Batavia's Graveyard (28 page)

Coen had returned to Batavia in September 1627 to find the city under threat. The
Bantamese, whose lands lay to the west, had fallen quiet, but to the east of the Dutch
enclave lay the much larger empire of Mataram, “an oriental despotism of the
traditional kind” whose sultan controlled three-quarters of Java. The VOC—with
its gaze fixed firmly on the spice trade—had little interest in its neighbor, which
was a purely agricultural society with a barter economy, but Mataram coveted Batavia. Its
ruler, Agung, was a conqueror who dreamed of ruling huge tracts of the Indies. He had
already subdued several smaller sultanates and taken the title “Susuhunan,”
which means “He to whom everything is subject.” Now he began to plan to
overthrow the Dutch.

Within a year of Coen’s return, the Susuhunan attacked. In August 1628 Agung
laid siege to Batavia with an army of more than 10,000 men, and the governor-general was
compelled to order the evacuation of the southern and western quarters of the town. To
deny Batavia to the enemy, Coen was forced to burn most of the settlement down and
withdraw to the fortress, where he and his garrison endured a three-month siege that ended
only when the Mataramese ran out of supplies. The siege was not lifted until 3 December,
and the Dutch knew that Agung would almost certainly return the following August, when his
next harvest had been gathered in. Thus, when Pelsaert’s emaciated, bone-weary
sailors reached their destination—having no doubt sustained themselves during their
ocean voyage with visions of feasting and debauchery in the taverns of the town—they
found it lying in ruins and the inhabitants preoccupied with the prospects of a fresh
attack.

In these straitened circumstances, news that a brand-new
retourschip
and
her cargo had gone aground on an unknown reef was a particularly devastating blow. The
Batavia,
her money chests, and Pelsaert’s trade goods were together worth at least 400,000
guilders, the equivalent of about $30 million today, and the 280 people abandoned in the
Abrolhos could have helped to swell Coen’s depleted garrison. The merchants of Jan
Company had always understood that a small proportion of their ships would inevitably be
lost on voyages to and from the Netherlands, but, even so, the wrecking of the
Batavia
was a serious disaster.

Pelsaert and Jacobsz must have appreciated this. Both men would have known that
their future careers, and perhaps even their liberty, now rested in the hands of the most
implacable man ever to serve the VOC—someone who “could never forget misdeeds
even when they resulted from understandable human weakness, and whose heart was never
softened by the sufferings of his opponents.” Only the previous month, Coen had
vividly demonstrated his willingness to punish all those who transgressed his fearsome
standards, no matter what their station, by flogging a girl named Sara Specx in front of
the town hall. Sara was the half-Japanese daughter of the VOC fleet commander Jacques
Specx, and her crime had been making love in the governor’s apartments.
^*37
Because she
was only 12 years old, and her lover, who was the nephew of the town clerk of Amsterdam,
no more than 15, even the
fiscaal
and the Councillors of the Indies had begged Coen
to show compassion; but though there was evidence to show that the intercourse had been
consensual and the lovers wished to marry, the governor-general had remained unmoved. He
had the boy beheaded and was only narrowly prevented from having Sara drowned. The skipper
and the
commandeur
knew that they could expect no mercy from such a man.

The longboat had arrived in Batavia on a Saturday. No work was permitted in the
citadel on Sundays, but as soon as the Council of the Indies reconvened on 9 July the
commandeur
was summoned and asked to account for the loss of his ship. Pelsaert cannot have relished
this audience with Coen, and he delivered what can only be described as a partial account
of the whole episode, emphasizing that his navigators had repeatedly assured him that the
ship was still well clear of land, and stressing his own determination to find water for
the castaways. The decision to head for Java was presented as a regrettable necessity
rather than a matter of self-preservation, and the
commandeur
was also careful to
give the governor-general some cause for guarded optimism. The most precious trade goods
had been landed in the archipelago, he reminded his interrogators, and even in the midst
of the evacuation of the ship he had seen to it that buoys were placed at the wreck site
to indicate the positions of valuables that had vanished overboard.

Jan Coen, it seems, was not overly impressed by this account, but one thing did
count in the Pelsaert’s favor. On Coen’s last voyage out to Java, the
governor-general had learned all about the dangers of the South-Land’s coast; he had
nearly run aground on it himself. “When we chanced upon the Land of the
Eendracht,”
Coen had written in a letter home,

“we were less than two miles away from the breakers, which we noticed
without being able to see land. If we had come to this spot during the night we would have
run into a thousand dangers with the ship and crew. The ship’s position fixed by the
mates was 900 to 1,000 miles away, so that land was not expected at all.”

This near disaster had occurred in September 1627, and the governor must have
recognized that there were clear parallels between his own narrow escape on board the
Wapen
van Hoorn
^*38
and the loss of the
Batavia.
The fierce currents of the Southern
Ocean had swept both vessels much farther east than they had realized, to the confusion of
their skippers, and it was only Coen’s good fortune in coming onto the South-Land
during the day, rather than in the middle of the night, that had saved him. Since the
governor-general was, for all his harsher qualities, at least scrupulously fair, he thus
forbore—for the time being—from any criticism of the
commandeur.
Instead,
he offered Pelsaert one chance to redeem himself.

According to the records of the Council of the Indies,

“It was put forward by His Hon. to the Council, since it was apparent that
it was possible that some of the people and also some of the goods might be saved and
salvaged, whether  . . . they should be sent thither with a suitable
jacht
 . . . and
it was found good to despatch the
Sardam,
arrived here from the Fatherland on the
7th inst.; to provide the same with provisions, water, extra cables and anchors, and to
send back thither Francisco Pelsart,
commandeur
of the wrecked ship
Batavia
 . . . in order to dive for the goods, with the express order to return hither as soon as
possible after having done everything for the saving of the people and the salvaging of
the goods and cash.”

Coen’s proposal was immediately endorsed by the other members of the
council, Antonio van Diemen and Pieter Vlack. Directions were given for the
Sardam
to be rapidly unloaded and prepared for the voyage south, and while this was being done
the governor-general wrote out his instructions to the
commandeur.

At first glance, the orders that Pelsaert eventually received were reasonably
straightforward, but they carried undertones of threat and had been drafted carefully to
ensure that the
commandeur
had no excuse for any second failure. The
Sardam
was to sail to the Abrolhos as rapidly as possible, it was explained, and once there she
would save not only any survivors but also as much money and equipment as possible,
“so that the Company may receive some recompense to balance its great loss.”
Time was not a consideration; Pelsaert should be prepared to spend “three, four or
more months” at the wreck site if need be. Even if he had to wait for the southern
summer to arrive before completing salvage operations he should do so, establishing a
temporary base on the South-Land itself if storms drove him from the islands.

The
commandeur
was to be supplied with six divers, Coen went on—two
Dutchmen and four men from Gujerat—and the
Sardam
’s crew was to be kept
to a minimum, apparently in the hope that a large number of survivors might yet be found.
In the event that no sign of the
Batavia
’s people could be found, the
jacht
was to sail on to the South-Land and scour the coast for traces of the passengers and
crew. Above all, Pelsaert was cautioned, it was his duty “to salvage the cash, which
is an obligation to the Company and on which your honour depends.” Failure to carry
out these orders, it was definitely implied, would not be tolerated.

Ariaen Jacobsz had not been present at the council meeting to hear the
commandeur
’s
attempt to place the blame for the disaster on his shoulders. He may still have been
recovering from the rigors of their recent voyage or may simply not have been asked to
attend; at any rate, it would appear that once they had arrived in the Indies, Pelsaert
kept his distance from both the skipper and the boatswain, Evertsz.

The
commandeur
had evidently come to suspect both men of complicity in the
assault on Creesje Jans long before the
Batavia
was wrecked. How he guessed they
were involved we do not know for certain, but it certainly appears possible that Lucretia
had recognized Evertsz as one of the masked men who had attacked her by his height or
size, or strong North Quarter accent; and once that connection had been made, shipboard
gossip, or something a little more definite than that, seems to have alerted Pelsaert to
the role played by the skipper. Cornelis Dircxsz, the Alkmaar man who alone of those
approached by the high boatswain had declined to have anything to do with the attack, is
so carefully cleared of any involvement in the crime in the ship’s journals that it
is at least possible it was he who eventually informed on his companions. Whatever
Pelsaert’s motives and his evidence, however, it is clear that shortly after his
arrival in Batavia he denounced both Jacobsz and Evertsz to his superiors. On 13 July
Ariaen was suddenly arrested and thrown into the dungeons of Castle Batavia. Jan Evertsz
followed him into the cells.

No record of the high boatswain’s arrest survives, but it is evident the
allegations that he faced were serious, and every attempt was made to extract the truth
from him. Justice, in Evertsz’s case, would have meant interrogation at the hands of
the
fiscaal,
Anthonij van den Heuvel, or one of his subordinates. Sitting or lying,
probably tightly bound, in a chamber deep within the citadel, the high boatswain would
have been confronted with Pelsaert’s charges and the evidence against him and asked
to confirm whether they were true. Denials were rarely taken at face value, and if the
case was deemed serious enough, Evertsz would undoubtedly have been tortured in an attempt
to make him talk.

This procedure was perfectly legal, though Dutch law did stipulate that a
confession extracted under torture was not in itself enough to secure a conviction.
Instead, the prisoner would be allowed to recover his senses and then asked to confirm the
admissions he had just made. Only a “freewill confession” of this sort, made no
more than a day after torture was applied, was acceptable as evidence of guilt. Naturally,
however, the retraction of confessions made under duress was not the end of the matter and
generally led only to the application of even harsher tortures, as Torrentius the painter
had already discovered. Since the end result was almost inevitably the same, the Dutch
insistence on freewill confession was thus something of a legal fig leaf.

Few men were capable of resisting the attentions of the torturer for long, and
the high boatswain of the
Batavia
was not one of them. Before long a full
confession of his involvement in the attack on Creesje Jans came tumbling from him. Given
all that Evertsz knew about the skipper’s role in events on board the ship, and
particularly his plans for mutiny, it is tempting to wonder exactly what he said during
his interrogation at Castle Batavia. No evidence survives, but while it seems not at all
unlikely that Jacobsz’s name came up in connection with the “very great
insolences, yea, monstrous actions, that were committed on the mentioned ship,” the
one surviving account—by Councillor Antonio van Diemen—confirms only that
Evertsz was subsequently hung for the assault and makes absolutely no mention of Jeronimus
Cornelisz. Whether this detail implies that the high boatswain was simply unaware of
Jeronimus’s closeness to the skipper, that he contrived not to mention the planned
mutiny in order to avoid still greater punishment, or that he was even more afraid of the
under-merchant than he was of being tortured is unclear.

More is known of the charges brought against the skipper. The minutes of the
Council of the Indies observe that there were two of them: