Batavia's Graveyard (20 page)

What, then, was he to do if a Dutch rescue ship arrived? To a man as ruthless as
Cornelisz, the answer appeared obvious. A
jacht
might carry a crew of no more than
20 or 30 sailors, so few they could be overwhelmed in a well-planned attack. Given the
support of enough determined men, he could make himself the master of a rescue ship. There
would be no need then to go to Java. Instead he could pursue the plan he had conceived in
the Southern Ocean: turn pirate, make a fortune, and retire to some foreign port to enjoy
the fruits of his endeavor.

Even if there turned out to be no rescue and no voyage, Cornelisz could see
advantages to freeing himself from the restraints he labored under in the Abrolhos. As
things stood, there were distinct limits to his power and authority. His suggestions might
always be respected, and his orders generally obeyed, but there were still four other
councillors on the
raad,
and he could be outvoted. The matter was made more serious
by the fact that Jeronimus’s colleagues did not share his views on the need to hoard
their limited supplies. Frans Jansz and the other councillors, the under-merchant had
begun to think, would kill them all with their ridiculous insistence on eking out a ration
to every man, woman, and child on the island. That was something he could not allow to
happen.

Sometime during the third week of the month, therefore, Jeronimus made up his
mind to instigate the mutiny that he had planned on the
Batavia.
The circumstances
were, of course, now very different. There was no longer any ship to seize; the
under-merchant’s closest ally, Ariaen Jacobsz, had deserted him; and—most
importantly—it would no longer be nearly such an easy matter to control the majority
of loyalists in the crew. But the Cornelisz’s goals had hardly changed. Jeronimus
sought wealth, power, comfort, and security, and he was prepared to go to any lengths to
secure himself these luxuries.

It took the under-merchant perhaps a week to recruit the men he needed to seize
power on the island. Exactly how he managed this was never revealed in any detail. The
survivors’ situation—stranded, short of food and water, and apparently abandoned
by the VOC—no doubt made his task easier than it would otherwise have been, and the
fact that up to a dozen of the sailors and soldiers who had been ready to mutiny on the
retourschip
had found themselves trapped on Batavia’s Graveyard was a significant advantage. But
he also had his own abilities to call on—a quick, if perverse, mind and a
pathologically charming tongue.

The Jeronimus of Pelsaert’s journals remains at best a half-drawn figure:
ruthless and deadly, certainly, yet also someone whose real personality has always been
obscured by layer upon layer of lies and special pleading. But he was, it seems, a truly
charismatic figure—able to persuade a varied group of men that their interests were
identical to his—and his talk of the wealth and luxury that might yet lie within
their grasp certainly made enticing listening for men trapped in the grey surrounds of
Houtman’s Abrolhos. Cornelisz was obviously and genuinely clever, and so vital that
he stood out among the failures, novices, and second-raters who peopled the
Batavia
’s
stern. He was also self-assured and eloquent in a way that awed men who were neither. The
rabble of the gun deck and the educated assistants of the stern alike seem to have found
him irresistible. Long before the end of June he had gathered about two dozen followers
around him and felt ready to put his plans into action.

Most of Jeronimus’s men had been with him on the
Batavia.
The most
valuable of them were a handful of army cadets, men such as Coenraat van Huyssen and
Gsbert van Welderen who had sailed for Java in the comparative luxury of the stern and
discovered they had little taste for life on Batavia’s Graveyard. They were
young—no more than 21—and inexperienced, and so were unlikely to dispute the
under-merchant’s leadership. And since they knew how to handle weapons, the common
people on the ship instinctively deferred to them. Several soldiers, led by lance corporal
Jacop Pietersz, had also been part of the conspiracy on the
retourschip.
The best
of these were German mercenaries, who were also mostly strong and young; Jan Hendricxsz,
from Bremen, was 24, and Mattys Beer, of Munsterbergh, was no more than 21. These men,
along with several of their comrades, may well have seen action in the Thirty Years’
War,
^*29
gaining invaluable military experience along the way. The third and smallest group
of mutineers consisted of a few men from the gun deck, mostly sailors whom Jacobsz had
recruited but had been unable to take with him on the longboat. The skipper’s good
friend Allert Janssen, who had been among the party that assaulted Creesje Jans, was the
leading member of this group.

The
Batavia
mutineers had concealed their true numbers so effectively that
it is now impossible to say with any certainty which of the other members of the
under-merchant’s gang had been recruited on the ship. It seems likely that Rutger
Fredricx, a 23-year-old idler from Groningen, was among the first men to be
approached—he was the
Batavia
’s locksmith, and his skills would have been
invaluable to mutineers who needed to imprison or restrain up to 200 of their colleagues.
One or two of the VOC assistants were also aware of the conspiracy, and since they must
have worked closely with Jeronimus on board the
retourschip
it may be that they,
too, were among the earlier recruits. The remainder of the under-merchant’s followers
appear to have been approached after the
Batavia
was wrecked. They would probably
have been recruited from among the friends of the existing mutineers, or those who
complained most bitterly about the discomforts of island life.

One of the assistants was of particular importance to Jeronimus. His name was
David Zevanck, and he came from a rural area a little to the north of Amsterdam. Zevanck,
like the others, was still young, and there are indications that he came from a good
family, one that owned property and had some pretensions to gentility. How he had come to
sail with the
Batavia
remains unknown. As one of the ship’s clerks, he must
have been an educated man, but there was also a hard edge to his character. He was
physically strong and handy with a sword, and of all the people on the ship, he was
perhaps the closest to Cornelisz in ambition, ruthlessness, and character. Now he became
the under-merchant’s principal lieutenant, organizing the men for him and ensuring
that his orders were obeyed.

Beginning in the third week of June, Cornelisz began to plot rebellion,
“acting very subtly and gradually, so that in the first 20 days it could not be
perceived.” The under-merchant detached his followers from the other survivors,
billeting them in two tents together with their weapons, and he collected all the other
swords and muskets on the island into a central store that he alone controlled. Next, he
prevented the ship’s carpenters from putting into action a plan to build their own
small rescue vessel from the wreckage of the
retourschip,
and he began to look for
ways of reducing the number of people on Batavia’s Graveyard. The latter was a
necessary precaution, he and Zevanck agreed—both to conserve the limited supplies and
to reduce the risk that their conspiracy might be uncovered. As things stood, the
mutineers were still outnumbered about six to one by the other men on the island. The
intention was to reduce the disparity by half.

The under-merchant’s solution to this problem was simple but effective. He
sent his followers to explore the islands, using the first of the little skiffs that the
carpenters had built from fragments of driftwood. Their purpose was not so much to find
freshwater wells and new colonies of sea lions—which was what the people of
Batavia’s Graveyard were told—as to provide the under-merchant with detailed
information about conditions elsewhere in the archipelago. From Cornelisz’s point of
view, it made little difference whether his men located additional supplies or not. What
he needed was merely an excuse to send parties of survivors to the other islands in the
group.

Within a day or two, the mutineers returned, reporting to Jeronimus that they had
found nothing of any value in the Abrolhos. Like Pelsaert and his sailors, the
under-merchant’s men had searched the two large islands to the north without finding
any sign of water. They had also visited a pair of smaller islets, one less than half a
mile away on the western side of the deep-water channel that ran along one side of
Batavia’s Graveyard, and the other a little farther to the south. The closer of the
islets was a long, thin, sandy spit that ran north to south for nearly a mile and was
crowned with a narrow ridge covered in coarse grass and low vegetation; it was home to
large flocks of birds and hundreds of sea lions—so many that the boats’ crews
took to calling it Seals’ Island—but the few pools discovered at its southern
tip were brackish and undrinkable. The other, which was the islet where Ariaen Jacobsz had
set up his temporary camp, was just as desolate. The mutineers found nothing there but a
few empty biscuit barrels, and the cay itself, which they named Traitors’ Island in
bitter remembrance of the men who had abandoned them, was a mere pancake of loose coral.
Its one resource was driftwood, which littered the entire southern shore.

Neither of these islands could possibly support more than a handful of people for
any length of time, but the under-merchant did not care. “He said that the number who
were [on Batavia’s Graveyard] together, about 200, must be reduced to a very
few,” Gijsbert Bastiaensz recalled, and Cornelisz glibly announced that his men had
made important discoveries. “Those people coming back again had got enough
information that there was not any consolation there for any Human Beings,” remarked
the
predikant,
“but the Merchant ordered them to say that there was water and
good food for the people; whereupon some others were ordered to go, and others went of
their own accord to know truthfully if there was Water.”

One group of about 40 men, women, and children were taken to Seals’ Island.
They were provided with a few barrels of water and promised that fresh supplies would be
ferried to them whenever they were needed. A smaller party, 15 strong and commanded by the
provost, Pieter Jansz, traveled to Traitors’ Island. They took with them all the
tools they needed to make rafts on the islet. Jeronimus had promised them that they could
make their way to the larger islands to the north as soon as the boats were
ready.

Shortly afterward, towards the end of the third week of June, it was announced
that the “High Land” to the north was also to be colonized. These two large
islands had now been searched for water twice without success—by Pelsaert on 6 June
and by Zevanck and his men a fortnight later—but the survivors on Batavia’s
Graveyard did not know this, so there were no protests when a third detachment, 20 strong,
was sent to hunt for hidden wells. Almost all of the members of this party were troops who
had remained loyal to the Company; they included “some of the boldest soldiers,”
the
predikant
believed. Jeronimus saw to it that they were only lightly equipped
and ensured that they were issued neither weapons nor a boat. The men were told to light
signal fires when—or if—they found fresh water and were promised that they would
be picked up when the fires were seen. In fact, Cornelisz had no intention of returning
for them and hoped that they might die of thirst.

The group sent to the High Land included two young cadets, Otto Smit and Allert
Jansz, but its real leader seems to have been a private from the small town of Winschoten
in Groningen whose name was Wiebbe Hayes. Nothing at all is known about Hayes’s
background, age, or military experience, but we know that the under-merchant had picked
him out from among the 70 or more private soldiers on the
Batavia,
which implies
that he possessed a certain presence. Unknown to Jeronimus, however, Hayes was also a man
of considerable ability, and his character and sense of purpose seem to have been unusual
for a private soldier of this time. It appears unlikely that he was a member of the
grauw,
the impecunious and uneducated rabble who had peopled the lower decks of the
Batavia,
and possibly he, like Coenraat van Huyssen and David Zevanck, came from a comfortable
background and had somehow fallen on hard times. It was not entirely unknown for the
children of respectable but impoverished parents to enlist with the VOC as ordinary
soldiers, but if Hayes did come from such a family, he plainly had even less money and
influence than men who could at least secure themselves commissions as cadets.

In any event, Wiebbe was able to keep his men alive on the High Land for almost
three weeks. The soldiers soon discovered—as had Pelsaert and Zevanck before
them—that there were apparently no wells on the smaller and more easterly of the two
islands, but they did find small puddles of rainwater among the coral, and these sustained
them while they completed their exploration. After several days, they moved west onto the
larger cay, waiting for low tide and stumbling across the mile of mudflats that separated
the islands to begin the search again. There they found abundant wildlife but no water,
and once again they had to scour the ground for little pools of rain. Again, they found
just enough to keep them alive. They continued this precarious existence for 20 days,
searching endlessly for wells, hunting for food, and keeping watch for rafts from
Batavia’s Graveyard that never came.