Batavia's Graveyard (19 page)

The position of the people on the wreck could not have been more different. The
70 men stranded on the
Batavia
had plenty to eat and drink; indeed the free access
they now enjoyed to the private quarters in the stern, where the officers had kept their
personal supplies, meant that most were better fed and watered than they had been for
years. On the other hand, the ship herself was partly filled with water and, under the
constant assault of the surf, she was rapidly disintegrating.

The
Batavia
held together for eight days, until, on 12 June, the breakers
finally destroyed her. Long before that, however, it had become difficult to find a place
on board that was still safe and dry, and the survivors’ discomfort was only
increased by the certainty that when she did break up they would all be tipped into the
booming surf. The majority of those left on board—Jeronimus Cornelisz among
them—could not swim; these men must have taken Ariaen Jacobsz’s advice and built
crude rafts or piled loose planks and empty barrels on the deck to be certain that they
would have something to hang onto when the moment came.

Even the stronger swimmers could hardly have been confident of reaching shore.
They had watched while the men who had jumped overboard on the night of the wreck were
smashed against the coral and drowned, and knew that it took luck to get across the reef
alive. So for a week they sat and waited for the ship to disappear beneath them, and while
they waited, most of them drank. They were, one of their number later recalled, “left
in such a desolate state.”

The destruction of the
Batavia,
when it finally occurred, happened so
rapidly that the men on board were taken by surprise. Battered to the point of
disintegration by the surf, the ship’s port side burst open and “the wrecking
went on so quickly and easily that it was like a miracle.” As the waves rushed in,
anyone caught down below must have drowned almost immediately. Even the men on deck hardly
had time to reach their life preservers before they found themselves afloat. For most the
end was quick; the breakers held them under or knocked them senseless on the coral so that
they drowned. The lucky ones were swept right over the reef into the calmer waters beyond,
but only 20 of the 70 men on board managed to float or swim ashore.

Jeronimus Cornelisz was not among them. When the
Batavia
’s upperworks
disintegrated, his fear of drowning had prompted him to shimmy, apparently alone, along
the
retourschip
’s bowsprit. The forward section of the ship had then broken
away, with him still in it, and somehow drifted safely to the shallows. The under-merchant
stayed there, clinging to his spar, for two more days, until the bowsprit fell apart
beneath him. Then he floated to the island in a mass of driftwood, the last man to escape
Batavia
alive.

Jeronimus staggered ashore on Batavia’s Graveyard cold, wet, and utterly
exhausted. He had been 10 days on the wreck, the last two of them alone, exposed to biting
southeast winds and in terror for his life. Now he was jelly-limbed and spent, in
desperate need of hot food and a place to rest.

The people of the island ran to meet him on the beach and half-helped,
half-carried him into their camp, where he was gratified to find that he was treated with
great deference and respect. Frans Jansz and his councillors came to greet him, and he was
pressed to take dry clothing and something to eat. Then, when he had filled his stomach,
he was urged to rest.

Cornelisz slept for hours in a borrowed bed and awakened to the sound of many
voices. The campsite on the northeast quarter of the island had by now grown to quite a
size, and it was alive with activity. The first crude tents had already been erected from
spars and scraps of canvas cast up on the coral, and small groups of survivors were busy
hunting birds or spreading strips of sailcloth to catch rain. Others scavenged washed-up
bits of planking from the ship for fires.

The destruction of the
Batavia
had substantially increased this bounty.
The survivors’ coral islet lay directly in the path of the winds blowing from the
wreck site, and large quantities of driftwood now appeared, along with barrels from the
stores. Over the next few days, 500 gallons of water and 550 gallons of French and Spanish
wine were washed ashore, together with some vinegar and other victuals. The barrels were
manhandled up the beach and left, under guard, in a central store; the spars and planks
were gathered by the carpenters, who set to work to turn them into skiffs and
rafts.

The appearance of these additional supplies was welcome, but one look at the
meager contents of the store tent convinced Jeronimus that Batavia’s Graveyard would
not support a large population for too long. With the arrival of the survivors from the
wreck, the number of people on the island had grown to 208 men, women, and children. Even
living on half rations, they would consume nearly three tons of meat and 1,250 gallons of
water a month, enough to empty the stores in a few days. To make matters worse, the
natural resources of the cay were already almost exhausted. During their first week on the
island, the survivors had killed and eaten hundreds of birds, and so many sea lions that
the colonies that had once crowded the beaches were all but gone, slaughtered for their
meat. The rains were still intermittent and could hardly be relied on, and while they
waited for the rafts to be completed there was still no way of leaving the island. Their
position was precarious in the extreme.

It was for this reason, more than any other, that Cornelisz was welcomed when he
came ashore. It was now the middle of June, and the people of Batavia’s Graveyard had
seen nothing of Francisco Pelsaert for well over a week. For a few days Frans Jansz and
his councillors had dared to hope that their
commandeur
would return with barrels
full of water, but by now it had become only too clear that Pelsaert had left the Abrolhos
and was unlikely to return. With the upper-merchant gone, Jeronimus, his deputy, was the
natural leader of the
Batavia
survivors. It was no surprise that the surgeon turned
to Cornelisz for help.

Within a day or two the under-merchant was elected to the
raad.
As the
senior VOC official in the archipelago, he was entitled to a seat on the ship’s
council, and his education and quick wit made him so much more articulate than his fellow
councillors that they deferred to him, at least at first. The scant surviving evidence
suggests that Cornelisz quickly came to dominate the group.

Jeronimus enjoyed his new position of authority, and his willingness to join the
raad
is easily explained. On
Batavia,
he had possessed no real power, but on
Batavia’s Graveyard he was listened to attentively, and the orders that he gave were
scrupulously obeyed. He had the luxury of a large tent to himself, and the
commandeur
’s
own clothes—which had been salvaged from the wreck—were placed at his disposal.
The under-merchant thus acquired by right the very things he had once planned to seize by
mutiny. In his private quarters, surrounded by his requisitioned finery, Cornelisz became
a man of consequence at last—the ruler, in effect, of his own small island
kingdom.

Assured of the respect and deference he craved, Jeronimus threw himself into the
business of survival. For a few days he was everywhere, striding about in Pelsaert’s
sumptuous clothing, issuing an endless stream of orders and working energetically to
improve the camp. He sent out hunting parties, supervised the erection of more tents, and
oversaw the completion of the boats. The
Batavia
survivors were grateful for his
efforts. “This merchant,” wrote Gijsbert Bastiaensz, “in the beginning
behaved himself very well.”

In truth, however, Cornelisz soon tired of his exertions. He might adore the
rigmarole of leadership, but he had no time for the responsibilities that it entailed. The
work was hard, the detail bored him; and though he had enjoyed his welcome as a savior, he
remained utterly self-centered. The fact was that the under-merchant did not care whether
the people he was protecting lived or died. On
Batavia,
where his shipmates had
stood in the way of his plans for mutiny, he had been willing to kill them all to seize
the ship. On Batavia’s Graveyard, the same men had become mere mouths to feed, and he
was still prepared to see them dead if he thought that it would benefit himself.

By the beginning of the latter half of June, moreover, Jeronimus’s inherent
ruthlessness had been buttressed by a sobering discovery: rumors of his planned mutiny
were circulating on the island. The man who had unveiled the plot was Ryckert Woutersz,
one of Jacobsz’s recruits, who had taken considerable risks on the
retourschip
at the skipper’s behest, “sleeping for some days with a sword under his
head” while he waited for the call to action. Outraged to discover that Ariaen had
fled the archipelago without him, Woutersz determined to betray his master, “telling
in public what They had intended to do, [and] complaining very much about the
skipper.” For some reason the man’s initial allegations had been more or less
ignored; perhaps the other survivors were too much racked by thirst to care about his
stories, or they simply did not believe him. Now that the situation on the island had
improved, however, fresh whispers had begun to sweep the camp. Jeronimus’s name, it
seems, had not been mentioned; Woutersz may not even have known of the
under-merchant’s involvement. But Cornelisz guessed that it might yet emerge. It was
not the sort of matter he could afford to ignore.

Alone in his tent, Cornelisz took stock of his position with cold-eyed
detachment. To begin with, he had to assume that Pelsaert and the skipper were by now on
their way to the Dutch settlements on Java. Ariaen, he hoped, might yet find some
opportunity to murder the
commandeur,
tip his body overboard, and change course to
some other European port—possibly Portuguese Malacca. In that case the
Batavia
survivors would perhaps be rescued by foreigners and the revelation of the mutiny would
cease to matter.

Nevertheless, as Jeronimus knew, there was every chance that Jacobsz and Jan
Evertsz would get no opportunity to dispose of Pelsaert. In that case, much would depend
on the skipper’s skill. The chances of an open, overloaded boat completing such a
lengthy ocean voyage were poor, but Ariaen was a first-rate seaman and it was at least
possible that he would reach the Indies. If he did, the Company would certainly dispatch a
rescue ship, most probably a
jacht,
to recover its money chests and pick up any
survivors. Provided that Jeronimus could stay alive long enough for the
jacht
to
reach them—perhaps another month or two—he might yet find himself stepping
ashore in Java.

In most circumstances, that too would be a welcome outcome, but Ryckert
Woutersz’s allegations were a problem. Jeronimus was, he knew, immune to normal
criticism in the Abrolhos; the
Batavia
’s men had no wish to risk angering the
leader of the council by taking issue with him. But his power was not absolute, and while
the other members of the council could band together to outvote him, any suggestion that
he had planned to mutiny would be catastrophic. Such a thing could not be laughed off or
forgotten, and if there ever was a full investigation of the matter, Cornelisz’s
actions on the
retourschip
might prove to be his death sentence. The Dutch
authorities would be bound to take the allegations seriously, and they would not hesitate
to torture any suspects who fell into their hands. There was every likelihood that the
truth would be uncovered in this way, and the ringleaders, including Jeronimus, exposed
and executed. No matter what else might occur, therefore, Cornelisz himself could not risk
going to the Indies.