Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [103]
No record of the high boatswain’s arrest survives, but it is evident the allegations that he faced were serious, and every attempt was made to extract the truth from him. Justice, in Evertsz’s case, would have meant interrogation at the hands of the fiscaal, Anthonij van den Heuvel, or one of his subordinates. Sitting or lying, probably tightly bound, in a chamber deep within the citadel, the high boatswain would have been confronted with Pelsaert’s charges and the evidence against him and asked to confirm whether they were true. Denials were rarely taken at face value, and if the case was deemed serious enough, Evertsz would undoubtedly have been tortured in an attempt to make him talk.
This procedure was perfectly legal, though Dutch law did stipulate that a confession extracted under torture was not in itself enough to secure a conviction. Instead, the prisoner would be allowed to recover his senses and then asked to confirm the admissions he had just made. Only a “freewill confession” of this sort, made no more than a day after torture was applied, was acceptable as evidence of guilt. Naturally, however, the retraction of confessions made under duress was not the end of the matter and generally led only to the application of even harsher tortures, as Torrentius the painter had already discovered. Since the end result was almost inevitably the same, the Dutch insistence on freewill confession was thus something of a legal fig leaf.
Few men were capable of resisting the attentions of the torturer for long, and the high boatswain of the Batavia was not one of them. Before long a full confession of his involvement in the attack on Creesje Jans came tumbling from him. Given all that Evertsz knew about the skipper’s role in events on board the ship, and particularly his plans for mutiny, it is tempting to wonder exactly what he said during his interrogation at Castle Batavia. No evidence survives, but while it seems not at all unlikely that Jacobsz’s name came up in connection with the “very great insolences, yea, monstrous actions, that were committed on the mentioned ship,” the one surviving account—by Councillor Antonio van Diemen—confirms only that Evertsz was subsequently hung for the assault and makes absolutely no mention of Jeronimus Cornelisz. Whether this detail implies that the high boatswain was simply unaware of Jeronimus’s closeness to the skipper, that he contrived not to mention the planned mutiny in order to avoid still greater punishment, or that he was even more afraid of the under-merchant than he was of being tortured is unclear.
More is known of the charges brought against the skipper. The minutes of the Council of the Indies observe that there were two of them:
“Because Ariaen Jacobsz, skipper of the wrecked ship Batavia, is notorious through allowing himself to be blown away by pure neglect; and also because through his doings a gross evil and public assault has taken place on the same ship . . . it has been decided by His Hon. [Coen] and the Council to arrest the mentioned skipper and bring him to trial here in order that he may answer those accusations made to his detriment.”
Unlike Evertsz, the skipper does not seem to have been put to the torture. Perhaps he was protected by his rank; perhaps the governor-general and his council were simply less convinced of his guilt than they were of the high boatswain’s. In truth, however, there was really no need to rely on Pelsaert’s accusations in this case. It was beyond dispute that Jacobsz bore responsibility for the faulty navigation that had piled the Batavia onto a reef; and as the officer