Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [106]
One of the under-merchant’s aims was to strengthen his own position by removing his followers from contact with the one authority in the islands that might have had the power to restrain them: the Dutch Reformed Church. By silencing the predikant, Cornelisz shielded the mutineers from the fear of criticism and divine retribution; and by introducing his men to a new theology he in effect began to create a new society in the Abrolhos—one in which his followers owed personal loyalty to him and were bound together not only by their crimes, but also by their rejection of conventional authority.
Once Cornelisz had assumed control of Batavia’s Graveyard, the mutineers were urged to reject the rules and laws that had until then restricted them. They were incited to blaspheme and swear—which was strictly prohibited by VOC regulations—and absolved from the requirement to attend religious services. Above all, they were encouraged to ridicule the predikant. On the one occasion that Bastiaensz did call on the men to pray, one mutineer shot back that they would rather sing; and when the minister beseeched God to take all those on the island “under His wings,” he looked up to find Jeronimus’s men capering about behind his tiny congregation. The mutineers were flapping the bloody, severed flippers of dead sea lions above their heads and sneering at his piety. “No need,” they hooted, “we are already under them.”
Jeronimus’s methods did help to bind him and his men together; nevertheless, it is clear that the under-merchant did not entirely trust the mutineers. Surrounded as he was by heavily armed soldiers, Cornelisz must have been painfully aware that he owed his position not to any military prowess—indeed, his actions all suggest that he himself was a physical coward—but to his unusually clever tongue; and he may have doubted he was strong enough to resist a real challenge to his authority. So, on 12 July, he required all two dozen of his followers to sign an “Oath of trust,” swearing loyalty to each other; and he also took oaths separately “from the Men he wanted to save, that they should be obedient to him in every way in whatever he should order them.” A second oath, sworn on 20 August, reinforced these vows. This one was signed by 36 people, including the predikant. By then the mutineers’ ranks had been swollen by fear.
It did not take long for a hierarchy to emerge among Jeronimus’s men. In theory they were equal, “assisting each other in brotherly affection for the common welfare,” but in fact Stone-Cutter Pietersz, the lance corporal, became the under-merchant’s second-in-command. Pietersz’s elevation no doubt owed a good deal to his influence among the soldiers, but since he was far junior to Cornelisz in rank, and a relatively colorless personality to boot, it was likely also because Jeronimus found him easy to manipulate. The corporal was certainly less of a potential threat than David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen, who were both self-confident, if junior, members of the officer class. Zevanck had not only led but orchestrated many of the killings on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Jeronimus had struggled to control Van Huyssen’s hotheadedness on the ship. The apothecary may have thought it wise to keep both men somewhat at arm’s length and invest more authority in the malleable Pietersz.
Cornelisz and the corporal set themselves apart from the other mutineers in several ways. They determined who would live or die, but they themselves did not kill, leaving Zevanck and Van Huyssen to carry out their orders. They were the only men to adopt new titles—Jeronimus