Batavia's Graveyard (67 page)

A good deal of work remains to be done if this disease is to be traced to the
arrival of Dutch mariners on the western Australian coast in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It remains entirely possible that it was introduced at a much later
date, and its appearance in Australia cannot can be regarded as definite evidence for the
long-term survival of Loos and Pelgrom and their compatriots. Nevertheless, evidence of
interaction between VOC sailors and the Aborigines continues to emerge occasionally, and
it is not impossible that a definite link will be established one day. Interview with Dr.
F. W. M de Rooij, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 26 June 2000. De Rooij’s work in
South Africa has confirmed Dean’s thesis that most South African porphyriacs can
trace the source of their disease to their kinship with Ariaantje van den Berg. Playford,
Carpet
of Silver,
pp. 227–32; Geoffrey Dean,
The Porphyrias: A Story of Inheritance
and Environment
(London: Pitman Medical, 1971), pp. 114–30;
The ANCODS
Colloquium,
pp. 50–1; “First Europeans in Australia,”
History Today
(June 1999): 3–4. A second condition—Ellis van Creveld syndrome, which results
in children being born with short limbs, extra fingers or toes, and heart
defects—exists among the Aborigines of Western Australia and has also been
tentatively linked to the arrival of shipwrecked Dutchmen. It has been calculated that
about one Aborigine in 40 carries the recessive Ellis van Creveld gene—the
second-highest incidence of the disease among any community in the world. The highest
incidence, tellingly enough, occurs among the Amish people of Pennsylvania, a Mennonite
sect whose ancestors emigrated from the Netherlands in 1683.

“. . . purely anecdotal evidence . . .”
Even today, speculation
as to the existence of Dutch survivors has not entirely died away, and the most recent
discovery is, in fact, also one of the strangest. It concerns reports of an expedition
into the interior of Australia that set out from Raffles Bay, at the end of the Coburg
Peninsula in the Northern Territories, some time prior to 1834. (Raffles Bay was the site
of a British military outpost established in 1818 and abandoned in 1829, which may date
the expedition more precisely.) This party included a Lieutenant Nixon, and it was on his
private journals that newspaper reports concerning what appeared to be a whole colony of
white people living in the interior were eventually based.

Nixon and his colleagues, it appears, explored the interior of the Northern
Territories for two months. One day, to their considerable surprise, they reached a spot
quite different from the untamed wilderness they had been traversing: “a low and
level country, laid out as it were in plantations, with straight rows of trees.”
Exploring further, Nixon then encountered “a human being, whose face was so fair, and
dress so white, that I was for a moment staggered with terror, and thought I was looking
at an apparition.”

The “apparition” spoke in broken Dutch, which—remarkably
enough—was understood by Nixon, who had spent time in the Netherlands in his youth.
It thus emerged that the local people believed they were descended from the
survivors—80 men and 10 women—of a Dutch ship that had been wrecked on the coast
many years earlier. This group had been forced by famine to go inland, where they had
established their colony and lived off maize and fish from a nearby river. They were now
led by a man who claimed descent from a Dutchman named Van Baerle, and “did not have
books or paper, nor any schools; their marriages were performed without any ceremony, they
retained a certain observance of the Sabbath by refraining from daily labours and
performing some sort of superstitious ceremony on that day all together.” Evidently
they had refrained from mixing with the local Aborigines.

This tale could be a nineteenth-century hoax, and it would be unwise to accept it
at face value without any supporting evidence. However, research by Femme Gaastra, the
noted Dutch historian of the VOC, has discovered that an assistant named Constantijn van
Baerle was indeed lost, with 129 others, on the ship
Concordia,
which vanished in
the Indian Ocean some time in 1708. Van Baerle is not a particularly common surname in the
Netherlands; just possibly, then, this discovery corroborates Lieutenant Nixon’s
original report. Femme Gaastra, “The Dutch East India Company: A Reluctant
Discoverer,”
The Great Circle
19 (1997): 117–20, citing the
Leeds
Mercury
of 25 Jan 1834, p. 7 col. a. The sponsors and the purpose of the expedition
remain a mystery. Its members are reported to have been conveyed back to Singapore on a
merchant ship, which may suggest it was not naval in origin. From an examination of the
map, it would appear that the Coburg Peninsula—which lies 700 miles to the east of
Batavia—and the interior of Arnhem Land generally are far from the first places one
would look for the survivors of a ship that had sailed west from Java and was apparently
last heard of near Mauritius.

Lort Stokes
John Lort Stokes entered the Royal Navy in 1826 and served in
South American waters, joining Darwin’s
Beagle
as a midshipman, and rising to
command the ship from 1841 to 1843 (this was after the naturalist had left her). In
addition to his work in the Abrolhos, Stokes conducted the first survey of New Zealand
since Cook’s day, and was the author of
Discoveries in Australia 1837–1843.
Despite a lifetime in the hydrographical service, he was passed over for the position of
Hydrographer of the Navy in 1863 in favor of Captain (later Vice Admiral Sir) George
Richards, the pioneer oceanographer. See G. S. Ritchie,
The Admiralty Chart: British
Naval Hydrography in the Nineteenth Century
(London: Hollis & Carter, 1967), pp.
180, 190, 307, 313.

Stokes in the Abrolhos
Malcolm Uren,
Sailormen’s Ghosts: the
Abrolhos Islands in Three Hundred Years of Romance, History and Adventure
(Melbourne:
Robertson & Mullens, 1944), pp. 238–43; Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 278–9.
He conducted the survey under the orders of Commander John Wickham.

“. . . published by a Perth newspaper . . .”
It appeared in the
Christmas 1897 edition of the Perth
Western Mail.
The translation was by Willem
Siebenhaar; it has since been reprinted by Philippe Godard as part of his
The First and
Last Voyage of the
Batavia (Perth: Abrolhos Publishing, nd, c. 1993).

Gun island as Batavia’s Graveyard
Uren, op. cit., pp.
244–5.

Identity of the wreckage
The debris was described by the
Zeewijk
’s
crew as noticeably old, while the
Aagtekerke
had vanished only the previous year
and the
Fortuyn
three years earlier. This seems to make an identification with the
Ridderschap
van Holland,
lost in 1694, at least possible. See also Graeme Henderson,
Maritime
Archaeology in Australia
(Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1986),
pp. 26–7.

Drake-Brockman and the Broadhurst collection
Hugh Edwards,
Islands of
Angry Ghosts
(New York: William Morrow & Co., 1966), pp. 93–5;
The ANCODS
Colloquium,
pp. 106–7; Drake-Brockman, pp. xxi–xxii; 279n. The Broadhurst
Collection is now in the Western Australian Maritime Museum, Fremantle. Henrietta
Drake-Brockman was the author of a historical novel,
The Wicked and the Fair
(Sydney: Angus & Roberston, 1957), which was based on the
Batavia
’s story
and identified present-day Goss Island as Batavia’s Graveyard. She died, in her
mid-60s, in 1968.

“. . . an article published in 1955 . . .”
Henrietta
Drake-Brockman, “The Wreck of the
Batavia,” Walkabout Magazine
21, no. 1
(1955).

The first artifacts
Edwards,
Islands of Angry Ghosts,
pp.
98–101;
The ANCODS Colloquium,
pp. 107–8.

Discovery by Johnson and Cramer
Edwards,
Islands of Angry Ghosts,
pp. 111–2, 116–7.

“The sea had dug a grave . . .”
Ibid., pp. 134–5.

The Batavia artefacts
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), pp.
37, 45, 55–60, 83, 90–1, 95–6, 99–101, 178, 183–5, 197–200;
Edwards,
Islands of Angry Ghosts,
pp. 149–51. The mortar bears the—in the
circumstances ironic—inscription AMOR VINCIT OMNIA: “Love conquers
all.”

Wiebbe Hayes’s dwellings
Robert Bevacqua, “Archaeological Survey
of Sites Relating to the
Batavia
Shipwreck,”
Early Days Journal
7
(1974): 64–9; Jeremy Green and Myra Stanbury, “Even More Light on a Confusing
Geographical Puzzle, Part 1: Wells, Cairns and Stone Structures on West Wallabi
Island,”
Underwater Explorers’ Club News
(January 1982): 1–6;
The
ANCODS Colloquium,
p. 10. There is considerable doubt that these structures are now as
they would have been several hundred years ago. There is anecdotal evidence of extensive
reconstruction, as well as general “tidying,” particularly by film crews filming
reconstructions of the events of 1629.

The Batavia reconstruction
The ship can be seen at the Bataviawerf in
Lelystad, to the east of Amsterdam. Philippe Godard,
The First and Last Voyage of the
Batavia (Perth: Abrolhos Publishing, nd, c. 1993), pp. 246–73; J. R. Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic
Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols.,
1979–87), I, pp. 37–40, 42–44.

Skeletons
Hunneybun, pp. 1.4a, 3.14, 4.2–4.13, 5.2–5.7; Myra
Stanbury (ed.),
Abrolhos Islands Archaeological Sites: Interim Report
(Fremantle:
Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 2000), pp. 5–10;
The
ANCODS Colloquium,
pp. 159–61; Juliïtte Pasveer, Alanah Buck, and Marit van
Huystee, “Victims of the
Batavia
Mutiny: Physical Anthropological and Forensic
Studies of the Beacon Island skeletons,”
Bulletin of the Australian Institute for
Maritime Archaeology
22 (1998): 45–50; Edwards, op. cit., pp. 3–7,
165–6; author’s interviews with Juliïtte Pasveer, Alanah Buck, and Stephen
Knott, 12–13 June 2000. The seven bodies in the grave pit consist of five partial
skeletons and two separate sets of teeth. In the case of “Jan Dircx,” who was
exhumed by Max Cramer in 1963, the musket ball has been separated from the body and now
lies mounted as part of a display in the dining room of the Batavia Motor Inn motel in
Geraldton. “Dircx,” if that is who he was, suffered from rickets and was so
physically immature he must have made a poor sort of soldier. His body (catalogued as BAT
A15508) has no skull, but a similarly weathered skull, BAT A15831, may belong to it. The
two relics have been attributed ages of 16–18 and 18–23, respectively, which is
how I have arrived at an estimated age of 18 for this body.

Death of Jacop Hendricxen Drayer
Sentence on Jan Hendricxsz, JFP 28 Sep
1629 [DB 183]. Buck’s reexamination of this body has revealed no trace of the broken
shoulder that some early writers on the subject say the skeleton displays.

The death toll in the islands
Pelsaert to the Gentlemen XVII of Amsterdam,
12 Dec 1629 ARA VOC 1630II [DB 259]; “Note regarding the fate of the people embarked
on board the Batavia,” ARA VOC 1098, fol. 582r [R 220]. It is hard to know what
Pelsaert meant by “children.” Certainly the
Batavia
’s cabin boys
must have been included among the 96 “employees of the VOC,” but when the
offspring of Pieter Jansz, Claudine Patoys, Hans and Anneken Hardens, and Mayken Cardoes
are added to the six children of the
predikant,
the number of children definitely
known to have been killed in the archipelago rises to at least 10. Conversely, if we take
“children” to mean those under the age of, say, 10, and count Bastiaensz’s
three daughters as “women,” thus correcting the number of children who died to
the number given by the
commandeur,
the number of female deaths cannot be less than
14. Bernandine Hunneybun, in
Skullduggery on Beacon Island
(BSc Hons dissertation,
University of Western Australia, 1995), section 5-5, suggests a total death toll of 137 in
the archipelago, including the 11 mutineers who died on Seals’ and Wiebbe
Hayes’s Islands.

“. . . more than 120”
“Declaration in Short,” JFP nd
[DB 248].

“. . . all but two of the children . . .”
The exceptions were
one child who was among those who fled to Wiebbe Hayes, and the babe in arms who reached
Batavia in the longboat.

“. . . almost two-thirds of the women . . .”
There were seven
survivors among the 20 women on the ship: Creesje Jans, Zwaantie Hendricx, Judick
Bastiaens, Zussie and Tryntgien Fredricx, either Anneken Bosschieter, or Marretgie Louys,
and the unnamed mother who sailed on the longboat.

Pelsaert on Jacobsz’s responsibility
“Declaration in
Short,” op. cit.; see also Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 61.

“Torrentian”
JFP 30 Sep 1629 [DB 212] (where the word is spelled
phonetically,
“torrentiœnschen,”
an indication of its rarity).

“Epicurean”
Ibid.; verdict on Andries Jonas, JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB
203].

“Following the beliefs of Torrentius”
Van Diemen to Pieter de
Carpentier, 10 Dec 1629, ARA VOC 1009 [DB 50].

Anonymous sailor
Letter of December 1629, published in
Leyds
Veer-Schuyts Praetjen, Tuschen een Koopman ende Borger van Leyden, Varende van Haarlem nae
Leyden
(np [Amsterdam: Willem Jansz], 1630), pp. 19–20 [R 235]. It has been
suggested that the author was the upper-steersman, Claes Gerritsz, and certainly the man,
whoever he was, seems to have returned to the Abrolhos with the
Sardam,
judging
from the details in his letter.