Batavia's Graveyard (11 page)

Boudewijn had received orders to sail for Arakan in the autumn of 1627, when he
was living in Batavia, and it took so long—up to a year—for letters to travel
from there to the Netherlands that Creesje was surely unaware her husband would not be in
Java when she arrived. It seems equally improbable that her voyage was planned 12 months
or more in advance, and that he knew she would be leaving the Republic. Most likely the
last of Creesje’s children died some time in 1628 and she, weighed down with grief,
made the more or less impulsive decision to rejoin her husband, sending perhaps a letter
in advance and settling her remaining affairs in time to secure a berth on the
Batavia.
She took with her no more than a few belongings and a lady’s maid. Like Cornelisz and
Bastiaensz, Creesje Jans had little reason to look back.

So much for the passengers in the stern. Like all East Indiamen, the
Batavia
was a segregated ship, in which the accommodation got more spartan as one moved toward the
bow. Those of middling rank, particularly the “idlers” (specialists such as the
surgeons, sailmakers, carpenters, and cooks who were not expected to stand watch and work
by night) lived down on the gun deck, though they too had the privilege of relatively
spacious berths in the forecastle or the stern. The sailors and soldiers who made up more
than two-thirds of the crew, on the other hand, were crammed into the space “before
the mast,” and it was a serious offense for any of them to appear aft unless their
duties called them there.

This strict segregation served several purposes. It reinforced status and
emphasized the divisions that existed on board between soldiers and sailors, officers and
men. But it was also a practical measure. Seamen and troops were placed on separate decks
because long experience had shown that they did not get along and would fight if they were
billeted together. Ordinary seamen were to stay before the mast to minimize the
ever-present threat of mutiny, and the entrance to the officers’ quarters in the
stern was fortified for the same reason.

The soldiers came off worst from these arrangements. Their quarters were two
decks down on the orlop—what the Dutch called the “cow-deck”—where the
roof beams were so low it was impossible to stand upright, and which was so close to the
waterline that it was equipped with neither vents nor portholes to provide a minimum of
air and light. The orlop was actually part of the hold, and on return journeys it became a
spice store. Uncomfortable though it was, it was not unknown for the troops to remain
confined to this dark and airless deck for all but two 30-minute periods each day, when
they were brought up under escort to taste fresh air and use the latrines.

The soldiers of the VOC were a particularly motley collection, misfits gathered
more or less indiscriminately from all over northern Germany, the United Provinces, and
France. A number came from Scotland, and there was even one Englishman—whose name
appears as “Jan Pinten” in the records of the voyage—among the soldiers on
the
Batavia.
The troops were largely untrained, and at a time when local dialects
and thick provincial accents were the norm, many found it difficult to understand each
other, let alone the orders of their officers.

There is little evidence of any solidarity among soldiers of the VOC; thievery
and casual violence were rife, and the only bonds that seem to have formed were
friendships of convenience between men who hailed from the same town or district. Friends
would keep an eye on each other’s possessions, share food and water, and nurse each
other if they fell sick. It was important to find a companion like this. Those who had no
friend to turn to when they succumbed to illness might be left to die;
retourschepen
were fitted with sick bays in the bows, but officers and seamen received priority for
treatment. A typical Dutch sailor, it was observed, “shows more concern for the loss
of a chicken in the coop than for the death of a whole regiment of
soldiers.”

On the
Batavia
the majority of the troops were German. A number came from
the North Sea ports of Bremen, Emden, and Hamburg, where the VOC maintained recruiting
centers to gather up the dregs of the waterfront. Though some were decent men—it was
not unknown for the younger sons of honorable but impoverished families to seek their
fortunes in the Company’s army—they were, on the whole, a potentially dangerous
group of malcontents.

The soldiers were led by a Dutch corporal, Gabriel Jacobszoon, who had come on
board with his wife. Jacobszoon was assisted by a
lansepesaat
(lance corporal) from
Amsterdam called Jacop Pietersz, whose nicknames—he was variously known as
steenhouwer,
“stone-cutter,” and
cosijn,
which means
“window-frame”—suggest a man with the considerable strength and bulk
required to control the brutal men under his command. The Stone-Cutter and the corporal
were in turn responsible to the young VOC cadets who were the only military officers on
board, and who did not themselves share the discomforts of the orlop deck.

These youths were frequently junior members of old noble families whose lands, in
the time-honored tradition, were passed down from a father to his eldest son, leaving any
other male children to make their own way in life. The crew of the
Batavia
included
a dozen such cadets, at least four of whom—Coenraat van Huyssen, Lenert van Os, and
the brothers Olivier and Gsbert van Welderen—appear to have had pretensions to
nobility.

Van Huyssen is the only cadet of whom it is possible to say much. The
predikant
noticed him as a “handsome young nobleman” who came from the province of
Gelderland, and it would appear that he was a junior member of the Van Huyssen family that
owned the manor of Den Werd, a fief near the German border in the county of Bergh. Over
the years the Van Huyssens produced several members of the knighthood of the province, but
their estate at Den Werd was small and not particularly productive. If Coenraat were
indeed a scion of this family, it would not be surprising to find him seeking a living in
the East. Perhaps he joined the Company’s army with some friends; the Van Welderen
brothers came from the provincial capital of Gelderland, Nijmegen, and it is not
impossible that the three young nobles knew each other.

If the
Batavia
’s soldiers endured appalling hardships, conditions
were only marginally better for the seamen on the gun deck. Their quarters stretched
forward from the galley to the bows. Here there was headroom, and gunports offered light,
but 180 unwashed men still lived together, crammed into less than 70 feet of deck that
they shared with their sea chests, a dozen heavy guns, several miles of cable, and other
assorted pieces of equipment. The gun deck was wretchedly cold in winter and unbearably
hot and stuffy in the tropics. Hammocks, which had been introduced in the previous
century, were still not widespread, and many sailors used sleeping pads instead, squeezed
into whatever spaces they could find on deck. Worst of all, the gun deck was almost always
wet, rendering even off-duty hours wretched for the many men who worked in heavy weather
without an adequate change of clothes.

The very sight of an ordinary seaman was alarming to the genteel merchants in the
stern, and it is not surprising that they were kept as far away from the passengers as
possible. Dutch sailors in general stood apart by virtue of their shipboard
dress—loose shirts and trousers offered the necessary freedom of movement in an era
of stockings and tight hose—and they had a reputation for being unusually rough and
raw, even by the standards of the time. But those desperate or destitute enough to risk
their lives on a voyage to the East had a particularly poor reputation, and ordinary
merchant skippers and even the Dutch navy would not recruit men who had served the
VOC.

“For sailors on board Indiamen,” one passenger observed, “cursing,
swearing, whoring, debauchery and murder are mere trifles; there is always something
brewing among these fellows, and if the officers did not crack down on them so quickly
with punishments, their own lives would certainly not be safe for a moment among that
unruly rabble.” A
retourschip
sailor, wrote another, “must be ruled with
a rod of iron, like an untamed beast, otherwise he is capable of wantonly beating up
anybody.”

Nevertheless, the seamen of the VOC did form a more or less cohesive group,
united by the bonds of language and experience. Most were Dutch, unlike the soldiers, and
all shared the unique dialect of the sea. The jobs they were expected to perform, from
weighing anchor to making sail, required cooperation and encouraged mutual trust, and they
were in general more disciplined and less disruptive than the troops.

The bulk of the mainmast, which ran right through the ship, marked the limit of
the sailors’ quarters. Here, halfway along the gun deck, there were two small
rooms—one the surgeon’s cabin and the other a galley lined with bricks and full
of copper cauldrons. The galley was the only place on a wooden ship where an open fire was
permitted, and in this tiny space the
Batavia
’s gang of cooks were required to
prepare more than 1,000 meals a day. Then came a capstan and the pumps, and farther back
again the quartermaster and the constable occupied two little cabins between the bread
store and the armory. Their quarters were directly below Pelsaert’s Great Cabin, but
for all those who lived down on the gun deck, the wooden beams that separated them from
the more privileged inhabitants of the stern were much more than a purely physical
barrier. They protected the merchants from the artisans and kept the officers safe from
the men. On most East Indiamen, this was a necessary precaution. On the
Batavia,
it
was to prove no protection at all.

The Gentlemen XVII had originally decreed that fleet president Specx would
assume overall command of the winter fleet, a substantial convoy of 18 vessels. Francisco
Pelsaert, in the
Batavia,
was to have sailed with them, his responsibilities
extending no further than the ship under his command. Toward the end of the month,
however, Specx was unexpectedly recalled to Amsterdam on business, and in view of the
deteriorating weather the VOC took the unusual decision to split the fleet in two. Eleven
ships would wait and sail with the president when he was ready. The other seven were to
depart immediately under the command of the most experienced upper-merchant
available.

Thus it was that Pelsaert found himself appointed
commandeur
of a whole
flotilla of merchantmen: three
retourschepen—
the
Dordrecht
and
’s
Gravenhage
as well as the
Batavia—
and three other vessels, the
Assendelft,
the
Sardam,
and the
Kleine David.
The final vessel in the squadron was the
escort warship
Buren.
One ship, the
Kleine David,
was to sail to the
Coromandel Coast of India to take on textiles, dyes, and pepper. The rest were bound for
the Spice Islands—which, God willing, they might expect to reach in the summer of
1629.

Jeronimus Cornelisz and Creesje Jans probably had only the sketchiest ideas of
the dangers they would face during such a voyage, but experienced merchants knew better
than to underestimate the difficulties of the eastward passage. The distance from Texel to
the Indies was almost 15,000 miles—more than halfway around the world. The voyage was
the longest that any normal seventeenth-century ship would ever undertake, and conditions
along much of the route were harsh. Most ships took eight months to reach Java, traveling
at an average speed of two and a half miles per hour, and though one or two of the most
fortunate reached their destination after only 130 days at sea, it was not unknown for
East Indiamen to be blown off course and left becalmed for weeks or sometimes months at a
time. The
Westfriesland
left the Netherlands in the early autumn of 1652 and
eventually limped home two years later, having endured a succession of disasters and
sailed no farther than the coast of Brazil. The
Zuytdorp,
which sailed in 1712,
found herself becalmed off the coast of Africa and made the fatal decision to sail into
the Gulf of Guinea in search of fresh water. Lack of wind trapped her there for five more
months, and four-tenths of her crew died of fever and disease. The ship finally rounded
the Cape of Good Hope nearly a year after leaving the United Provinces.