Batavia's Graveyard (26 page)

Thus, by the end of the third week of July, the situation in the Abrolhos was
relatively clear. Jeronimus and his gang of mutineers had secured absolute control over
Batavia’s Graveyard. Nevertheless, their base, the island itself, was so devoid of
natural resources that their position in the longer term was not absolutely assured. They
remained dependent on the rain for water and on salvaged, and thus limited, supplied for
everything else, from clothing to weaponry.

Meanwhile, Wiebbe Hayes and his original party of 20 men had somehow contrived to
survive on the two largest islands in the archipelago. There had been no direct contact
between the under-merchant and the soldiers for more than a month, but thanks to the
arrival of the survivors from Seals’ Island, and then Aris Jansz, Hayes had a very
good idea what the mutineers were doing and understood the danger he was in. Jeronimus, on
the other hand, had no real inkling of the soldiers’ situation. He realized they had
been forewarned and reinforced by several refugees, but neither he nor his council knew
whether Hayes’s men were comfortably established on their island, or so short of food
and water they were simply dying by degrees.

The under-merchant knew, however, that the situation had changed in one critical
respect. Wiebbe might have no swords or guns, but now he did possess two boats. Cornelis
Jansz’s little homemade boat and Aris Jansz’s skiff were not a danger in
themselves; they could never carry enough men for Hayes to launch a worthwhile attack. But
they could make things very difficult for the mutineers if Pelsaert reached his
destination and returned to rescue them.

6

Longboat

“We expected nothing else but death.”

ANONYMOUS SAILOR

T
HE
BATAVIA
’S LONGBOAT, with Francisco Pelsaert and Ariaen Jacobsz
aboard, bobbed in the ocean swells north of the Abrolhos, steering for the South-Land. She
was quite a substantial craft—a little more than 30 feet long, with 10 oars and a
single mast—but though her sides had been built up with some extra planking there was
still not much more than two feet between them and the ocean’s surface. The boat
could easily be swamped in heavy seas, and even the short voyage to the mainland over the
horizon—which the skipper guessed was only 50 miles away—was not without its
dangers.

Pelsaert’s original intention had been to search for water on the nearest
stretch of coastline and bring back enough, in barrels, to supply the rest of the
survivors for several weeks at least. This, in turn, would make it possible to send a boat
north to fetch help. The chief problem with the plan was that the coast of Terra Australis
was so poorly mapped that neither the skipper nor the
commandeur
had any real idea
where to search; the VOC’s earlier encounters with the South-Land indicated that a
river reached the coast about 360 miles north of their position, but locating supplies any
closer than that would require luck as much as judgment, and there was no telling how long
it would take to get them back to the Abrolhos.

Lurking at the back of Ariaen Jacobsz’s mind was the thought that if no
fresh water could be found they would have to sail the longboat straight to Java, where
the Dutch trading settlement of Batavia was the one place they could be sure of finding
help. The Indies were nearly 2,000 miles away, however, and even if such a lengthy voyage
was possible, it would be at least two months before any survivors in the archipelago
could be rescued; by that time it seemed likely that many of them, if not all, would have
died of thirst. No doubt others in the skipper’s entourage had reached the same
conclusion, for all 48 of the people who had been part of Jacobsz’s party insisted on
sailing with him. They took with them all the remaining food and water. In consequence,
the longboat, which was designed for no more than 40, was dangerously
overloaded.

The only people in the boat who really mattered were the sailors. All the senior
officers of the
Batavia—
the skipper, the three steersmen, and the high
boatswain, Evertsz—were on board, and they alone had the experience and skills
required to keep a small vessel afloat on the open ocean and navigate to and from the
Abrolhos. Of the other 43 passengers and crew, the great majority were surely able seamen;
in addition, Jacobsz’s cousin, the bos’n’s mate, and Harman Nannings, the
Batavia
’s
quartermaster, were probably on board. Only six of those who sailed from the
Abrolhos—three men, two women, and a child—had no apparent knowledge of the sea.
Zwaantie Hendricx was one; Ariaen had kept her close to him ever since the wreck and had
no intention of leaving her behind now. Zwaantie was accompanied by a young mother (she is
not named in Pelsaert’s journals) and her two-month-old baby, who had been born
somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Also on board were Hans Jacobsz, a joiner; Claes Jansz,
the
Batavia
’s chief trumpeter; and Francisco Pelsaert himself.

They sighted the South-Land on the afternoon of 8 June, their first day at sea.
The coast was bleak and utterly forbidding: flat; featureless; devoid of water, trees, or
vegetation; and protected by an unbroken line of cliffs that stretched as far as could be
seen in either direction. Huge breakers crashed endlessly against the rocks, churning the
sea white with foam and making any approach to land extremely hazardous. By now night was
only a few hours away, and Jacobsz did not dare remain inshore; instead, he steered back
out to sea for several hours, turning east again at midnight and coming back upon the
coast a few miles to the north at dawn. The sun rose to reveal an identically
awe-inspiring cliffscape, and they sailed north along it for a whole day without finding
anywhere to land.

Pelsaert and Jacobsz had, in fact, chanced upon the South-Land coast at its most
desolate. From Houtman’s Abrolhos the shoreline remains almost unremittingly hostile
all the way to what is now Shark Bay, 200 miles to the north. Along the way, the cliffs
rise precipitately to heights of up to 750 feet. There are almost no safe landing places,
and the hinterland is parched and almost uninhabited.

A few decades later, another Dutchman, Willem de Vlamingh, sailed along this
stretch of coast and described it as “an evil place”:

“The land here appears very bleak, and so abrupt as if the coast had been
chopped off with an axe, which makes it almost impossible to land. The waves break with so
great a fury that one should say that everything around must shake and become dismembered,
which appears to us a truly terrible sight.”

Pelsaert was of the same opinion. The cliffs, he noted gloomily, were “very
steeply hewn, without any foreshore or inlets as have other countries.” Worse, the
land behind them was uniformly unpromising: “a dry, cursed earth without foliage or
grass.” There was no sign of any water.

To make matters worse, another storm blew up toward evening on 9 June, and the
longboat was caught dangerously close to the coast. Jacobsz and Pelsaert had been
searching for a landing place when the wind rose in the west, and they were driven
steadily toward the cliffs. For a while it seemed they would all be tipped into the surf
to drown, but eventually the skipper got them clear. Even then, however, it took continued
effort from the steersmen to keep the boat clear of the shore, and they passed a miserable
night and the whole of the next day battling the rising seas.

By the second evening, Jacobsz and his sailors were exhausted, soaked, and
chilled, and still the gale showed no sign of abating. The wind started to gust out of the
northwest, setting up a dangerous chop that slapped against the built-up sides and
sometimes swilled into the longboat. The little yawl they had towed from the Abrolhos was
taking on water too, and as it grew dark they were forced to cut the smaller boat adrift
and bail their own craft frantically. They were so tightly packed there was little room
for such energetic work, and before long the situation had become so desperate that
Jacobsz ordered them to tip much of their food and spare equipment overboard. Two small
barrels of fresh water in the bottom of the boat were spared.

With most of the supplies gone, the boat rode a little higher in the water and
there was more room to bail. Gradually the danger of swamping receded, and on the morning
of 11 June the storm blew itself out. But the swell remained as high as ever, and the
current pushed them ever farther north.

For three more days they searched fruitlessly for a landing spot until, after a
week at sea, they had reached latitude 24 degrees south. The longboat was now about 300
miles from the Abrolhos and one-sixth of the way to Java, and their own supply of water
had nearly gone. Only strict rationing—half a pint per person per day—had made
it last so long, but now they had enough for no more than another day or so. There could
no longer be any question of turning back. They would die themselves if they could not
find water farther up the coast.

At length, on the afternoon of 14 June, Pelsaert managed to get a party of men
ashore at a place where he had spotted smoke rising from the mainland, but there was
nothing to be found. Next day they tried again, this time on the North-West Cape, where
they found a way inside the reefs and into calmer water. Here at last there were beaches
and dunes. It was the first time Jacobsz had been able to land the boat, and with many
more hands available to search for water, the
commandeur
split his party into two.
One group was set to digging in the dunes while the other went to hunt among the rocks
inland.

The dunes yielded only brine, but the men who had ventured inland had better
luck. They chanced upon the remains of an Aboriginal fire, with discarded crab shells
scattered all about, and close by found dozens of tiny pools among the rocks. It was
rainwater, which had fallen during the storm a few days earlier; had they reached the spot
a few days earlier or later it would not have been there. As it was, they gathered up
enough to quench their thirst and still fill the nearly empty barrels with another 80
kannen
of liquid (about 17 1/2 gallons), enough for at least another six days at sea.

There was nothing further to be found, and on 16 June they made their way back to
the open sea. Pelsaert had intended to run into “the river of Jacop
Remmessens,”
^*34
in the most northerly part of Eendrachtsland, which a Dutch ship had
chanced upon in 1622; it lay on the far side of the Cape, still another hundred miles
away, but the wind was now blowing from the east and forcing them away from the coast. It
soon became apparent that they could not stay close to land, and as they were now more
than 360 miles from the Abrolhos, with only enough water for themselves, Pelsaert and
Jacobsz at last made the decision to head for Batavia. It was a serious step; there was
every chance it could be interpreted as a deliberate act of desertion, and to protect
himself the
commandeur
required all those on board to sign an oath signifying their
agreement with his resolution. When that was done, Jacobsz swung the tiller. The longboat
came about, and the skipper pointed her bow north into the Timor Sea.

There were few precedents for what the people from the
Batavia
were about
to attempt: a voyage of about 900 miles across the open ocean in an overloaded boat, with
few supplies and only the barest minimum of water. Jacobsz and Pelsaert had some
advantages: good winds, fair weather, and a boat adapted to the open sea. But, even so,
the
Batavia
’s longboat took on water continually, and none of those on board
dared move too much for fear of overturning the boat. There was no shelter from the heat
of the day. Before long, one of the sailors in the boat confessed, “we expected
nothing else but death.”

The men who sailed in the longboat recorded few details of the privations they
endured. Even Pelsaert, who kept up his journal throughout the voyage, confined himself to
brief daily notes about the weather, the boat’s estimated position, and the distance
run. But 160 years later, Captain William Bligh undertook a similar—though
considerably longer—voyage after being cast adrift by the
Bounty
mutineers. He
sailed 4,600 miles west across the Pacific with 18 men and their supplies crammed into a
10-man launch, leaving a detailed account that gives some clues as to what Jacobsz,
Pelsaert, and their men must have gone through to survive.

Bligh was in command of an experienced crew of able seamen and did not have women
or children to worry about. He also sailed across a part of the Pacific rich in islands,
and only rarely for days on end across an empty sea. Nevertheless, his men suffered badly
from overcrowding, as the people from the
Batavia
must also have done. They found
it necessary to swap places in the boat every few hours and devised a system whereby men
took turns on the tiller while others gingerly exchanged seats. Bligh also established a
definite routine. The men in the
Bounty
’s boat were divided into three
watches, as they would have been on board ship, to ensure there were always people alert
to the danger of being swamped by an unexpected wave. Some of those who were off duty
bailed; the others rested or slept. At noon they shot the sun and calculated their
position. It seems likely Ariaen Jacobsz would have done the same.

A good captain—and William Bligh, for all his faults, was a fine one in this
respect at least—also understands that men facing the likelihood of death need hope
as much as they need water. Studies of shipwreck survivors have shown that men who do have
hope outlive those who may be physically as strong or stronger but give way to despair. A
stubborn determination to make land, perhaps see a wife or family again, has helped many
sailors to survive long periods in open boats. Religion is another comfort; even the most
agnostic man tends to turn to prayer in the middle of the ocean. Nevertheless, it is
leadership—provided by a man who displays competence, remains confident, and tries to
keep up the spirits of his men—that most often means the difference between life and
death for sailors cast adrift. There were two such potential leaders in the
Batavia
’s
longboat, the skipper and the
commandeur;
but from what we know of the two
men—Pelsaert no sailor and still ill, Jacobsz not only an excellent seaman but loud
and assertive—it seems certain that it was the skipper who performed this vital
function in the longboat.