Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [105]
There was still someone alive on Batavia’s Graveyard.
7
“Who Wants to Be Stabbed to Death?”
“What a godless life is that which has been lived here.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
GIJSBERT BASTIAENSZ SETTLED HIMSELF DOWN on the sand and stared disconsolately out to sea. It was now August in the archipelago, and the mutineers had kept him hard at work since the murder of his family some weeks earlier. The predikant was employed as the island’s boatman, launching the mutineers’ flotilla in the morning and hauling the skiffs and rafts back onto the little beach when their crews returned from a day’s fishing. For the remainder of the day he was merely required to remain near the landing place, and for the most part he spent those hours on the strand, seeking consolation in his Bible.
Gijsbert had not been allowed to mourn his murdered family. The day after his wife and children had been killed, the mutineers had found him “weeping very much,” and ordered him to stop. “Said that I ought not to do so,” the preacher noted. “Said, that does not matter; be silent, or you go the same way.” Nor did Bastiaensz receive, in Jeronimus’s kingdom, the respect and special treatment normally accorded to a minister. He not only worked, as everybody had to work, but ate the same meager rations as the other people on Batavia’s Graveyard. And, like them, the predikant heard Zevanck and the others freely discuss who they would kill next and how, and he feared daily for his life:
“Every day it was, ‘What shall we do with that Man?’ The one would decapitate me, the other poison me, which would have been a sweeter death; a third said, ‘Let him live a little longer, we might make use of him to persuade the folk on the other Land to come over to us.’ . . . And so, briefly, this being the most important thing, my Daughter and I, we both went along as an Ox in front of the Axe. Every night I said to her, you have to look tomorrow morning, whether I have been murdered . . . and I told her what she had to do if she found me slaughtered; and that also we must be prepared to meet God.”
Gijsbert was rarely allowed to preach. Religious affairs in the Abrolhos were now in the under-merchant’s hands, and—having made himself the ruler of the island—Jeronimus felt free to drop his old pretense of piety. To his followers, he openly espoused the heretical beliefs that had once been furtively discussed at Geraldo Thibault’s fencing club, so that “daily [they] heard that there was neither devil nor Hell, and that these were only fables.” In the place of these old certainties, Jeronimus preached the heterodox doctrines of the Spiritual Libertines, which he used to justify his actions and assuage the guilty consciences of his men.
“He tried to maintain . . . that all he did, whether it was good or bad (as judged by others), God gave the same into his heart. For God, as he said, was perfect in virtue and goodness, so was not able to send into the heart of men anything bad, because there was no evil or badness in Himself; saying that all he had done was sent into his heart by God; and still more such gruesome opinions.”
Even this summary of the apothecary’s views, written—as it was—after the fact by someone who scarcely began to comprehend such heresies, only scratches at the surface of Cornelisz’s beliefs. As a Libertine, Jeronimus held to a theology based on the central tenets of the Free Spirit as they had been set down in the fourteenth century. One of these beliefs, as written in a medieval manuscript, was that “nothing is sin except what is thought of as sin.” Another explained that “one can be so united with God that whatever one may do one cannot sin.”
What the other mutineers made of Cornelisz’s ideas it is difficult to say. The majority of them were barely educated men, and they could not have been expected to grasp the subtleties of the Libertine philosophy. But the general thrust of the apothecary’s thought was easy enough to understand; and his men had every reason to accept it, since it promised to absolve them from wrongdoing.