sides of the jacht and alert the crew before the sloop pulled alongside. One look at the 11 men on board—dressed in their ostentatious laken uniforms, dripping with gold and silver braid and crewing a vessel filled with swords and cutlasses—was enough to convince Pelsaert that Hayes’s story was true. At his command, the swivel guns on the Sardam’s poop were leveled at mutineers’ boat and men with pikes lined the deck. Thus reinforced, the commandeur felt ready to repel boarders. He hailed the boat, demanding: “Wherefore do you come aboard armed?”
Even now, Jan Hendricxsz and the other cutthroats in the sloop were not quite ready to surrender. “They answered me that they would reply to that when they were on the ship,” Pelsaert recalled, but by now he was thoroughly alarmed and would not permit any such thing. A brief standoff ensued, the men in the boat refusing to lay down their arms and the Sardam’s men threatening to open fire, and it was only when it at last became apparent to the mutineers that their cause was hopeless that they threw their weapons overboard and clambered, unarmed, onto the jacht. Each man was seized the moment that he stepped on board, securely bound, and locked up in the forecastle.
Pelsaert began the process of interrogation that same afternoon, at once anxious and appalled to discover the true extent of the disasters that had engulfed the archipelago. Most of his information came from “a certain Jan Hendricxsz from Bremen, soldier,” who immediately and freely confessed to having killed “17 to 20 people” on the orders of Jeronimus. Hendricxsz had been one of the first men to join the conspiracy on the Batavia, and he possessed an intimate knowledge of all Cornelisz’s stratagems and plans. Under questioning by the commandeur, the German mutineer soon revealed not only the terrible details of the murders and massacres in the Abrolhos, but the original plot to seize the ship, and the skipper’s role in it, which Pelsaert had long suspected but never had confirmed. Armed with this information, the commandeur then had the other mutineers brought before him, one by one, confronting each man with statements of his guilt:
“We learned from their own confessions, and the testimony of all the living persons, that they have drowned, murdered and brought to death with all manner of cruelties, more than 120 persons, men, women and children as well, of whom the principal murderers amongst those still alive have been: Lenert Michielsz van Os, soldier, Mattys Beer of Munsterbergh, cadet,*45 Jan Hendricxsz of Bremen, soldier, Allert Janssen of Assendelft, gunner, Rutger Fredricx of Groningen, locksmith; Jan Pelgrom de Bye of Bommel, cabin servant, and Andries Jonas of Luyck, soldier, with their consorts.”
Other names were also mentioned. Those of councillors David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and Jacob Pietersz cropped up several times in the course of the interrogations. Nevertheless, the evidence of Jan Hendricxsz and his fellow mutineers seemed conclusive on at least one point. Jeronimus Cornielsz had been the cause of all the trouble.
Hayes brought Jeronimus aboard late that same afternoon. The captain-general arrived under close guard. Stripped of his men and all his power, he was reduced to something of a curiosity. Even now, however—disheveled, tied up, stinking of decomposing birds, with his red cloth finery in tatters—Cornelisz plainly retained something of his weirdly compelling aura, the hypnotic fascination that had bound the mutineers together and made men willing to kill for him. Nor had two weeks of plucking feathers in a limestone pit deprived him of his facile tongue, his agile mind, or his ingenuity. Francisco Pelsaert, a less clever and a much less complex man, hardly knew what to make of his former deputy. “I looked at him with great sorrow,” wrote the commandeur,
“such a scoundrel, cause of so many disasters and of the shedding of human blood—and still he had the intention to go on . . . . I examined him in the presence of the [Sardam’s] council, and asked him why he allowed the devil to lead him so far astray from all human feeling, to do that which had never been so cruelly perpetrated among Christians, without any real hunger or need of thirst, but solely out of bloodthirstiness.
“[Jeronimus] answered, that one should not blame him for what had happened, laying it on David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and others, who have been killed, that they had forced him and willed him to do it; that also one had to do a great deal to save oneself; denied that he had ever had the intention to help in the plan to seize the ship Batavia, and as to the idea of seizing any jachtthat might come, he said Zevanck had proposed this, to which he had only consented on account of his own safety without meaning it. For, firstly, he believed that they would never be delivered; [and secondly] that skipper Ariaen intended to throw the commandeur overboard [from the longboat] . . . . In this manner he tried to talk himself clean, with his glib tongue telling the most palpable lies, making out that nowhere had he had a hand in it, often appealing to the [other mutineers], who would say the same thing.”
Unable to penetrate this barrage of untruths for the time being, Pelsaert halted the interrogation at dusk. There were other things to do: salvaging the wreck and subduing the remaining mutineers, who were still on their island. Cornelisz was returned to his prison in the forecastle, and next morning, before dawn, Pelsaert took the Sardam’s boat to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, where he armed 10 of the Defenders with swords and muskets. At daybreak he sailed to Batavia’s Graveyard, “where the rest of the scoundrels were, in order to capture and secure them.” Half a dozen mutineers had stayed on the island, including Wouter Loos, Lenert van Os, and Mattys Beer; but when they saw a boatload of fully equipped soldiers disembarking on the beach, even these hardened men surrendered without a fight. Pelsaert had them securely bound and immediately began to search the island for the Company’s valuables, and in particular the casket of jewels he had landed on Traitors’ Island three and a half months earlier. He was pleasantly surprised to discover his hoard intact, down to and including the Great Cameo of Gaspar Boudaen—“these were all found,” he wrote later, “except a ring and a gold chain, and the ring has been recovered hereafter.” In the course of hunting for the valuables, the commandeur’s search parties also found fresh evidence of the mutiny in Jeronimus’s tent. From various bundles of papers they recovered copies of the oaths that the mutineers had sworn to Cornelisz and Loos and the promises that the women kept for common service had been forced to make. These and other incriminating documents were handed to Pelsaert.
The commandeur must have encountered Lucretia Jans during this short stay on Batavia’s Graveyard, but he makes no mention of their meeting in his account of the mutiny. Creesje had spent the last two weeks sequestered with Wouter Loos and had been treated comparatively decently since Jeronimus’s capture, but having lived through shipwreck, extreme thirst, and repeated rape, she was a different woman from the lady Pelsaert had known aboard the Batavia. There must also have been other reunions at about this time—Jan Carstensz, one of Hayes’s men, with his wife Anneken Bosschieters; Claes Jansz the trumpeter with his Tryntgien; the predikant with his daughter Judick—but the awkwardness, and what was said, and how they explained themselves one to the other, are likewise passed over without comment in the journals; they can only be imagined.
That evening, with the search complete, Pelsaert rowed over to the wreck. It was unusually calm, and the Sardam’s boat was able to approach the site without much danger. There was little enough to see:
“We found that the ship was lying in many pieces, [and that] all above water had been washed away except a small piece of bulwark . . . . A piece of the front of the ship was broken off and thrown half on the shallow; there were also lying 2 Pieces of Cannon, one of brass and one of iron, fallen from the mounts.—By the foreship was lying also one side of the poop, broken off at the starboard port of the gunners’ room. Then there were several pieces of a greater or lesser size that had drifted apart to various places, so there did not look to be much hope of salvaging much of the money or the goods.”
The upper-merchant nevertheless drew comfort from a statement made by Reyndert Hendricxsz, the Batavia’s steward and one of the unwilling mutineers. He had been employed as a fisherman and, venturing out to the wreck one day, had seen several of the money chests lying on the bottom. These, it seemed, should still be there, and Pelsaert resolved to search for them on the next calm day.
In the meantime, the commandeur continued his interrogation of the prisoners. Pelsaert was legally bound, under Dutch law, to administer justice as quickly as possible, and to that end he assembled the Sardam’s council and then enlarged it with two men from the Batavia in order to form a Broad Council, which alone had the power to try criminal cases. The members of the Sardam’s raad were the commandeur himself, the jacht’s skipper, Jacob Jacobsz Houtenman,*46 Sijmon Yopzoon, the high boatswain, and Jan Willemsz Visch, who was probably the Sardam’s provost. The Batavia’s representatives were Claes Gerritsz, the upper-steersman, and his deputy, Jacob Jansz Hollert; on at least one occasion Gijsbert Bastiaensz was drafted onto the council, too, to take the place of someone unavoidably detained. Rather more remarkably, the clerk tasked with recording the proceedings was none other than Salomon Deschamps, who was both a mutineer and a murderer. Nor did Deschamps merely write up the interrogations and the sentences as they were made; he himself signed many of the council’s resolutions and thus helped to pass judgment on his former comrades. It is possible that Pelsaert remained unaware of the assistant’s guilt until late on in the proceedings—certainly the clerk would have glossed over his involvement in the killings, but it is hard to believe that the mutineers themselves were so discreet. Perhaps the commandeur had an unreasoning trust in his old colleague; more probably, however, Deschamps was the best scribe available, and the appointment was simply a matter of necessity.
Once the proceedings were under way, the prisoners were kept together on Seals’ Island, where they were less likely to cause trouble than on board the Sardam, and the interrogations took place largely on Batavia’s Graveyard itself. The commandeur dealt with the mutineers one by one—asking questions, noting answers, and often calling witnesses to confirm the truth of what he had been told. Most of Jeronimus’s men were examined several times, over several days, so that the information they provided could be used to question others. It would appear, from the summaries prepared by Salomon Deschamps, that statements were also taken from some of the survivors from the island, as well as the Defenders, but very little of this evidence found its way into the record. Practically all of the surviving accounts come from the mouths of mutineers.
The proceedings on the island were conducted in accordance with Dutch law, but they were not trials in the modern sense and the mutineers did not have lawyers, nor any right to call witnesses in their own defense. Pelsaert’s chief difficulty lay in securing reliable testimony from the accused, for the statutes of the United Provinces were quite specific on the question of what constituted evidence: a man could only be condemned to death on the basis of his own freely given confession. Since few men would openly admit to capital crimes, however, the Broad Council did have the right to resort to torture when a prisoner refused to answer questions or there was good reason to doubt the veracity of his evidence. As we have seen, confessions extracted under torture were not in themselves admissible as evidence of guilt, and any statements given in this way had to be put to the prisoner again, to be confirmed “of freewill,” within a day of being made. Some men recanted all that they had said when this was done. But since the denial of evidence given under duress led only to further interrogation, it was not unusual for testimony obtained in the torture chamber to be confirmed later in the day by men who would say anything to avoid further pain and suffering.
Jeronimus himself was the first man to be bound for torture. The under-merchant had indignantly denied his guilt when he had been brought before Pelsaert on the Sardam, but his testimony had been so undermined by the freewill confession of Jan Hendricxsz that the commandeur had little compunction in examining him more closely as soon as the Broad Council had been assembled on Batavia’s Graveyard, “in order,” as he said, “to learn from him the straight truth, as he tries to exonerate himself with flowery talk, shoving dirt onto persons who are dead and cannot answer for themselves.”
Had Cornelisz been imprisoned in the Netherlands, he would probably have been stretched on the rack, just as Torrentius the painter had been a little less than two years earlier. But racks were cumbersome and expensive pieces of equipment, and throughout the Dutch dominions in the East the preferred method of interrogation was the water torture, which was almost equally effective and far easier to apply. Water torture required neither specialized equipment nor expert torturers; at its most basic, all that was needed was a funnel, which was forced into the prisoner’s mouth. Where time and resources permitted, however, it was more usual for the man in question to be stripped to the waist and strapped, spread-eagled, into an upright frame—a door frame was sometimes used. An outsized canvas collar, which extended from his neck up to his eyes or a little higher, was then slipped over his head and fastened under his chin in such a way that liquids poured into it had nowhere to escape. The torturer then climbed a ladder by the frame, carrying a large jug, and the interrogation began.
Water was poured slowly over the prisoner’s head, trickling down into the collar until it formed a pool around his chin. Failure to answer questions satisfactorily led to more liquid being added, until the man’s mouth and finally his nostrils were submerged. From then on, he had to drink in order to breathe; but each time he reduced the level of the water the torturer would add more from the jug, so that the interrogation proceeded with the prisoner alternately gulping down the water and gasping for breath.
If the man persisted in his denials, and the torture became protracted, the sheer quantities of water that he consumed would bloat him hideously, “forcing all his inward partes [and] coming out of his nose, eares and eyes,” as a contemporary English writer observed, and “at length taking his breath away and bringing him to a swoone or fainting.” When this happened, the prisoner would be cut down and forced to vomit so that the torment could begin again. After three or four applications of the torture, the man’s body would be “swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead,” and he would generally be ready to confess to anything that he was asked to.
Few men endured the water torture for this long, and Cornelisz was not one of them. It took some days, and several applications of the torment, but gradually the under-merchant was driven to confess not only to his plot to seize the rescue jacht, but also to the part that he had played in planning mutiny on the Batavia herself. Yet still he wriggled like a worm on a hook. Where there was little chance of misleading anyone, Jeronimus confessed freely to his crimes. He knew that Pelsaert had found copies of the oaths the mutineers had sworn to him, and he made no effort to deny that they existed. But where he could—where no other evidence existed—Cornelisz continued to blame Ariaen Jacobsz or David Zevanck for decisions that had actually been his own. Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, and Allert Janssen were brought in to confront him, at which he belatedly confessed to ordering the murders of three dozen people; but at no point did the apothecary admit to any involvement in the deaths of men killed by Zevanck, Van Huyssen, or Gsbert van Welderen. Then, on 28 September, when his interrogation was finally concluded, he suddenly recanted everything—“saying they [the witnesses] are lying, also that all he has confessed he has confessed because he has been threatened with torture; also that he knew nothing of the seizing of the ship Batavia”—and Pelsaert found himself confronted with the possibility that he would have to start the whole procedure once again.
“Therefore,” noted the commandeur,
“on account of his unsteady and variable confessions, practising crooked means—though by all people accused in his own presence in order to prove the same to be lies—have again and for the last time threatened him with torture and asked why he mocked us, because he has confessed and told everything freely several times.”
Cornelisz replied with a further lie: he had wished, he said, to delay matters sufficiently to be taken to Batavia “in order to speak again to his wife”—although he knew, as Pelsaert perhaps did not, that she was still in the Dutch Republic. Then, when the commandeur read out his statements and confessions “before all the people on the Island,” Jeronimus complained that a small detail was still incorrect: “Something was in it of which Assendelft,*47 Jan Hendricxsz and others accused him wrongly.” It was yet another delaying tactic; the law compelled Pelsaert to recall both witnesses to double-check their stories, which in turn meant a respite of perhaps an hour while the men were brought over from Seals’ Island.
At last, when the men concerned had been fetched and reconfirmed their testimony, the exasperated commandeur confronted Cornelisz directly, demanding to know why he “mocked the Council through his intolerable desperation, saying one time that they spoke the truth, another time that they all lied.” From Pelsaert’s voice, or manner, the under-merchant finally understood that he was now beaten. Further evasion, he could see, would only result in vigorous torture; and so a truth of sorts emerged. “Confesses at last,” noted Deschamps at this point in his summary, in his best Italian hand, “that he did it to lengthen his life.”
Rather than endure any further torment, Jeronimus now agreed of free will that all his testimony was true, and late in the afternoon of 28 September he signed his statements and confessions. “He well knows that all he has done is evil enough,” Pelsaert observed in conclusion, “and he desires no grace.”
Cornelisz’s fellow mutineers were more easily entrapped. A few, such as Jan Hendricxsz, largely spared themselves the agonies of the water torture by confessing freely to their sins. Others, including Rutger Fredricx and Mattys Beer, tried to conceal at least some of their crimes, in the hope of lessening their punishment. They were put to the torture in an attempt to get at the truth. Andries Jonas suffered more than most for his blind insistence that he had remained outside the predikant’s tent on the night the family were murdered; the commandeur suspected that Jonas was concealing his role in the affair, and the soldier was half-drowned twice before his persistent denials were believed. But none of the captain-general’s gang escaped without enduring at least a little pain. Even Hendricxsz was tortured once, when he tried to pretend that he knew nothing of his leader’s plan to seize the jacht.
Jeronimus, meanwhile—once he had been forced into confession—betrayed his fellow mutineers without compunction. He had never cared remotely about how other people felt, and now he saw no reason to risk further torture simply to help his men who had sworn loyalty to him. When Rutger Fredricx begged his captain-general to confirm that he, Fredricx, had been given a direct order to kill Andries de Vries, Cornelisz obliged—but added maliciously “that he certainly believes that Rutger has done more than he has confessed, because he was always very willing to offer his services if anyone had to be put out of the way.” Next, the under-merchant gave a lengthy statement implicating Lenert van Os in eight murders, the first massacre on Seals’ Island, and the slaughter of the predikant’s family, naming in addition Jan Hendricxsz as the killer of Stoffel Stoffelsz and Mattys Beer as the murderer of Cornelis Aldersz. Then he mentioned Lucas Gellisz as Lenert van Os’s accomplice in the killing of Passchier van den Ende and Jacob Hendricxen Drayer, and named Rogier Decker as the murderer of Hendrick Jansz. Perhaps Pelsaert would have got to the truth anyway; but Jeronimus’s willingness to recall places, names, and dates must certainly have aided the investigation, and it quickly broke down the remaining bonds of loyalty among the mutineers. Before long each man was blaming his companions, and the whole truth about the mutiny emerged.
Seven of the mutineers were examined in this first round of interrogations. They were the worst of the murderers—Jan Hendricxsz, Andries Jonas, Mattys Beer, Lenert van Os, Allert Janssen, Rutger Fredricx, and Jan Pelgrom—and only Andries Jonas, at the end of his interrogation, blurted out, apparently spontaneously, “that he has been very willing in murdering, and does not know how he wandered so far from God.” The other six gave neither reasons for their crimes nor the least show of remorse.
It would have made little difference if they had. The Broad Council’s verdicts, when they were delivered on 28 September, were very nearly as severe as Pelsaert could make them, and the commandeur seems to have made no allowance whatsoever for the men who had cooperated more or less freely with his investigation. Each case had been judged strictly on its merits.
All of the retourschip’s survivors, and the Sardam’s crew, were assembled on Batavia’s Graveyard to witness the sentencing. The surviving members of Cornelisz’s gang were present too. It was nearly evening by the time Pelsaert was ready to proceed and the leading mutineers shuffled forward to hear the verdicts on their cases.
The captain-general was the first man to be called. “Because Jeronimus Cornelisz of Haarlem, aged about 30 years, apothecary, and later under-merchant of the ship Batavia, has misbehaved himself so gruesomely,” Pelsaert intoned,
“and has gone beyond himself, yea, has even been denuded of all humanity and has been changed as to a tiger . . . and because even under Moors and Turks such unheard of, abominable misdeeds would not have happened, we, the undersigned persons of the Council . . . in order to turn us from the wrath of God and to cleanse the name of Christianity of such an unheard of villain, have sentenced the foresaid Jeronimus Cornelisz that he shall be taken to a place prepared to execute justice, and there first cut off both his hands, and after that punish him on a gallows with a cord until death follows—with confiscation of all his goods, Moneys, Gold, Silver, monthly wages, and all that he may have to claim here in India against the VOC, our Lord Masters.”
It was the maximum penalty available under Dutch law. And so the commandeur continued: Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, Allert Janssen, and Mattys Beer were sentenced to have their right hands removed before they were hanged; the other three mutineers—Jan Pelgrom, Andries Jonas, and Rutger Fredricx—received a slightly lesser punishment. Presumably because their crimes had been less extensive, these men were to go to their deaths unmutilated, but in each case they, like all the others, suffered the confiscation of their goods and died knowing that Jan Company, not their families, would inherit whatever meager worldly possessions they left behind.
Pelsaert had not yet finished. In the course of his investigation, the commandeur had also formed opinions of the remainder of the mutineers. Nine of them, he now announced, were to be taken to Java for interrogation—“or to punish them on the way, according to time and occasion.” They were Wouter Loos, Stone-Cutter Pietersz, Hans Jacob Heijlweck, Daniel Cornelissen, Andries Liebent, Hans Fredérick, Cornelis Janssen, Rogier Decker, and Jan Willemsz Selyns—by no means all of them minor figures in the tragedy. Nineteen other men, who had signed Jeronimus’s oaths and had been held on suspicion of active involvement in the mutiny, were freed “until later decision, unless something detrimental arises.” Most of them had done little more than pledge allegiance to Cornelisz—their numbers included relative nonentities such as the steward, Reyndert Hendricxsz, Gillis Phillipsen, the soldier who had sharpened the sword used to decapitate the net-maker Cornelis Aldersz, and the doubly bereaved Hans Hardens. Bastiaensz the predikant was also cleared, at least provisionally. But several of these men had been closer to Jeronimus than Pelsaert yet appreciated. Among those who were now released was Olivier van Welderen, who was more than capable of causing further trouble.
At least the commandeur could rely on Wiebbe Hayes. The Defenders’ leader, who was still a private soldier, was now promoted to the rank of sergeant at a salary of 18 guilders per month—twice his former wage. He was thus placed in charge of all the surviving soldiers, who had been without a commanding officer since the Sardam’s arrival in the archipelago, a move that no doubt helped to reinforce their sometimes doubtful loyalty to the Company. Hayes’s principal lieutenants on his island, the cadets Otto Smit and Allert Jansz, were both made corporals at a salary of 15 guilders. These promotions were the only ones that Pelsaert offered to the 48 loyalists who had helped preserve the VOC’s interests in the Abrolhos.
The commandeur had other matters on his mind. His chief priority was now to salvage what he could from the wreck site, but he also had to keep his men supplied with food and water and ensure that Cornelisz and the mutineers were kept securely under guard. The salvage work was proving difficult—fierce winds and high seas had kept Pelsaert’s divers from the wreck on seven of the eight days that he spent on the interrogations—and by the end of September the only goods recovered were two money chests and a box of tinsel. Though the same weather conditions at least kept the mutineers safely imprisoned on Seals’ Island, the members of the Broad Council were also uncomfortably aware that these cases full of silver coins, which had already helped to spark one mutiny, might yet cause trouble on the voyage back to Java.
It was the last consideration that caused the commandeur to wonder if it would be wise to transport Cornelisz and his men all the way back to the Indies to be executed. There were more than enough mutineers about to cause trouble on a ship the Sardam’s size, and now that the most brutal of them were under sentence of death they had very little to lose by plotting further violence. The thought of traversing nearly 2,000 miles with Cornelisz alive and waiting for a chance to exploit the least sign of dissent was not a pleasant one, and Pelsaert rapidly concluded that “it would not be without danger for the ship and the goods to set off to sea with so many corrupt and half-corrupted men.” The latter, he reasoned, “could easily become wholly corrupted by the richness of the salvaged wealth,” and he and his men could still go the way of the skipper of the Meeuwtje. The safer option was to carry out the hangings in the Abrolhos, and it was soon decided that it would be safest if the ringleaders were dispatched next day, 29 September. To reduce the risk of moving groups of desperate men about the archipelago, the place of execution was to be Seals’ Island.
The commandeur did not announce this date in passing sentence, and Jeronimus continued to dream up ways to buy himself more time. His next ploy was to request a stay of execution, “because he desired to be baptized and so that he could meanwhile have time to bewail his sins and think them over so that at last he might die in peace and in repentance.” This, he cynically calculated, might buy him several weeks of life; but though Pelsaert was pious enough to agree to a brief postponement, he was not prepared to allow the under-merchant more than an extra 48 hours to confront his demons. At dusk on 28 September the executions of the seven prisoners were moved back to Monday, 1 October, but once again the date itself was not revealed to the condemned men.
Jeronimus Cornelisz, who had kept the people of Batavia’s Graveyard in fear of sudden death for two long months, found he could not stomach the agony of wondering how long he had left to live. The apothecary begged Gijsbert Bastiaensz to reveal the date of his execution, and when the preacher could not or would not tell him, he became quite agitated. In the end “the predikant put him at ease for that day [28 September], and he behaved himself as if he had some solace, and was more courageous,” but next morning this veneer swiftly fell away and again Jeronimus pleaded to be told how many days he had, saying that he could not otherwise properly prepare himself for death.
This time, Pelsaert told him. “Tut—nothing more?” Cornelisz muttered in disgust. “Can one show repentance of life in so few days? I thought I should be allowed eight or fourteen days.” Then his self-possession left him and he altogether lost his temper, raging:
“I see well [you] want my blood and my life, but God will not suffer that I shall die a shameful death. I know for certain, and you will all see it, that God will perform unto me this night a miracle, so that I shall not be hanged.”
And that, the commandeur noted with concern, “was his tune all day.”
Whether or not Jeronimus really believed, at this point, that his God would intervene to save him is an interesting question; it would not have been out of character for him to have entertained such thoughts. But Pelsaert plainly guessed that the apothecary’s boasts meant that he intended to commit suicide. He issued special orders to the guards, demanding extra vigilance and warning them not to allow anyone to smuggle the prisoner anything that he could use in such an attempt.
Security was, however, still a problem in the Abrolhos. Although the mutineers were kept safely away from the other survivors, they were not in any modern sense in prison on Seals’ Island. There were no thick-walled cells to lock them in; their quarters were merely tents, and it was impossible to prevent so many men from mixing with their guards. In these circumstances, and especially when Pelsaert was still unaware of the real extent of the mutineers’ support, it was unusually difficult to ensure that the prisoners were kept isolated. Jeronimus had already been able to write two letters to his friends back in the Netherlands, full of tall tales of the conspiracies against him and outraged assurances of his innocence; these he had smuggled to Jacob Jansz Hollert, the Batavia’s under-steersman, in the hope that he would send them home. As it happened, Hollert had given the letters to Pelsaert instead, and they had been opened by the Broad Council and found to be “contrary to the truth, in order to cover up his gruesome misdeeds.” But if it was possible for Cornelisz to pass notes out of his tent, it was also easy enough for him to receive contraband. At some time prior to 29 September the apothecary had obtained some poison, which was perhaps a remnant of the batch that had been mixed to dispose of Mayken Cardoes’s child; and, that night, he took it—either in fulfilment of his own prophecy, or because he had at last despaired of divine intervention.
The effect was not at all what he had hoped. The poison, Pelsaert wrote, was not strong enough to do its job, for although it “started to work at about one o’clock in the morning, so that he was full of pain and seemed like to die,” it left Jeronimus writhing in hideous agony without actually killing him. “In this great anxiety,” the commandeur noted with just a trace of satisfaction,
“he asked for some Venetian theriac. At last he began to get some relief . . . but he had to be got out of his prison certainly 20 times during the night, because his so-called miracle was working from below as well as from above.”
By morning on 30 September, a Sunday, Cornelisz was sufficiently recovered to be called from his tent to hear the preacher’s sermon with the other prisoners. He alone, however, refused to join the party, vowing to have nothing at all to do with the minister. This refusal to seek solace in religion less than a day before the scheduled executions struck the commandeur as remarkable, and it was only now, at the end of the whole story, that Pelsaert finally began to comprehend the true significance of the under-merchant’s heresy. Jeronimus’s strange ideas had cropped up from time to time during his interrogation, particularly in connection with the suppression of Bastiaensz’s preaching on the island, but they had become so bound up with his litany of lies, half-truths, and self-deception that the members of the Broad Council seem to have largely disregarded them, seeing the captain-general’s theology as little more than another of the devices that he used to control his men. The other councillors were bluntly practical men, of strictly orthodox religious views. Confronted with the reality of the murder, rape, and pillage that had gone on in the archipelago they did not feel compelled to explore a merely ideological charge of heresy.
The commandeur, who had a better education than the rest and at least some imagination, was perhaps the only man in the Abrolhos who—at this late remove—finally understood not only how Cornelisz’s beliefs had helped to mold the shape and nature of the mutiny, but also that these views were in themselves only a part of a larger and more complex personality—a personality he plainly believed was evil. In his journals, Pelsaert recoils almost visibly from this recognition, just as a snail that has been prodded by a twig retreats into its shell. And, like the snail, the commandeur had no more than an incomplete understanding of what it was that had touched him. It was as though he had just seen a truth that had lain masked by the easy denunciations of the official record: “Godless,” “evil-minded,” “innately corrupt.” “See how miraculously God the Lord reveals godlessness before all the people,” the commandeur had written piously of Jeronimus’s refusal to come to church; but what he really meant was that he had caught a glimpse—as it were from the corner of his eye—of someone living far beyond the bounds of conventional morality and godliness.
Time was now fast running out for all the mutineers. The first day of October dawned so grimly stormy that the planned executions had to be postponed; the seas were so high that it was dangerous to make the generally easy voyage across the deep-water channel to Seals’ Island. But this respite was only temporary; the next day it was calmer, and a group of carpenters went over to begin building the gallows. Seals’ Island is the only place in the vicinity of Batavia’s Graveyard where the soil is deep enough to support such structures; there is a good landing place on the west side of the channel, toward the southern end of the islet, and a ridge just inland with enough sand and guano-encrusted earth on it to sink the posts. The carpenters used spare lumber from the Sardam, and perhaps the Batavia’s driftwood, too, and when they had finished they had put up two or three large scaffolds, with room enough for seven men.
Once that work was done, the prisoners were summoned. Pelsaert was there to supervise the execution of justice, and Bastiaensz to console the men and save their souls, if that were possible. There, too, was Creesje Jans, who had not talked to Jeronimus since his capture nearly a month earlier. An hour before the executions were due to begin, and in the hearing of some of the Defenders, she at last came close enough to the captain-general to catch his eye. Pelsaert was not present to record this last brief encounter; but Wiebbe Hayes was there, and he listened while Creesje reproached her former captor in the strongest terms. “She bitterly lamented to the said Jerome,” the newly promoted sergeant noted later, “over the sins he had committed with her against her will, and forcing her thereto. To which Jerome replied: ‘It is true, you are not to blame, for you were in my tent 12 days before I could succeed.’ ”
Creesje was not the only person on Seals’ Island anxious to confront Cornelisz before he died. The other condemned mutineers, who had once been the captain-general’s creatures, had greatly resented his betrayal of them under interrogation, and they now loudly demanded that Jeronimus be strung up first, “so that their eyes could see that the seducer of men [had] died.” This request reflected their desire for revenge, of course, but also a real fear that if they died first the apothecary might yet talk his way out of punishment. They crowded round the under-merchant as he was dragged toward his execution—Hendricxsz and Van Os, Jonas and Allert Janssen, Fredricx and Beer—and they hooted and hissed at him. They saw him kneel before the hangman so that his hands could be removed (a contemporary print suggests that the amputations were crudely performed, with a hammer and a chisel). And at the very end, they gathered beneath the gallows to watch as he ascended.
The assembled people on the island saw one last drama played out on the scaffold. “They all shouted at each other,” Pelsaert recalled. “Some evil-doers shouted ‘Revenge!’ at Jeronimus, and Jeronimus shouted at them. At last he challenged them, as well as the council, before God’s Judgement Seat, that he wanted to seek justice there with them, because he had not been able to get it here on Earth.”
The predikant witnessed the same bizarre exchange. “If ever there has been a Godless Man,” he wrote,
“in his utmost need, it was he; [for] he had done nothing wrong, according to his statement. Yes, saying even at the end, as he mounted the gallows: ‘Revenge! Revenge!’ So that to the end of his life he was an evil Man.”
Then Gijsbert Bastiaensz, who had more cause than most to hate Cornelisz, added a last thought. “The justice and vengeance of God has been made manifest in him,” he scrawled, “for he had been a too-atrocious murderer.”