Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [104]
The Sardam cleared Batavia on 15 July, a Sunday. The crew had set out one day before the date ordered by Coen, so anxious was the commandeur to be on his way.
Three of the men who had sailed north with Pelsaert were with him on the jacht. Two were steersmen, Claes Gerritsz and Jacob Jansz Hollert; their navigational skills would be needed to help relocate the Abrolhos, whose position at this time was still most uncertain. The third was the Batavia’s upper-trumpeter, Claes Jansz Hooft. The trumpeter was on the Sardam for an altogether different reason. He had left his wife, Tryntgien Fredericx, on Batavia’s Graveyard and must have been desperately anxious to rescue her.
The voyage from the islands to Batavia had taken 30 days, and even though the jacht would be sailing against the prevailing winds, she was a fast ship and Pelsaert probably hoped to reach the wreck site around the middle of August. By then it would be 10 weeks since his ship had gone aground, and the commandeur must have recognized that the people he had abandoned on Batavia’s Graveyard could only have survived by finding water. He knew, however, that heavy rain had fallen in the area three days after he had left—memories of the violent gale of 10 June would have been all too vivid for the people in the longboat—and he no doubt hoped to discover some, if not all, of the remaining passengers and crew alive.
The Sardam made reasonable time. The ship was south of Java by 17 July, and three weeks later, on 10 August, they reached latitude 27 degrees 54 minutes and found themselves less than 50 miles from Batavia’s Graveyard, which lies at 28 degrees 28 minutes south. What followed was more than a month of intense frustration. In the chaos that ensued after the loss of the Batavia, Ariaen Jacobsz and his steersmen had obtained no more than rough bearings for the wreck site. Calculating latitude required a navigator to “shoot the sun.” Persistent bad weather in the Abrolhos had made this very difficult, and the position given by the skipper was no more than an estimate. In consequence, Pelsaert knew only that the Batavia lay at about 28 degrees south, and since he had almost no idea of the wreck’s true longitude, it followed that the best way of finding the Batavia was to zigzag east along Jacobsz’s estimated line of latitude until the Abrolhos were sighted. The skipper had, however, miscalculated by about a third of a degree, placing the retourschip and the islands around 30 miles north of their true position. In most circumstances this would not have been an error of any moment, but when it came to searching for a few lumps of low-lying coral amid the endless swells of the eastern Indian Ocean it was a significant mistake. Pelsaert and the crew of the Sardam spent the last two weeks of August and the first half of September cruising fruitlessly to and fro some way to the north of Houtman’s Abrolhos.
It was not until 13 September that they at last chanced on the most northerly part of the archipelago. They were then no more than 17 miles from the wreck site, but the weather soon closed in and the Sardam had to spend another two days lying at anchor, riding out the storm. On 15 September the winds had abated somewhat, but the jacht made no more than six miles into a strong southeasterly and it was not until the evening of 16 September that Pelsaert at last sighted Hayes’s islands on the horizon. Night was falling and the sailors were all too aware that there were reefs about, so they anchored for the evening and got under way again at dawn. Soon the Sardam was only a few miles from the islands, her men lining the decks and climbing into the rigging to look for signs of life. At last, at about 10 in the morning, they found it: “smoke on a long island west of the Wreck, [and] also on another small island close by.” Pelsaert could