Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [0]
TITLE PAGE
MAP: THE UNITED PROVINCES c. 1628
MAP: ROUTE OF THE BATAVIA
MAP: HOUTMAN’S ABROLHOS
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PREFACE
Prologue: Morning Reef
1. The Heretic
2. Gentlemen XVII
3. The Tavern of the Ocean
4. Terra Australis Incognita
5. The Tiger
6. Longboat
7. “Who Wants to Be Stabbed to Death?”
8. Condemned
9. “To Be Broken on the Wheel”
Epilogue: On the Shores of the Great South-Land
FOOTNOTES
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DUTCH PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OTHER BOOKS BY MIKE DASH
COPYRIGHT PAGE
For Penny: my Creesje
“I looked at him with great sorrow: such a scoundrel, cause of so many disasters and of the shedding of human blood. Besmirched in every way not only with abominable misdeeds but also with damnable heresy . . . and still he had the intention to go on.”
FROM THE INTERROGATION OF JERONIMUS CORNELISZ
BY FRANCISCO PELSAERT
Preface
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN THIS BOOK IS INVENTED. It is closely based on contemporary sources, and direct quotes, where they appear, are drawn from those same documents. In the few places where I have drawn my own conclusions about the thoughts and actions of the Batavia’s passengers and crew, I have indicated the fact in the notes.
Jeronimus Cornelisz and his companions sailed at a time when the use of surnames was still rare in the Dutch Republic, and when it was correspondingly common for names to be spelled and written in several different ways within a single document. I have taken advantage of this fact to avoid the possibility of confusion between two similarly named people, where there is contemporary authority for such usage. Thus Daniel Cornelisz, a mutineer, is referred to as “Cornelissen” throughout, to prevent him being confused with Jeronimus; and of the two Allert Janszes who were on the ship, one has become Allert Janssen.
It is impossible to make accurate comparisons between prices in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic and today’s prices, but—roughly estimated—one guilder in 1629 bought the equivalent of $75 in 2001.
Place names are spelled as they were in the seventeenth century, thus Leyden rather than Leiden, and Sardam rather than Zaandam.
MIKE DASH, London, June 2001
Prologue
Morning Reef
“The pack of all disasters has moulded together and fallen on my neck.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
THE MOON ROSE AT DUSK ON THE EVENING OF 3 JUNE 1629, sending soft grey shafts of light skittering across the giant swells of the eastern Indian Ocean. The beams darted their way from crest to crest, racing each other for mile after mile across the empty vastness of sea, until at last they caught and silhouetted something for an instant, a great black mass that wallowed in a trough between the waves.
In another second, the shape surged onward, rushing up the shifting wall of water in its path until it breasted the next swell. As it did so, it reared up momentarily and the moon fixed it as it slapped back into the water and sent plumes of fine white spray into the air on either side.
In the half-light of the southern winter, the black mass stood revealed as a substantial ship, steering north with the sting of a sharp wind at her back. She was built in the European style, squat and square-sailed, and she looked unbalanced, being considerably lower forward than she was aft. Her curved beak of a prow hung so close to the sea that it was frequently awash with a foam of dark water, but from there her decks curved sharply up like some massive wooden scimitar, rising so steeply that she towered almost 40 feet out of the water at the stern. As the ship came on, the moon was bright enough to pick out some of the larger details along the hull: her figurehead (a wooden lion springing upward), a tangled mass of rigging, the giant iron anchors lashed upside down along her sides. Her bows were blunt, and both the broadness of her beam and the fullness of her draught marked her as a merchant vessel.
Although the moon was bright that evening, there was too little light for the ship to be identified by the flags that writhed and snapped