Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [108]
Of all the seven women, Creesje Jans was by far the most desirable, and Jeronimus claimed her as his own. Almost as soon as he took power in the island, the captain-general had Lucretia taken to his tent, where rather than assaulting her he made every effort to seduce her. For nearly two weeks, he wrote her sonnets, poured her wine—tried everything, in fact, to persuade her that he was not a monster. Cornelisz’s remarkable behavior suggests that he wanted to possess her not just physically but mentally—and that he also possessed a great capacity for self-delusion, for she resisted stubbornly, just as she had resisted Ariaen Jacobsz, and eventually Jeronimus gave up his attempts at gallantry. The story of what happened next somehow reached the ears of others on the island:
“In the end [Jeronimus] complained to David Zevanck that he could not accomplish his ends either with kindness or anger. Zevanck answered: ‘And don’t you know how to manage that? I’ll soon make her do it.’ He had then gone into the tent and said to Lucretia: ‘I hear complaints about you.’ ‘On what account?’ she asked. ‘Because you do not comply with the Captain’s wishes in kindness; now, however, you will have to make up your mind. Either you will go the same way as Wybrecht Claasen, or else you must do that for which we have kept the women.’ Through this threat Lucretia had to consent that day, and thus he had her as his concubine.”
Creesje therefore yielded in the end; but she did so unwillingly. Like the women kept for common service, the girl had acted to save her life, and as long as the captain-general was happy she at least assured herself of decent food and drink, and protection of a sort. The rest of the survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard—the menfolk and the boys—enjoyed no such assurance. Hungry, thirsty, ill, they lived in constant terror of their lives. Now that a good deal of the killing had been done, the mutineers’ existence on the island was increasingly routine, and they began to look for fresh diversions; attracting the attention of any of Cornelisz’s henchmen was unwise, and a few mutineers, perhaps unstable to begin with, became deranged.
The most extreme case was that of Jan Pelgrom, the cabin boy, whose “gruesome life” is vividly sketched in the ship’s journals. “Mocking at God, cursing and swearing, also conducting himself more like a beast than a human being,” Pelgrom lacked any self-control, “which made him at last a terror to all the people, who feared him more than any of the other principal murderers or evil-doers.” The boy’s sudden elevation—he had been one of the lowliest of the Batavia’s crew, and now found himself among the most powerful—practically unhinged him, and he took to racing around the island “like a man possessed,” spewing out challenges and blasphemies to anyone who would listen. “[He] has daily on the island run,” the journals observe, “calling out, ‘Come now, devils with all the sacraments, where are you? I wish that I now saw a devil. And who wants to be stabbed to death? I can do that very beautifully.’ ”
In this highly charged and dangerous environment, it is no surprise that the killings on the island did not cease with the murder of the predikant’s family on 21 July. Cornelisz and his blood council still sat in judgment on their dwindling band of subjects, and the captain-general continued to order executions.
What did change was the nature of the violence. For two weeks, Jeronimus’s men had killed—ostensibly