Batavia's Graveyard (12 page)

The Gentlemen XVII were roused to fury by the thought of such delays and even
resented the need for all
retourschepen
to put into land at least once to rest and
take on fresh supplies of food and water. In the early years of the VOC, ships had visited
Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands, and sometimes St. Helena as well, but these calls
could add several weeks to the voyage. By the 1620s most fleets outward bound called only
at the Cape, about 150 days’ sailing from the Dutch Republic. Most ships tarried
there for about three weeks, long enough to nurse the sick, and restock, and the Cape
became so useful that the VOC built a fort there in the middle of the century and settled
colonists to provide fresh food for its ships. It was popular with the sailors, too, who
took to calling it “The Tavern of the Ocean” for the bounties that it promised
them. To the directors of the VOC, however, the Cape was at best an unfortunate necessity,
which slowed down the all-important flow of profit. They offered bonuses to merchants,
skippers, and steersmen whose vessels made fast passages—600 guilders for a voyage of
only six months, 300 guilders for one of seven, and 150 for those who arrived in the
Indies less than nine months after setting sail. Such measures seem to have had little
effect. Some ships did make extraordinarily short passages; in 1621 the
Gouden Leeuw
^*14
completed the voyage from the Netherlands to the Indies in 127 days, and in 1639 the
Amsterdam
established a new record of just 119. But such speedy voyages were rare. The masters of
most ships evidently preferred the comforts of the Cape to the lure of guilders in their
pockets.

Francisco Pelsaert had never had to consider such necessities before. The
additional responsibility that he now assumed was all the more daunting for being so
unexpected. Still, even the most experienced fleet commanders had relatively little
control over their ships; the vessels of a departing convoy could well spend weeks at
anchor, waiting for good winds, and the order to sail—when it eventually
came—could easily lead to chaos as unwieldy
retourschepen
maneuvered in the
tight confines of their roadsteads. Minor collisions were common and, though the ships all
lit their huge stern lanterns to keep track of each other in the dark, it was rare for a
convoy to stay together all the way from the Channel to the Indies.

Pelsaert’s flotilla did not even leave the Zuyder Zee together. The
Batavia
was left behind when the other six ships in the convoy sailed on 28 October 1628, and the
commandeur
’s
new flagship did not finally get under way until the following day. The most likely
explanation is that there was trouble in loading the
Batavia
’s cargo of silver
and trade goods, but, whatever the reason, the
retourschip
’s passengers and
crew soon had cause to regret the short delay.

On the first day at sea,
Batavia
ran into an exceptionally violent storm
while still off the Dutch coast. The crew was still green and untested, and before the
ship could be got properly under control, she ran aground on the treacherous Walcheren
sandbanks. Stuck fast and battered by the steep waves that built up quickly in the
shallows, both passengers and crew had good reason to fear for their lives.

Storms were the greatest danger an East Indiaman could face, and stranding was
one of the worst calamities that could befall her in a storm. Even in open seas, heavy
waves could swamp a
retourschip,
or smash her sides, or make her roll until the
masts dipped into the water and the sails filled with sea and carried the whole ship down.
Aground, the waves could open up her seams, and if they were big enough to make the
ballast shift, the weight of the guns, masts, and yards could tip her over, too.

The Walcheren Banks were a particularly deadly obstacle; though well within the
home waters of the Dutch Republic, they claimed one ship in every five of the total lost
by the VOC between Amsterdam and the Indies. The threat to the
Batavia
was
considerable, and it took all Ariaen Jacobsz’s skill as a seaman to get her off the
banks without serious damage. The skipper not only bullied and encouraged his men to
shorten sail and check the stowing of the ballast, but kept the ship intact until the
storm had blown itself out. Then he floated the
Batavia
off on the tide. Careful
checks revealed the hull was not too badly damaged and by morning on 30 October the ship
was able to continue on her way.

Jacobsz steered west, heading for the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic. At some
point during the passage down the Channel, it appears, the
Batavia
came upon the
battered survivors of the rest of Pelsaert’s convoy. They had been savaged by the
same storm that had nearly sunk their flagship, and the smallest of the
retourschepen
,
’s Gravenhage,
had been so badly damaged that she had been forced to run into
the Dutch port of Middelburg for repairs that were to keep her there for about four
months. The other six ships continued to steer west.

It was November now; the northern winter was drawing in, and the days were mostly
short and cold and wet. For novice sailors such as Jeronimus Cornelisz, this was their
first experience of the sea and it took time to get used to the constant motion of the
ship, particularly in the stormy waters of the Bay. Surviving accounts written by voyagers
to the East are full of the misery of these early days at sea, when seasickness was rife.
Even the livestock on the main deck—carried to ensure a supply of fresh
meat—suffered in this way. The pigs in particular were prone to bouts of
mal-de-mer.

The shock of life at sea would have been considerable for Jeronimus and his
companions. Within a week of sailing even basic cleanliness became a dreamed-of luxury for
the passengers and crew of a
retourschip.
There was no fresh water to spare for
washing, and although one of the largest ships of her day, the
Batavia
was equipped
with no more than four latrines. One pair was located on either side of the Great Cabin
and reserved for the use of the people in the stern. The rest of the crew had to line up
to use the remaining pair in the bow, which were nothing more than holes in the deck under
the bowsprit. These heads were open to the elements and in full view of all those waiting
in line. The only additional amenity was a long, dung-smeared rope that snaked through the
hole in the latrine. The frayed end of the rope dangled in the sea and could be hauled up
and used to wipe oneself clean.

This miserable existence was compounded in bad weather. All the gunports and the
hatches had to be closed and battened down, and little fresh air penetrated below deck.
The men stank of stale sweat and garlic (a popular cure-all at the time); everything was
permanently damp, and it became too dangerous to venture to the latrines. Soldiers and
sailors relieved themselves in corners or crouched over the ladders down to the hold,
^*15
and
if the weather was bad enough for the pumps to be called into action, the urine and feces
that had been deposited below made an unwelcome reappearance. Rather than discharging into
the sea, the
Batavia
’s pumps simply brought up filth and water from the
bilges, “fuming like hell and reeking like the devil” as one contemporary put
it, and sent it cascading down the gun deck to slosh around sleeping seamen until it found
its own way out through open ports and sluices. When the weather finally improved, the men
would scrub the decks with vinegar and burn frankincense and charcoal down below in an
attempt to clear the air, but for much of the passage the lower decks of the
Batavia
smelled like a cesspit. Those fortunate enough to travel in the stern were spared the
worst of this unpleasantness, but every account of the journey east makes it plain that,
during the first weeks at sea, even the most distinguished passengers endured discomforts
they could scarcely have dreamed of back at home.

At length Pelsaert’s convoy left the worst of the weather behind it and
headed south. The winds became lighter as the ships entered the Horse Latitudes off the
North African coast, and though there were occasional excitements—the first sight of
dolphins, which often came to play around Dutch ships, and seaweed in the water, heralding
the approach to the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands—for the most part the voyage
quickly became tedious. When the winds dropped there was relatively little for even the
sailors to do, and for the soldiers, merchants, and passengers on board, day followed day
with scarcely a break in the general routine.

In these circumstances, food quickly became a subject of consuming importance for
the inhabitants of the
Batavia.
The passage of time was marked by the hot meals
served three times a day: at eight in the morning, noon, and 6 p.m. These could be grand
occasions; Pelsaert and Jacobsz ate in the Great Cabin, usually with the ship’s
senior officers and the most distinguished passengers as guests. Jeronimus Cornelisz and
Lucretia Jans dined at the upper-merchant’s table, along with Gijsbert Bastiaensz and
his wife. Claas Gerritsz the upper-steersman would have been there, too, along with his
deputies, the watch-keepers Jacob Jansz Hollert and Gillis Fransz—whose nickname,
somewhat unnervingly, was “Half-Awake.” Further down the table sat the provost,
Pieter Jansz, and perhaps some of the junior merchants: young VOC assistants such as
Pelsaert’s favorite clerk, Salomon Deschamps of Amsterdam, who had been with him in
India. But even these privileged people could not take an invitation to the
merchant’s table entirely for granted; there was another well-stocked table in the
passenger accommodation at the stern to which they might occasionally be relegated and
where the
predikant
’s children and the less-favored merchants and officers
ate. Here and in the Great Cabin there were napkins and tablecloths, pewter plates and tin
spoons, cabin boys to bring the food and the steward to serve wine. The sailors and
soldiers, on the other hand, dined where they slept, sitting on their sea chests and
eating from wooden dishes with wooden spoons. There were no servants before the mast.
Instead the men were grouped into messes of seven or eight, and one man from each mess
acted as orderly to his shipmates in weekly rotation, fetching food from the galley in
pails and washing the dishes afterward. The cook and his mates ate last of all, standing
watch while the rest of the crew had their meals.

The quality of the food varied considerably. Officers ate better than the men and
all on board enduring a progressively more unsavory diet as the voyage progressed. Some
effort was made to provide fresh food: as well as the live chickens, goats, and pigs
carried in pens on the main deck, the topmost cabin in the stern—a low-roofed little
hutch known as the
bovenhut—
served as a sort of greenhouse in which Jan
Gerritsz, the ship’s gardener, grew vegetables. On calm days fish were sometimes
caught, but the tradition of the service dictated that no matter who reeled them in, the
first landed each day went to the skipper, the next dozen or so to the merchants and the
officers, and so on down the established lines of precedence. It was uncommon for much
fresh food to reach the ordinary sailors and soldiers.

The men lived almost entirely on cask meat, legumes, and ship’s biscuit, a
sort of bone-dry bread often known as hard tack. Although it was possible, in the first
half of the seventeenth century, to preserve some foods fairly well, the VOC was not
renowned for the quality of its stores. On land, meat was cured by carefully rubbing it
with salt (which drew out moisture), or hung for a while and then pickled by being
repeatedly immersed in boiling brine or vinegar. Both processes killed bacteria and
flavored the meat and could produce surprisingly palatable results when done well. But
such methods were costly and time consuming, and Jan Company balked at the expense. For
less money, its suppliers took freshly slaughtered pigs and cows and dunked whole sides of
meat into seething cauldrons full of seawater without even draining off the blood, which
seeped out later to sour the brine. Meat preserved in this way was cheap but extremely
salty. It needed to be soaked in fresh water before being cooked, but at sea it was
generally boiled in brine, to preserve the limited supplies of drinking water on board,
and emerged from the pot snow white with encrusted salt. Served, as it was, in an equally
salty broth, it could burn the lips and induce a raging thirst.

Retourschepen
also carried preserved fish, which was dried, not salted.
The Vikings had crucified the cod they caught in their longboats’ rigging;
Netherlanders impaled theirs and called them
stokvisch
after the Dutch word for the
stick on which they threaded up to 30 split and gutted cod for air drying. The drying
process produced bone-hard slabs of white fish that had to be softened up for cooking by
being soaked, or beaten with mallets. Like salt pork and beef, stockfish was generally
served in a stew with dried peas or beans. But fish was relatively difficult to preserve,
and—at least according to the later records of the Royal Navy—it tended to go
bad more quickly than preserved meats and was probably among the first stores to be
consumed. The chances are that stockfish featured heavily in the meals served on the
Batavia
at this early stage in the voyage.

Even salt meat was difficult to store in the sort of conditions that confronted
the little fleet as it neared the coast of West Africa under a tropical sun. In the
absence of any form of refrigeration, conditions down in the hold quickly became
unbearable. Ventilating the nether reaches of the ship was practically impossible, and the
lowest decks became so stifling that it was not unknown for seamen sent into the
storerooms to suffocate. Casks burst open in the heat, scattering their contents and
providing food for the multitude of vermin that scurried and swarmed down below. When it
rained and water seeped down into the stores, dried food rotted or became moldy and
infested, too.