Batavia's Graveyard (39 page)

Jacques Specx lived on to die, in 1652, as replete with wealth and honor as a
lifetime in the spice trade could make a man. He returned to the Republic late in 1632,
having been a quarter of a century in the East; since leaving home in 1607, aged 18, he
had spent no more than 12 months in the Netherlands and devoted most of his energies to
opening up the Dutch trade with Japan. On his way home he seized the uninhabited island of
St. Helena in the Company’s name, and for a few years the isle became a popular
refueling station for Dutch spice ships on their homeward voyage. Eventually, however,
pirates and privateers learned that it was a rich hunting ground, and by the 1660s a sharp
increase in the loss of ships had forced the VOC to abandon their new
possession.

Home at last, Specx became a director of the Company—one of the Gentlemen
XVII—in 1642 and held the post for the last nine years of his life. He died at the
ripe age of 63; his voyages had made him rich, and he bequeathed his children a
considerable inheritance, including several portraits of himself made by artists of the
stature of Rembrandt van Rijn.

Specx’s half-Japanese daughter, Sara, whom Coen had flogged for her supposed
immorality, fared less well. After her father’s return to Batavia she was nursed back
to health, but because she was Eurasian he was nevertheless compelled to leave her behind
in Java upon returning to the Netherlands. (Dutch law at this time forbade Eurasians to
enter the Republic. The intent was to encourage men who had fathered families in the East
to remain there, thus easing the VOC’s perpetual shortages of manpower.) The girl,
who was 15 when this happened, remained in the East and seems to have been well cared for
in her father’s absence. A few years later she made a good marriage to a
predikant
named Georgius Candidius. The groom was 20 years her senior, and the union endured for
less than 12 months before Sara Specx died at the Dutch factory in Formosa, of unknown
causes, around the end of 1636. She was only 19 years old.

Perhaps half a dozen active mutineers slipped through Pelsaert’s net before
they could face charges for their crimes. Four of them—Dirck Gerritsz, Jan Jansz
Purmer, Harman Nannings, and the bos’n’s mate—were sailors who seem to have
been among the crew of the longboat. Three of them had taken part in the assault on
Lucretia Jans, which had cost Jan Evertsz his life, but their names only emerged when the
other members of their party were interrogated in the Abrolhos. By the time the
commandeur
returned to Java, the men had dispersed, and there is no record that any of them were ever
brought to trial.

Luckier still was Jan Willemsz Selyns, the
Batavia
’s upper-cooper,
who seems to have led something of a charmed life. He had taken part in the awful massacre
of women and children on Seals’ Island on 18 July, when almost 20 people died, and
was thus at least an accessory to murder. Then, on 5 August, he had come under suspicion
as a potential defector to Wiebbe Hayes and only survived Jeronimus’s attempt to kill
him when Wouter Loos personally intervened on his behalf. Later, he had been a member of
the boat’s crew that set off to capture the
Sardam
and murder half her crew,
and he had thus been held on board the
jacht
for further questioning. Many of those
with whom he shared a cell—Jacop Pietersz and Daniel Cornelissen among them—were
executed for their crimes, and all the other members of the group had at least been
flogged and keelhauled, but so far as can be ascertained Selyns entirely escaped
punishment. Perhaps he simply died of natural causes en route to Java, but Pelsaert’s
journals make no mention of this, and it seems more likely that he somehow convinced the
commandeur
of his innocence.

The fate of a sixth man, Ryckert Woutersz, is still a greater mystery. The
disgruntled gunner, whose loose tongue had revealed Jeronimus’s plans soon after the
wreck, had certainly schemed to seize the ship and taken part in the attack on Creesje,
but his name does not appear on the lists of suspects compiled by Pelsaert and he was
never accused of any crime. At some point the gunner simply disappears, and it seems
likely that it was Cornelisz who dealt with him, arranging for his throat to be slit one
night in the Abrolhos as payment for his treachery. There is no proof of this, however, so
perhaps Woutersz did somehow contrive to stay alive and found his way to Batavia with the
other survivors of the under-merchant’s brief and bloody reign.

Francisco Pelsaert reverted briefly to his womanizing ways. Almost as soon as he
had disembarked in Java—and certainly long before he finished his report to the
Councillors of the Indies—the upper-merchant contrived to form a close liaison with a
married woman named Pieterge, who was the wife of a certain Willem Jansz. Pieterge’s
husband was away from Batavia, and the woman took full advantage until, in December 1629,
she and two female friends were caught by the local
predikant
carousing in the
“young, rash” company of
de gentlemen
Croock, Sambrix, and Pelsaert.
Pieterge and Pelsaert received stern warnings from the cleric, and the whole affair was
reported to Batavia’s Church Council. The preacher’s notes leave little doubt
that the relationship was a sexual one, which would probably have continued for some time
had it not come to the attention of the Church.

The warnings had the required effect, however, and the affair seems to have been
over by the end of January 1630, when Pelsaert was summoned before the Council of the
Indies to present his credentials. This interview must have caused him some concern. The
Council might have been expected to deal harshly with a man who had not only failed to
keep good order on his ship, but also abandoned several hundred people to Jeronimus’s
mercies while he himself sailed to Java to fetch help. However, the prompt recovery of
almost all of the
Batavia
’s trade goods and the capture of the under-merchant
and his men stood to Pelsaert’s credit, and in the end the
commandeur
was
neither greatly criticized nor heaped with praise. Instead he was dispatched to Sumatra as
second-in-command of a military expedition to Jambi, a pepper port placed under siege by
the Portuguese. He spent the months of May and June 1630 helping to lift the
blockade.

The Jambi adventure kept the
commandeur
occupied while he waited for the
September monsoon winds that would finally take him back to Surat. The silver
“toys” designed to please the Great Mogul and the cameo he had shipped to the
East on behalf of Gaspar Boudaen were all destined for the court at Lahore, and Pelsaert
must have been keenly aware that only the successful completion of this part of his
mission was likely to restore him to full favor with the Gentlemen XVII. In the meantime,
all he could do was put his own version of events in the Abrolhos in writing for his
employers, the directors of the chamber of Amsterdam.

The
Batavia
journals, which contained a lengthy account of the events of
the mutiny, reached Amsterdam in July 1630. The Gentlemen XVII read them and were
unimpressed by the
commandeur
’s actions and behavior. By then, however, it was
far too late for them to make their displeasure known. Pelsaert was already dying, most
probably exhausted by the same illness that had all but killed him on board the
Batavia
during the journey from the Cape.

That fever, it appears, had never quite abated, and the
commandeur
had
spent much of his time on board the
Sardam
in his bunk, “wholly ill and
reduced to great wretchedness.” He must then have enjoyed a brief remission, during
which he took part in the Jambi expedition, but by the middle of June his health had
collapsed again, and he was struck down by a long and terminal illness that ended, the
records of the Company attest, with his death some time before mid-September. He was then
about 35 years old and had spent almost half his life in the service of the VOC.

Francisco Pelsaert thus survived his nemesis, Cornelisz, by no more than 11
months, and his career, which in the summer of 1628 had seemed to hold great promise,
never recovered from the wrecking of his ship. In some respects, indeed, the
commandeur
was fortunate to have died at the moment that he did. The markets of India, which he had
professed to understand better than any other Westerner, had changed fundamentally with
the death of the Emperor Jahangir in 1627; the Great Mogul’s successor, Shah Jahan,
did not share his taste for Western fripperies. The VOC came to the unwelcome realization
that there was no longer any market for Pelsaert’s gold and silver toys. They had
cost, it will be recalled, around 60,000 guilders, and so far as the Councillors of the
Indies were concerned, blame for the debacle rested squarely with the late
commandeur,
who had pressed ahead with his commissions even after news of Jahangir’s death had
reached him in the Netherlands.

There can be little doubt that this second failure, coming so soon after the loss
of the
Batavia,
would have put an end to Pelsaert’s career. As it was, the
high officials of the Company in Java—to whom the thankless task of finding buyers
for the trade goods fell—complained bitterly about the impossibility of getting a
good price for them. The plate, which the
commandeur
had confidently predicted
would yield a 50 percent profit, was eventually disposed of in India—after six
months’ fruitless haggling—for a “vile price” in 1632, but no amount
of effort could persuade the Moguls to show any interest in Gaspar Boudaen’s Roman
cameo, the fabulous jewel that Jeronimus had displayed to seduce the mutineers with dreams
of unimagined luxury. It had accompanied Pelsaert’s toys to India, but no buyer could
be found, and by 1633 it was in Batavia again. After years of being peddled unsuccessfully
in Asia, it was put up for auction in Amsterdam in 1765. In 1823 the jewel was purchased
by King Willem I for 5,500 guilders. It can now be seen in the royal coin collection in
Leiden.

While all this was going on, the remnants of Pelsaert’s fragile reputation
had finally been destroyed by the revelation that the
commandeur
had been deeply
involved in illegal private trade. Soon after his death, a search of Pelsaert’s
baggage had turned up a variety of jewels and other goods valued at almost 13,500
guilders. These, the Company suspected, were to be sold for private profit, which was
strictly forbidden, and Pelsaert no doubt expected to receive a commission for his part in
the transactions. Upon investigation it emerged that a number of the items—including
a second agate cameo, this one brand-new and engraved with a likeness of the Great
Mogul—belonged to Gaspar Boudaen, who was eventually compelled to appear before the
Gentlemen XVII of Amsterdam to beg, unsuccessfully, for their return. Others were the
property of a second merchant, Johannes Dobbelworst of Amsterdam. All these goods were
confiscated by the VOC.

Pelsaert’s early death thus cost his family most of the fortune he had
labored to amass. Barbara van Ganderheyden, the
commandeur
’s elderly mother
and the chief beneficiary of his will, did eventually receive his outstanding salary,
together with the sum of 771 guilders—the value of her son’s personal
possessions. The Company, however, banked the 10,500 guilders it earned from the sale of
the confiscated jewels, and although Van Ganderheyden was eventually promised compensation
amounting to 3,800 guilders, the VOC made it clear that this amount would only be paid in
full and final settlement of all the claims the Pelsaert family might have against
it.

Even then, the payment took forever to come through. Van Ganderheyden applied for
her money in 1635, but it was evidently not forthcoming, for she repeated the request in
1638. Pelsaert’s mother was dead by the end of the latter year, probably aged
somewhere in her middle sixties. It seems probable that she never saw any of the money her
son had worked so hard for.