Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [101]
In these straitened circumstances, news that a brand-new retourschip and her cargo had gone aground on an unknown reef was a particularly devastating blow. The Batavia, her money chests, and Pelsaert’s trade goods were together worth at least 400,000 guilders, the equivalent of about $30 million today, and the 280 people abandoned in the Abrolhos could have helped to swell Coen’s depleted garrison. The merchants of Jan Company had always understood that a small proportion of their ships would inevitably be lost on voyages to and from the Netherlands, but, even so, the wrecking of the Batavia was a serious disaster.
Pelsaert and Jacobsz must have appreciated this. Both men would have known that their future careers, and perhaps even their liberty, now rested in the hands of the most implacable man ever to serve the VOC—someone who “could never forget misdeeds even when they resulted from understandable human weakness, and whose heart was never softened by the sufferings of his opponents.” Only the previous month, Coen had vividly demonstrated his willingness to punish all those who transgressed his fearsome standards, no matter what their station, by flogging a girl named Sara Specx in front of the town hall. Sara was the half-Japanese daughter of the VOC fleet commander Jacques Specx, and her crime had been making love in the governor’s apartments.*37 Because she was only 12 years old, and her lover, who was the nephew of the town clerk of Amsterdam, no more than 15, even the fiscaal and the Councillors of the Indies had begged Coen to show compassion; but though there was evidence to show that the intercourse had been consensual and the lovers wished to marry, the governor-general had remained unmoved. He had the boy beheaded and was only narrowly prevented from having Sara drowned. The skipper and the commandeur knew that they could expect no mercy from such a man.
The longboat had arrived in Batavia on a Saturday. No work was permitted in the citadel on Sundays, but as soon as the Council of the Indies reconvened on 9 July the commandeur was summoned and asked to account for the loss of his ship. Pelsaert cannot have relished this audience with Coen, and he delivered what can only be described as a partial account of the whole episode, emphasizing that his navigators had repeatedly assured him that the ship was still well clear of land, and stressing his own determination to find water for the castaways. The decision to head for Java was presented as a regrettable necessity rather than a matter of self-preservation, and the commandeur was also careful to give the governor-general some cause for guarded optimism. The most precious trade goods had been landed in the archipelago, he reminded his interrogators, and even in the midst of the evacuation of the ship he had seen to it that buoys were placed at the wreck site to indicate the positions of valuables that had vanished overboard.
Jan Coen, it seems, was not overly impressed by this account, but one thing did count in the Pelsaert’s favor. On Coen’s last voyage out to Java, the governor-general had learned all about the dangers of the South-Land’s coast; he had nearly run aground on it himself. “When we chanced upon the Land of the Eendracht,” Coen had written in a letter home,
“we were less than two miles away from the breakers, which we noticed without being able to see land. If we had come to this spot during the night we would have run into a thousand dangers with the ship and crew. The ship’s position fixed by the mates was 900 to 1,000 miles away, so that land was not expected at all.”
This near disaster had occurred in September 1627, and the governor must have recognized that there were clear parallels between his own narrow escape on board the Wapen van Hoorn*38 and the loss of the Batavia. The