Batavia's Graveyard (13 page)

Hard tack was the worst affected. This twice-baked bread contained no fats or
moisture and would keep indefinitely in normal conditions, though it was so dry it cracked
teeth and had to be dunked in stew to make it edible. Damp, it was easier to eat but
became a perfect larder for the weevils that laid their eggs within and turned each piece
into a honeycomb of tunnels and chambers full of larvae. Every sailor who made the passage
to the Indies learned to tap his ration of bread against the sides of the ship before he
ate it, to dislodge the insect life within. Any that remained were eaten anyway. Novice
seamen learned to distinguish the flavors of the different species: weevils tasted bitter,
cockroaches of sausage; maggots were unpleasantly spongy and cold to bite into.

On board ship, as on land, the officers and men not only ate differently but
drank differently as well. Pelsaert and Cornelisz and the other senior officers were
permitted to carry their own supplies of wine and spirits, in quantities proportionate to
their rank; those who had reached the post of boatswain or above were also accorded double
rations of the water and weak beer that was shipped for general use. The men were allowed
spirits only to prevent disease, and their water and beer were prone to turn green with
algae in the tropics. Water from the island of Texel was highly favored by the VOC because
its mineral content helped to keep marine growth at bay, but by the time the
Batavia
reached Africa her drinking water was slimy and stinking. It had even become heavily
infested with tiny worms, which the sailors sieved with their teeth, and the daily
three-pint ration was brought up from the hold “about as hot as if it were
boiling.”

Unfortunately for the people on board, the deterioration in the
Batavia
’s
supplies of water and beer coincided with the onset of blazing weather, which caused both
passengers and crew—many of them still dressed in the thick cloth suited to a
northern winter—to sweat profusely and develop thirsts that were only heightened by
the salty diet. Rationing was necessary to conserve the precious supply of beer and water,
however undrinkable it became. Almost every sailor, no matter how poor, possessed a cup in
which to receive his ration; serving the men beer or water in a common jug inevitably led
to violent disputes over who had received more than his fair share of precious
liquid.

For all this, the men of the
Batavia
ate and drank well by the standards
of the day. Their food was laden with sufficient calories to keep them working, and at a
time when it was usual for peasants and artisans to eat meat no more than three or four
times a month, a
retourschip
’s crew enjoyed it three or four times a week.
Nicolaes de Graaf, a surgeon who made five voyages to the Indies between the years 1639
and 1687, observed that “each mess gets every morning a full dish of hot groats,
cooked with prunes and covered with butter or some other fat; at midday they get a dish of
white peas and a dish of stockfish, with butter and mustard; save on Sundays and Thursdays
when they get at midday a dish of grey peas and a dish of meat or bacon. Each man gets 4
lbs of bread (or usually biscuit) weekly, and a can of beer daily, as long as this lasts.
They are also supplied with as much olive-oil, vinegar, butter, French and Spanish brandy,
as they need to keep themselves reasonably healthy and fit.”

At the captain’s table, there was no rationing. Pelsaert and Jacobsz,
Cornelisz, and Creesje ate meat or fish three times a day, and on special occasions 11- or
12-course feasts were served in the Great Cabin. It was a way to pass the time.

Boredom tested the patience of everyone on board during the long voyage south
toward the Cape. In between meals, the passengers and crew passed the time with gossip and
games. There was singing and sometimes the crew staged amateur theatricals. Gambling with
dice was popular, though technically illegal, and draughts and tick-tack—a form of
backgammon—were widely played. A few, chiefly among the officers, read for
recreation, though most of the books available were the religious texts that the VOC, in a
rare moment of piety, had determined to supply to all its ships. (Sir Francis Drake
himself, on his voyage around the world, is known to have whiled away the hours by
coloring in the pictures in his copy of Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs.
) The handful
of women on board knitted or wove lace; on some voyages, old records attest, they even
took over in the galley on occasion, fed up with a diet of bread “which lay like a
stone in their stomachs.” The sailors enjoyed rougher sports. Fistfights were
tolerated as an amusing diversion, and when they could the men played the “execution
game,” a contest involving forfeits that included being smeared with pitch and tar.
This game was so dangerous that it could only be played with the express permission of the
skipper.

Disputes flared rapidly amid the boredom and the heat. The fights that were not
about the rations generally concerned the living space, or lack of it. With more than 330
people crammed into a ship only 160 feet long, privacy was almost impossible to come by.
The men fought over space to lay their sleeping mats, and so disruptive was the problem of
theft that stealing was punished almost as severely as murder. The temptation was great,
however; most of the sailors and soldiers on board were almost destitute—they would
hardly have been risking their lives in the Indies otherwise—and minor theft was a
continual problem on every Dutch ship.

It was during this period of indolence and tedium that Jeronimus Cornelisz first
revealed his heterodox views to the people of the
Batavia.
Talk in the Great Cabin
in the stern turned quite frequently to matters of religion, and from time to
time—far now from the grasp of the Reformed Church—the under-merchant enjoyed
shocking the assembled company with his thoughts on some bit of doctrine. He was an
unusually eloquent man and talked so persuasively that even his more inflammatory beliefs
were somehow rendered almost palatable. Jacobsz and his officers, who seldom encountered
educated men, found his smooth tongue almost hypnotic. The merchant was, in any case,
careful not to stray too far into outright heresy. “He often showed his
wrong-headedness by Godless proposals,” the
predikant
recalled, much later on,
“but I did not know he was Godless to such an extent.”

In time, Cornelisz’s practiced charm seems to have made a great impression
on the skipper, and somewhere off the coast of Africa the two men became friends. They had
a number of interests in common, and the many hours the ship spent becalmed in the tropics
provided them with ample opportunity to become better acquainted. It is safe to assume
they touched on two subjects more than once: the fortunes to be made in the Spiceries, and
the beauty of Lucretia Jans.

Creesje commanded the attention of many of the officers in the stern. With the
exception of the provost’s wife, who seems to have been considerably older, she was
the only woman of any rank on board the
Batavia.
That alone would have been enough
to engage the interest of men denied much female company for several months on end, but
her remarkable beauty, which is attested to in the records of the voyage, undoubtedly
enhanced this allure. There can be no question Cornelisz had noticed it. By the time the
Batavia
neared the West African coast, it would seem that the skipper and the
commandeur
—who
both greatly enjoyed the company of women—were well aware of Creesje, too.

By the last days of December the ship had reached the southern limit of the Horse
Latitudes,
^*16
which lay at 25 degrees north. By then, it would appear, the ship was short of
either food or, more likely, drinking water, since Pelsaert made the decision to put in at
Sierra Leone. Doing so was a violation of the VOC’s sailing instructions which had,
since 1616, designated the Cape of Good Hope as the sole permissible port of call on the
voyage to Java. By putting in to port, Pelsaert made himself liable not only to a fine but
to the condemnation of his employers. Moreover, even at this early date Sierra
Leone—infested as it was with malaria and yellow fever—was so rotten with
disease that it had earned a deserved reputation as a “white man’s grave.”
To sail into port there was to take a risk, and although it was not unheard-of for VOC
ships to visit the African coast, those that called there generally did so as a last
resort.

The first Westerners to visit Sierra Leone had been the Portuguese, who made
contact with the local tribes as early as the fifteenth century. The people who lived
along the coast were members of the Temne clan, which controlled much of the commerce with
the interior. They lived on fish, supplementing their diet with rice, yams, and millet,
and they traded food for swords, household utensils, and other metal goods when they
could. By 1628 the Portuguese had also begun to purchase slaves in Sierra Leone.

Pelsaert had no interest in slaves and was interested only in resupplying his
ship, but, to general surprise, the
Batavia
did make one addition to her crew in
the port. Rowing ashore to purchase supplies, Pelsaert’s men noticed a single white
face among the people waiting on the waterfront. It belonged to a 15-year-old boy from
Amsterdam named Abraham Gerritsz, who had deserted from another Dutch East Indiaman, the
Leyden,
at the beginning of October and was by now just as anxious to leave the settlement.
Pelsaert, who had been forced to transfer several of his own men to other ships in the
flotilla at the beginning of the voyage, agreed to allow the boy to work his passage to
the Indies on board the
Batavia.

From Sierra Leone, the little fleet put back out into the Atlantic and headed
south toward the equator. Here the winds grew less predictable again, and skippers were
instructed to stay within the confines of what the Dutch called the
wagenspoor
—the
“cart-track,” two parallel lines crossing the ocean from northeast to southwest
all the way from the Cape Verde Islands down to the equator. The
wagenspoor
was
sketched in on VOC charts and marked the boundaries of the safest route. If a ship sailed
east out of the cart-track, she risked becoming becalmed in the Gulf of Guinea. If she
ventured too far west, she would rot in windless seas off the coast of Brazil.

Ariaen Jacobsz kept the convoy within the
wagenspoor
as it limped across
the unpredictable doldrums around the equator. There was little wind and the weather was
blisteringly hot now, so much so that it became all but impossible to sleep below and the
crew sought the sanctuary of the deck at night. Planking warped in the heat, and the sun
softened the tar that had been used to caulk gaps between the timbers, trapping animals
that had been unwary enough to fall asleep along the cracks. Wax melted below decks,
causing candles to ooze and run until they hardened into weird, squat shapes in the cooler
evening air. The men wore only loincloths when they had to go below; passengers who had
never experienced such unbearable temperatures wrote that the sun had “dried the
feces within the body”; and in an era before the invention of effective balms and
creams, everyone suffered agonies from sunburn. Cooling these burns in brine brought only
temporary relief, and the salt in the water caused rashes that itched unbearably. The
latter problem must have been exacerbated by the fact that, in the absence of fresh water,
sailors traditionally washed their filthy clothes in urine.

Down in the abandoned hold was the empire of the rats. Bloated rodents scurried
between the supplies, gnawing their way into the casks of meat and nesting in the linen
trade goods. Having learned that wooden walls of barrels concealed huge quantities of
food, they sometimes attacked the sides of the ships in error. Given time, rats could chew
their way through the layers of oak planking in the hull, springing leaks that tested the
pumps and kept the
Batavia
’s sweating gang of caulkers busy.