Batavia's Graveyard (44 page)

On rough days, when diving on the wreck was impossible, the members of the
Edwards expedition scoured the islands of the Wallabi Group for more evidence of the
Batavia
survivors. They had limited success. There was virtually nothing to find among the coral
rubble, but Edwards and his companions did identify Long Island as Pelsaert’s
Seals’ Island, and a year later, on West Wallabi, about five miles due west of
Beacon, they succeeded in locating the remains of Wiebbe Hayes’s dwellings.

As early as 1879, a surveyor named Forrest had noted the existence of two
rectangular “huts” on the island, and both can still be seen today. One was just
inland from the sea, close to a feature known as Slaughter Point and in a commanding
position overlooking the approaches from Batavia’s Graveyard and Seals’ Island.
The other was further inland, in the middle of a flat limestone plain toward the center of
the island. Both “huts” are built from coral slabs, which lie piled in a
half-haphazard fashion to a height of about three feet. The structure closest to the sea
has an internal wall, which divides it into two “rooms” of roughly equal size.
It is quite large—almost 30 feet from end to end—and (at 6 feet) broad enough to
allow the average Dutchman of Pelsaert’s time to lie stretched out inside it. With
sailcloth added as a roof, the “hut” could conceivably have housed somewhere
between 12 and 20 men. The inland structure is more simply built. It has one room, nearly
square in shape, and—unlike its companion—it has an entrance on one side.
Although its setting seems desolate at first glance, it has actually been placed only a
few yards from one of the island’s largest wells.

Excavations at the coastal site unearthed fragments of Rhenish stoneware, iron
fishhooks, and a ladle that had been crudely fashioned from a sheet of lead. One piece of
ancient pottery bore the shield of Amsterdam and established that this building, at least,
had been the work of Wiebbe Hayes. It had been positioned with a soldier’s eye,
guarding the middle of a bay, so that attempts to approach it could have been detected
while the attackers were still miles away. Once they had come ashore, Jeronimus’s
mutineers would still have had to scale a small rock face, six feet high, to leave the
beach and reach the structure. Hayes and his men, who occupied the high ground, would have
had a good chance of defending it.

All this has led to the suggestion that the coastal “hut” was actually
a fort, built to protect the Defenders from the muskets carried by the mutineers.
Certainly its coral walls are nowhere broken by a doorway, and the building seems to have
been permanently manned. Nearby, the explorers found two fire pits and a large quantity of
charred animal bones from wallabies and sea lions—enough, they reckoned, to have fed
a group of 40 men for about three months.

The inland structure is the more controversial of the two. It is built on
bedrock, making it impossible to excavate, but careful sifting of the surface debris
around it has failed to turn up any evidence of Dutch occupation. Some have argued it was
built only in the late nineteenth century; Lort Stokes, in 1840, took water from the well
nearby without apparently noticing any sign of a building, and old fishermen, questioned
in the 1960s, recalled seeing the hut in use by guano diggers around 1900. Those who
prefer to think it dates from the seventeenth century point out that surveyor Forrest
noted its existence in 1879, before organized guano mining on West Wallabi began. One
piece of circumstantial evidence seems to connect it to Hayes: although the inland
structure cannot be seen from its companion near the coast, a cairn of coral slabs has
been discovered midway between the two. Both structures are clearly visible from its
summit, so perhaps the cairn was built to permit signals from the coastal fort to be sent
inland. Whatever the truth, though, and no matter what the controversy concerning the
inland hut, the provenance of the coastal structure now seems well understood. The untidy
pile of coral slabs is, in fact, the first evidence of European habitation in
Australia.

In the Netherlands, the rediscovery of the
Batavia
led to a resurgence of
interest in the East Indiaman. One of those inspired by the story of the ship was Willem
Vos, a master shipwright specializing in the construction of wooden sailing boats. In the
1970s, when archaeologists from the Western Australian Maritime Museum were salvaging the
Batavia
’s
stern from Morning Reef, Vos conceived the idea of building a full-sized reconstruction of
the
retourschip,
a project that would provide employment for young craftsmen and
help to keep alive traditional skills that were fast being lost.

The
Batavia
herself had been built in a little more than six months. It
took Vos almost a decade simply to lay the keel of his replica East Indiaman. The early
years were spent raising money—the
Batavia
reconstruction cost more than 15
million guilders, or $6,560,000, in excess of 150 times the price of the original—and
scouring archives for contemporary plans and drawings. Working out how the VOC had built
its ships proved to be at least as difficult as finding backers for the project; Dutch
shipwrights of the seventeenth century put together all their craft—even East
Indiamen—by rule of thumb, without the benefit of plans.
Retourschepen
generally conformed to the same general dimensions, which were laid down by the Gentlemen
XVII, but each ship was unique and differed from its consorts in a myriad of small
ways.

Eventually, Vos acquired copies of Dutch shipbuilding treatises compiled in 1671
and 1697, and these, together with earlier drawings, supplied sufficient information to
plan the reconstruction with some certainty. The new
Batavia
’s keel was laid
in October 1985 in a purpose-built yard in Lelystad, built on land reclaimed from the
Zuyder Zee. Construction proceeded hesitantly at first, but gradually the modern
shipwrights became more expert and, in the process, rediscovered many lost techniques that
helped to illuminate the working methods of Jan Rijksen, the architect of the original
Batavia.
Vos and his men were thus able to provide useful information for the archaeologists
struggling to reassemble the salvaged stern section in Australia—“the
archaeology of reconstruction and experiment,” it has been termed—receiving
details of the
retourschip
’s actual construction in return.

The second
Batavia
was launched in April 1995 and has already attracted
well over four million visitors. She is perfectly seaworthy, and though she lacks the
passengers, crew, and much of the equipment that would make her as packed and busy as her
predecessor, going aboard provides fine insights into what life on board an East Indiaman
was like. The confined spaces, the darkness below decks, the squalor of the open latrines,
and the impossible discomforts of the orlop deck all come vividly to life; and, in winter,
the lack of heat and proper light are only too apparent. The thought of spending between
six and nine months living on her, sleeping on deck, eating cask meat, and drinking
stagnant, green-tinged water is not a pleasant one.

In the years since 1960, digging on Beacon Island had revealed more skeletons.
The remains of as many as 19 of the 70 or so people who are known to have died on
Batavia’s Graveyard have been uncovered from three main sites. Persistent rumors
suggest that local fishermen have stumbled across other graves but prefer simply to rebury
any bones they find.

The known remains are telling enough. Jeronimus’s victims did not die well.
With only one exception, their bodies were thrown into grave pits and buried carelessly.
Many bore not just the unmistakable signs of violence, but scars inflicted by illness,
injury, and malnutrition earlier in life. These skeletons bear mute testament to the
privation and desperation that drove men and women to travel to the Indies in the
1620s.

Three of the bodies are male, and one is female; the rest are so undeveloped or
so badly damaged that their sex cannot be determined. Seven, at least, were found in a
single grave pit, into which their bodies had been tipped with little ceremony so that
they lay huddled close together just below the surface. Two others, adult males, had been
interred side by side a little way away, and a third—the remains of an
18-year-old—also lay nearby. This last corpse is said to have been found with a
musket ball lying inside the chest cavity. If so, it ought to be the body of Jan Dircxsz,
the Defender shot in the mutineers’ final assault on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island and
the only person reported to have died of gunshot wounds throughout the whole course of the
mutiny.

Together, the
Batavia
corpses represent a broad cross section of the
retourschip
’s
passengers and crew: the oldest is that of a man (or, perhaps, a heavyset woman) aged
about 40 or 45, and the youngest a child who was no more than five or six when his or her
life was ended. Several of the skeletons show signs of scurvy, and many of the teeth have
been scratched and scoured by the sand that found its way into the rough island diet. The
young child’s teeth have been worn down by constant grinding brought on by severe
stress.

Of all the bodies, the most complete and best preserved is one recovered during
the original
Batavia
expedition. It was found by the east corner of Dave
Johnson’s house on Beacon Island, buried face up in about 15 inches of soil. The
remains are those of a tall man—he was only just under six feet in height—who
had been somewhere between 30 and 39 when he died.
^*60
He must have come from a relatively
poor family: the skeleton still shows growth-arrest lines of the sort caused by bouts of
malnutrition, and the teeth and jaw are badly diseased, perhaps as the result of scurvy.
Bony excresences cover parts of the pelvis; they seem to have been caused by a severe blow
inflicted just below the stomach. The victim’s injuries had been badly treated; the
man who bore them would have been in constant pain.

A detailed examination of this skeleton, carried out in 1999 by Dr. Alanah Buck,
a forensic scientist from the Western Australian Centre for Pathology and Medical Research
in Perth, showed that the victim had died after being struck over the head by a
right-handed assailant who had stood almost directly in front of him to deliver the
attack. A single vicious blow, apparently inflicted with a sword, had left a two-inch cut
mark on the victim’s skull. The resultant concussion may have been severe enough to
kill; at the very least the wound would have caused unconsciousness and profuse bleeding.
As there are no traces of damage to the bones of the forearm of the sort typically
inflicted on a man who dies protecting his head and face, it would appear that the victim
was unable to defend himself. He may have been restrained by several of Cornelisz’s
men, or taken by surprise. If he survived the initial assault at all, he was most likely
stabbed to death or had his throat cut while he lay stunned.

The dead man’s identity remains something of a mystery. One possibility is
that he was Jacop Hendricxen Drayer, who was killed because Jeronimus thought him
half-lame and thus useless. The skeleton shows that the victim’s pelvic injury had
never healed properly, and the man who bore it would certainly have limped. But the wounds
found on the body do not tally with those mentioned in Pelsaert’s journal, which
describes how Jan Hendricxsz “struck two knives to pieces” on Drayer’s
chest, and two more in his neck, before cutting his throat. This skeleton shows no sign of
the nicks and scratches to the ribs and vertebrae that such a violent assault must surely
have caused.

The remains of three other
Batavia
skeletons, examined by Buck and a
forensic dentist, Dr. Stephen Knott, suggest that many of Jeronimus’s victims
underwent still more terrifying deaths. One man in his early 30s had been struck a massive
upward blow with a wooden club or axe handle. The impact had been absorbed by two of his
front teeth; one of the canines had been forced more than an inch up through the jaw and
into the nasal cavity. The right upper incisor next to it had been smashed and twisted up
through 90 degrees, so the cutting edge now faced straight out from the mouth. The victim
had then been finished off with another blow to the side of the head, heavy enough to open
up the sutures joining the fused skull plates and cause immediate unconsciousness and
death.