Batavia's Graveyard (57 page)

The plan to turn pirate
For details of the pirates’ haunts in
Madagascar, see Jan Rogozinski,
Honour Among Thieves: Captain Kidd, Henry Every and the
Story of Pirate Island
(London: Conway Maritime Press, 2000), pp. 54–68 and David
Cordingly,
Life Among the Pirates: The Romance and the Reality
(London: Little,
Brown, 1995), pp. 173–5. The center of their operations was St. Mary’s Island
[Isle Sainte Marie], off the northeast coast. Jacobsz and Cornelisz planned to sail there
almost three-quarters of a century before Madagascar became the principal pirate base in
the Indian Ocean. They would have used St. Mary’s large natural harbor as an
anchorage and sailed out from there to raid the shipping lanes that ran along the Indian
coast. Two of the other possible bases they discussed, Mauritius and St. Helena, were then
uninhabited, though both had been stocked with animals by passing sailors who visited
infrequently and used the islands to rest and replenish their supplies of food and
water.

“He would act, Ariaen predicted . . .”
Interrogation of Allert
Janssen, JFP 19 Sep 1629 [DB 195].

“Terra Australis Incognita”
De Jode’s atlas,
Speculum
Orbis Terrae,
notes: “This region is even today almost unknown, because after the
first and second voyages all have avoided sailing thither, so that it is doubtful until
even today whether it is a continent or an island. The sailors call this region New
Guinea, because its coasts, state and condition are similar in many respects to the
African Guinea. . . . After this region the huge Australian land follows which—as
soon as it is once known—will represent a fifth continent, so vast and immense is it
deemed . . .” Günter Schilder,
Australia Unveiled: The Share of Dutch Navigators
in the Discovery of Australia
(Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1976), pp.
268–9. The name “Terra Australis Incognita” appears on Henricus
Hondius’s famous world map of 1630 (ibid. pp. 320–1). Abraham Ortelius’s
Types
Orbis Terrarum
(ca. 1600) gives “Terra Australia Nondum Cognita” (ibid., pp.
266–7), and there were several other variants.

Early theories concerning the existence of the South-Land
Ibid., pp.
7–10; Miriam Estensen,
Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land
(Sydney:
Allen & Unwin, 1998), pp. 5–9.

The discovery of Australia
Aborigines arrived in Australia about 70,000
years ago, sailing rafts or crossing land bridges created by the last great Ice Age. The
identity of the European discoverers of the continent remains a matter of dispute. Kenneth
McIntyre,
The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years Before
Captain Cook
(Medindie, South Australia: Souvenir Press, 1977), makes a case for the
Portuguese, whose bases in Timor were only a few hundred miles to the north.

“Faulty interpretation of the works of Marco Polo”
The Venetian
had actually been describing Malaysia and Indochina.

Beach, Maletur and Lucach
J. A. Heeres,
The Part Borne by the Dutch in
the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765
(London: Luzac, 1899), p. iv; Schilder, op.
cit., pp. 23, 78n; Estensen op. cit., pp. 9, 87.

The old route to the Indies
Heeres, p. xiii; Estensen, p. 126.

Hendrik Brouwer
Heeres, pp. xiii–xv; Estensen, pp. 126–7; Boxer,
“The Dutch East-Indiamen,” p. 91.

The new Dutch route
Like the Portuguese before them, the Dutch attempted
to keep their new route secret. As late as 1652, the
seynbrief—
sailing
instructions—issued to eastbound ships were handwritten rather than printed, in an
attempt to keep control of this secret information. The instructions for this portion of
the voyage were relatively bald—sail 1000
mijlen
(about 4,600 miles) east of
the Cape, and then turn north. Vessels passing close to Amsterdam or St. Paul received
some intelligence of their position from the presence of seaweed in the water, but
otherwise the decision as to when to make the turn was largely a matter of guesswork. The
problem was exacerbated by the difficulties experienced by ships that turned north too
early; those that did so found themselves on the coast of Sumatra, where the prevailing
winds were easterlies that blew them away from their destination in Java. Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic
Shipping,
I, p. 61; Boxer, “The Dutch East-Indiamen,” p. 87; Boxer,
The
Dutch Seaborne Empire,
p. 164; Jaap Bruijn, “Between Batavia and the Cape:
Shipping Patterns of the Dutch East India Company,”
Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies
11 (1980): 256–7; Jaap Bruijn and Femme S. Gaastra, “The Dutch East
India Company’s Shipping, 1602–1795, in a Comparative Perspective,” in
Bruijn and Gaastra (eds.),
Ships, Sailors and Spices: East India Companies and Their
Shipping in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries
(Amsterdam: NEHA, 1993), p. 188; Jeremy
Green,
Australia’s Oldest Shipwreck: the Loss of the
Trial,
1622
(Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1977), p. 4.

The Eendracht
She was skippered by Dirck Hartog of Amsterdam, who engraved
a pewter plate commemorating his discovery and left it on a wooden post atop a cliff on
the island at the north end of Shark Bay that now bears his name. The plate was
rediscovered by a latter skipper, William de Vlamingh, in 1696, and taken to Batavia. It
is still preserved today, in Amsterdam. Schilder, op. cit., pp. 60–1,
294–5.

The Zeewolf
The skipper’s name was Haeveck van Hillegom. Heeres, op.
cit., pp. 10–13; Estensen, op. cit., p. 130.

“. . . long before she could turn away . . .”
Dutch
retourschepen
had an estimated turning circle of about five and a half miles, could not use their rudder
to maneuver, and were unable to steer more than six points off the wind. Phillip Playford,
Carpet of Silver: the Wreck of the Zuytdorp
(Nedlands, WA: University of Western
Australia Press, 1996), pp. 69–70.

The Vianen
Schilder, op. cit., p. 105; Estensen, op. cit., pp.
155–6.

The loss of the Tryall
Brookes escaped blame for the
Tryall
’s
loss and the death of the majority of the crew and was soon appointed to command another
English East India Company ship, the
Moone.
He proved his dangerous incompetence by
running her aground off Dover in 1625, and on this occasion was imprisoned for purposely
wrecking his vessel.

The location of the
Tryall
’s wreck remains a matter of some dispute.
Most historians and maritime archaeologists concur that she ran aground in the Monte Bello
Islands, and in 1969 divers found 10 old anchors, five cannon, and some granite ballast
from an old ship on Ritchie Reef, a little way to the northeast of the Monte Bellos. These
were identified as coming from the
Tryall.
Recovery of the majority of the
artifacts was rendered impossible by appalling local conditions, and more recently it has
been suggested that the materials that were salvaged may not be consistent with an English
East Indiaman of the 1620s. Green,
Australia’s Oldest Shipwreck,
pp. 1,
16–7, 21, 48–51; Graeme Henderson,
Maritime Archaeology in Australia
(Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1986), pp. 20–1; J. A.
Henderson,
Phantoms of the
Tryall (Perth: St. George Books, 1993), pp. 24–45,
76–92; Estensen, pp. 140–1.

Latitude
The sun was shot with one of a variety of navigational
instruments carried by East Indiamen—astrolabes, cross-staffs and back-staffs. A VOC
equipment list of 1655 suggests that a wide variety of instruments would have been carried
for the use of the skipper and the upper steersman. The manifest includes three round
astrolabes, two semicircular astrolabes, a pair of
astrolabe catholicum
(the
“universal astrolabe,” used for solving problems of spherical geometry), a dozen
pairs of compasses, four Jacob’s Staffs, four Davis’s quadrants and many charts
and manuals.

The astrolabe, which was perfected by the Portuguese, was the most primitive of
the three principal navigational tools. The
Batavia
carried at least four—the
number that have been recovered from the wreck site. Almost certainly Ariaen Jacobsz would
have taken another with him in the longboat for his voyage to Java. Green,
The Loss of
the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie Retourschip
Batavia, p. 83.

Navigational problems
The skipper of an East Indiaman was primarily
responsible for navigation, but as a document dated 1703 explained, he was supposed to
cooperate with others in “calculating the latitude, shooting the sun, checking the
variation of the compass, altering the course, and in everything else concerning the
navigation of the ship.” Boxer, “The Dutch East Indiamen,” p. 87.

An additional problem lay in the fact that while lines of latitude run parallel,
those of longitude get closer together the farther a ship sails from the equator.
Navigating far to the south, along the borders of the Roaring Forties, the
Batavia
would traverse each degree of longitude considerably more quickly than would have been the
case farther north. This made it even more easy to underestimate the distance run when
sailing east across the Southern Ocean.

The
Batavia
would have carried four varieties of hourglass—a
four-hour glass, for measuring the duration of watches, and one hour, 30 minute, and 30
second glasses. Later recalculation eventually revealed that in order to measure longitude
correctly, the last-named glass should have contained 28 and not 30 seconds’ worth of
sand, so Jacobsz’s calculations of longitude would have been 7 percent out even if he
had been in possession of every other fact he needed. The only realistic option available
at the time was to calculate longitude based on magnetic variation. The Dutch
savant
Petrus Plancius (1552–1622) developed a system of “eastfinding” that used
this principle and published a table of variations for the guidance of mariners, but his
results were insufficiently precise to guarantee accuracy.

The Dutch prime meridian
Playford, op. cit., p. 31. At the time, it was
popularly supposed that this was the highest mountain in the world.

Logs
The English system, which involved a piece of wood attached to a long
line, was considerably more accurate. Knots on the line allowed English sailors to assess
the distance traveled in any given time with a greater degree of certainty. Green,
The
Loss of the VOC Retourschip
Batavia
,
pp. 10–11.

“. . . it is in retrospect surprising . . .”
One reason for the
comparative excellence of Dutch navigation was the superiority of the VOC’s charts.
The Dutch made great efforts to pool all available information, and returning skippers
were required to hand over their journals and charts to the Company’s official
mapmakers. The first mapmaker was appointed in the same year that the VOC was founded.
Boxer, “The Dutch East Indiamen,” p. 87; Boxer,
The Dutch Seaborne Empire,
p. 164; W. F. J. Mörzer Bruyns, “Navigation of Dutch East India Company Ships around
the 1740s,”
The Mariner’s Mirror
78 (1992): 143–6.

Charts
Dutch charts of this period were regularly updated to incorporate
discoveries. A relatively complete map of the known South-Land coast by Hessel Gerritsz,
the chief cartographer of the VOC, and dated 1618 (Schilder, op. cit., pp. 304–5),
actually incorporates discoveries made off Australia up to 1628 and so could not have been
available to Pelsaert when the
Batavia
sailed from Holland in the autumn of that
year. Even this showed the Abrolhos as a long, thin string of islands and thus gave no
real indication of their exact position or appearance.

Frederick de Houtman
He came from Gouda, where he was born in 1571, and
sailed with his brother in the first Dutch fleet to reach the Indies. Captured in battle
in Sumatra, he learned Malay and on his release wrote the first Dutch-Malay dictionary. De
Houtman was later governor of the Moluccas (1621–3). He died in Alkmaar in
1627.

Houtman’s Abrolhos
De Houtman’s only comment was: “One
should stay clear of this shoal, for it lies most treacherously for ships that want to
call in at this land. It is at least 10
mijlen
[45 miles] long; lies at 28 degrees,
26 minutes.” J. P. Sigmond and L. H. Zuiderbaan,
Dutch Discoveries of Australia:
Shipwrecks, Treasures and Early Voyages Off the West Coast
(Adelaide: Rigby, 1979), p.
39. See also Schilder, op. cit., pp. 75–6, 100, 112–3. The
seynbriefen
of
the VOC did mention the existence of the islands and warned seamen to beware of
them.

Chapter 5: The Tiger

The material in this chapter is based almost entirely on the surviving
primary source material: Pelsaert’s journal, the letters of various survivors, and
the Harderwijck MS. The original material has, however, been supplemented with
archaeological evidence. Almost all the important works on this subject have been produced
under the auspices of the Western Australian Maritime Museum and the National Centre of
Excellence for Marine Archaeology in Fremantle, but the unpublished BSc. Hons dissertation
of Bernandine Hunneybun,
Skullduggery on Beacon Island
(University of Western
Australia, 1995) and Sofia Boranga’s work on the camps of the
Zeewijk
survivors in the southern Abrolhos,
The Identification of Social Organisation on Gun
Island
(Post Graduate Diploma in Archaeology dissertation, University of Western
Australia, 1998) also made interesting reading. Copies of both papers can be found in the
library of the Western Australian Maritime Museum.

Weather conditions in the Abrolhos
Jeremy Green,
The Loss of the
Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie Retourschip
Batavia,
Western Australia 1629: An
Excavation Report and Catalogue of Artefacts
(Oxford: British Archaeological Reports,
1989), p. 3, summarizes the islands’ weather as follows: in the summer the
predominant wind is southerly, blowing at Force 5–6 40 percent of the time. There can
be cyclones between January and March, and in winter the winds are variable, with
occasional gales of up to Force 8–12. In spring the weather improves and the winds
drop to become mild and variable. The climate is temperate and, except when it is raining,
there is relatively little danger of exposure. See also Hugh Edwards,
The Wreck on the
Half-Moon Reef
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), pp. 94–5; Boranga,
The Identification of Social Organization on Gun Island,
p. 5; Hunneybun,
Skullduggery
on Beacon Island,
pp. 1–5; Jeremy Green, Myra Stanbury, and Femme Gaastra (eds.),
The ANCODS Colloquium: Papers Presented at the Australia-Netherlands Colloquium on
Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History
(Fremantle: Australian National Centre of
Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 1999), pp. 89–91.

“. . . no real undergrowth”
Archaeologists are of the opinion
that there would have been considerably less brush on the island in 1629 than there is
now, the construction of fishermen’s homes in the period from 1946 having created a
set of windbreaks that allow more plants to grow.

The survivors as a group
JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 124]. The breakdown of
numbers is not actually given anywhere; mine is based on a thorough examination of all the
references in Pelsaert’s journals. Jeronimus Cornelisz implicitly commented on the
early banding together of survivors into groups, writing that the oaths of loyalty his men
swore to him “cast away all previous promises . . . including the secret
comradeships, tent-ships and others.” Mutineers’ oath of 20 Aug 1629, JFP 19 Sep
1629 [DB 148].

Proportion of foreigners
This is the earliest proportion cited by Bruijn
et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,
I, p. 155. It dates to 1637. No specific figures
exist for the
Batavia
or the period before 1637, though from mentions in
Pelsaert’s journal it is possible to identify at least eight Frenchmen, an
Englishman, a Dane, a Swiss, and seven Germans among the crew. The total number of
foreigners would certainly have been higher than that, but it is disguised by the
commandeur
’s
habit of putting all names into their Dutch form.

Frans Jansz
Jansz’s role as leader of the first survivors’
council is conjecture on my part; the journals are quite silent on the subject. It seems
likely he took leadership of the camp, both because his seniority would have made it
natural and also because there are two minuscule hints in the journals that the
surgeon’s unpleasant fate (see chapter 7) was occasioned by an unresolved conflict
with Jeronimus’s principal lieutenant, Zevanck, whose nature is undisclosed, but
which can only have been based on some claim, on Jansz’s part, to a degree of
authority over the survivors. Since the surgeon was never a member of Cornelisz’s
council, it seems most logical to assume that he had been, rather, the leader of the
council that Jeronimus deposed.

VOC hierarchy
See the salary scales (for 1645–1700) printed by C. R.
Boxer,
The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800
(London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp.
300–2. Following these scales, and taking the lower estimates printed to allow for
some inflation between 1629 and 1645, it would appear that relative seniority and the
monthly rates of pay for the principals on the
Batavia
would have been roughly as
follows:

Able seamen were paid about 10 guilders a month, ordinary seamen 7 guilders,
private soldiers 9 guilders, and ship’s boys 4 guilders a month. Among the sailors
and craftsmen, the relative importance of carpenters—who were vital to the integrity
of a
retourschip
in the course of the long voyage east—is particularly
striking.

Councils
V. D. Roeper,
De Schipbreuk van de
Batavia,
1629
(Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), pp. 30–1; Henrietta Drake-Brockman,
Voyage to
Disaster
(Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), pp.
11–12.

Supply of water
JFP 5 June 1629 [DB 125].

“Begun to coalesce . . .”
This is supposition on my part, but
based on the typical behavior of survivors after a shipwreck. See, for example, the
behavior of the
Medusa
survivors—members of the crew of a French transport
stranded off the coast of Mauritania in 1816—described by Alexander McKee,
Death
Raft: the Human Drama of the
Medusa
Shipwreck
(London: Souvenir Press, 1975),
pp. 117–9.

Suffering caused by lack of water
Harderwijk MS [R 22–4]; JFP 16 Sep
1629 [DB 145]; Nathaniel Philibrick,
In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That
Inspired Moby Dick
(London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 127–9.

Deaths from thirst
Harderwijk MS [R 22]; anonymous Letter of, 11 Dec 1629,
published in
Leyds Veer-Schuyts Praetjen, Tuschen een Koopman ende Borger van Leyden,
Varende van Haarlem nae Leyden
(np [Amsterdam: Willem Jansz], 1630) [R 233]. The
author says the dead consisted of nine children and one woman.

“Our own water . . .”
LGB.

Wybrecht Claasen
She presumably came from Dordrecht, like her employer. A
very large proportion of people from the town earned a living from the sea, which may
explain how the girl came to swim so well. Harderwijk MS [R 22–3].

The breakup of the wreck
“Declaration in short [of] the origin,
reason, and towards what intention, Jeronimus Cornilissen, under-merchant, has resolved to
murder all the people . . .,” JFP nd [DB251], anonymous letter of 11 December 1629,
op. cit. [R 233].

“Taken by surprise”
Letter of 11 December, op. cit. refers to
people “swimming naked through the surf.”

“. . . the wrecking went on . . .”
JFP 17 Sep 1629 [DB
145].

Jeronimus comes ashore
JFP 17 Sep 1629; “Declaration in Short,”
op. cit. [DB 145, 158, 251].

Southeast wind
JFP 12–14 June 1629 [DB 129].

The camp
The position of the
Batavia
survivors’ camp was
revealed by test diggings conducted in 1992. Green, Stanbury, and Gaastra,
The ANCODS
Colloquium,
p. 111.

There is little in the ship’s journals to indicate how the survivors
organized themselves, but the campsites left by the crew of the
Zeewijk,
another
retourschip
lost in the Abrolhos (see epilogue), have been excavated, and they offer many clues as to
how the
Batavia
’s men would have set up their camp.

One key feature of the
Zeewijk
’s camp was the way in which the
officers retained control of the supplies salvaged from the wreck of their ship and kept
their distance from the men. They pitched their tent on their island’s highest point
and kept all the salvaged victuals there. The soldiers occupied a separate site about 100
yards along the beach, but both the common sailors and the petty officers were kept
farther away, on the far side of the soldiers’ camp, apparently because they posed a
significant threat to the officers’ authority and even their lives.

The example of the
Zeewijk
survivors also provides some clues as to what
happened next. Despite the presence of both the skipper and the upper-merchant, the
shortage of supplies meant that discipline was a constant problem on the islands. The
petty officers and the seamen sometimes refused to accept their officers’ authority
to ration the supplies, and on at least three occasions near-mutinies forced the
distribution of stores that should really have been rationed.

The
Zeewijk
’s officers and the VOC officials, who were outnumbered
eight to one by the rest of the survivors, seemed to have solved this problem by forming a
loose alliance with the soldiers. Analysis of the animal bones found at the various sites
suggests that the
retourschip
’s troops enjoyed significantly better rations
than the petty officers, whose main diet was sea lion. In exchange for these privileges,
the soldiers provided an armed guard for the supply tent. Even so, the officers’
authority over the sailors remained extremely fragile. The petty officers retained control
of the ship’s boat, and used it to roam freely around the islands. There is no sign
that they stockpiled food at their main camp site, and it seems likely that they used
their superior experience and skills to catch and eat a good deal of fresh food for
themselves.

It seems unlikely that the
Batavia
survivors’ camp was even this well
ordered. The
Zeewijk
carried no women and no passengers, and the officers stayed on
the islands with the men. The
Batavia
survivors, on the other hand, were a more
disparate group and had no natural leaders. If the example of the
Zeewijk
is any
guide, discipline would quickly have broken down and the petty officers would have become
almost impossible to control.

The first of the near-mutinies referred to above occurred when the petty officers
and common hands forced the distribution of 1.5
aums
of wine among the men; on
another, “all the rabble as well as the petty officers” ordered an
aum
of
wine to be distributed equally among them, as well as five Edam cheeses, six kegs of
salted fish and some tobacco. On the third occasion, the high boatswain, the gunner and
the boatswain’s mate took bread and pork barrels from the store and gave each of the
petty officers 12 loaves. The officers themselves were not immune to such temptation; one
day the longboat was seized by an officer and several petty officers and rowed to a
distant point, where the men on board consumed a large quantity of food, drink, and
tobacco rather than share it with their colleagues. Finally, when the
Zeewijk
’s
longboat set out for Java, the composition of her crew was decided by the drawing of lots,
a procedure insisted on by the men. Boranga, op. cit., pp. 6–9, 31–3,
93–104; Edwards, op. cit., pp. 107–8, 110–2, 118–9.

208 people on the island
Anonymous letter of 11 Dec 1629 [R
232].

Water and wine from the wreck
JFP 17 Sep 1629 [DB 145].

Store tent
There is no mention of such a tent in the available sources,
but as such a tent was a feature of practically every shipwreck survivors’ camp,
including that of the
Zeewijk,
it seems safe to assume that there would have been
one on Batavia’s Graveyard, too.

Water ration
This estimate is calculated from the standard daily ration,
which was 3 pints (1.5 liters) of water. R. van Gelder,
Het Oost-Indisch Avontuur:
Duitsers in Dienst van de VOC, 1600–1800
(Nijmegen: SUN, 1997), p. 158.