Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [1]
She was the East Indiaman Batavia, seven months out of Amsterdam on her maiden voyage and still some 30 days’ sailing from her destination, the Dutch trading settlements on the island of Java. Behind her, trailing in the phosphorescence of her wake, lay 13,000 miles of sea. Ahead were another 1,800 miles of uncharted ocean that had, by the end of the third decade of the seventeenth century, been crossed by only a handful of European vessels. There was rumor and speculation aplenty, among the geographers of England, the Netherlands, and Spain, about what might lie over the horizon in the immense blank that stretched south on their globes from the known waters of the Indies, but little information and no certain knowledge. The few charts of this unknown region that the Batavia carried were fragmentary in the extreme, and all but useless as navigational aids. So she sailed on blind into the gathering night, trusting to God and the skipper as the hourglass trickled away the minutes to midnight and the change of watch.
The ship had been brand-new when she left the Netherlands, but she was weathered now. Her upperworks, which had been painted pale green with embel-lishments in red and gold, were chipped and worn and scoured by sea salt. Her bottom, which had once been smooth and clean, was now festooned with so many barnacles and weeds that their drag slowed her progress north. And her hull, built though it was from oak, had been subjected to every conceivable extreme of temperature, so that it now shuddered as the ship rolled in the swell. First the Batavia’s timbers had swollen in the northern winter, for she had left Amsterdam late the previous October when the northern seas were already cold and stormy. Then they had been shriveled by the sun as the ship sailed along the fever coasts of Africa, swung west on passing Sierra Leone, and crossed the equator headed for Brazil. Off the coast of South America she had at last turned east, picking up a current that carried her to the Cape of Good Hope and then fierce easterlies that took her through the Roaring Forties and the Southern Ocean, where it was winter once again and perpetual gales hurried her onward, between the barren little islets of St. Paul and Amsterdam and into the unknown waters to the east.
At least it was warmer now, and the storms had abated as the Batavia headed north after more than seven long months at sea. But the endless discomforts of the voyage had if anything grown worse, and outweighed the slow improvement in the weather. The fresh food was long gone, the water was alive with worms, and below deck the ship herself stank of urine, unwashed bodies, and stale breath. Worst of all, in its own way, was the plodding monotony of the endless days at sea, which ate away the spirit of the passengers and undermined the efficiency of the crew.
At 12 the watch changed. The new watch, the midnight watch, was always acknowledged to be the most difficult and dangerous of all. Working conditions were at their worst, and the alertness of the men could not always be taken for granted. For these reasons it was customary for the skipper himself to be on deck by night, and as the last grains of sand slid through the glass, a small doorway opened on one of the upper decks and he came up.
The master of a Dutch East Indiaman was a man who enjoyed almost unlimited power in his small kingdom. He commanded a ship that had cost 100,000 guilders to build and contained a cargo that, in the Indies trade, was worth many times more. He was charged with the safe navigation of his vessel and responsible for the lives of all