Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [10]
1
The Heretic
“He was more evil than if he had been changed into a tiger animal.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
JERONIMUS HAD NEVER MEANT TO GO TO SEA. He was not a merchant by profession and had no family or interests in the East. He was, in fact, a man of education and refinement, who moved with ease among the upper classes of the United Provinces. At home in the Netherlands, his social standing had been higher than that of any other man or woman on board the Batavia; he had even outranked his superior on the ship, Francisco Pelsaert. Indeed, throughout his life—and he was 30 when he sailed for Java—the under-merchant would have had no reason to associate with what Dutchmen called the grauw, the rabble of criminals and paupers who occupied the lowest strata of society. Now, however, he had at least one thing in common with the thugs and sots who had made themselves at home on the wreck. He was a desperate man.
In the seventeenth century few people sailed to the East by choice. The Spiceries of the Indonesian archipelago were the source of unimaginable wealth, it was true. Yet the men who earned vast fortunes trading with the Indies were the astonishingly wealthy merchants who stayed at home in Amsterdam and Middelburg, Delft and Hoorn and Enkhuizen—not those who actually manned their ships and risked their own lives on the long sea voyage. For the ordinary traders and the sailors of the VOC, service with the Company did offer certain opportunities to profit from the spice trade. But it also exposed them to privation, disease, and early death. The life expectancy of a merchant newly arrived in the Indies was a mere three years, and of the million or so people who sailed with the VOC during the lifetime of the Company, fewer than one in three returned.
A small proportion of the million settled in the Indies and survived, but the climate and conditions accounted for most of the deaths at VOC’s trading bases overseas. Lethal bouts of dysentery—“the bloody flux”—were the principal scourge, but assorted plagues and fevers also took their toll. Some died in accidents at sea or in battle with the local people, and a good number perished at the hands of the Dutch authorities themselves, who ruled with considerable severity. A man in Jeronimus’s position was, in short, much more likely to meet his doom in a place like Java than he was to make his fortune.
It is thus hardly surprising that throughout the history of the VOC the men who sailed aboard the East Indiamen were portrayed as the lowest of the low. In the popular perception, the Company was (in one contemporary’s opinion) “a great refuge for all spoilt brats, bankrupts, cashiers, brokers, tenants, bailiffs, informers and suchlike rakes”; its soldiers and sailors were violent, feckless and otherwise unemployable; and its merchants either disgraced debtors or plucked students who would risk anything for the chance to restore their failing fortunes.
Jeronimus Cornelisz was a merchant of this type: a man who had compelling reasons of his own for gambling his life on the lottery of an Indies voyage. When he left the United Provinces, he was almost bankrupt, a bereaved father—and also a dangerous and possibly wanted heretic. These misfortunes were entirely of his own making.
Cornelisz came originally from Friesland, one of the most isolated and northerly of the United Provinces. It was a place apart, largely rural and with borders so well protected by a dense barrier of peat bogs, lakes, and marshes that only the most persistent travelers ventured in by road. The few who did, and made their way along the almost impassable mud tracks that led into the interior, found themselves passing through a land that was somehow not entirely Dutch.
The Frisian people certainly thought of themselves as different. They traced their ancestry back to Roman times and claimed descent from