Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [110]
Pelgrom did not have to be told to kill; he begged the captain-general for the opportunity. Even the boy’s companions seem to have found his intense desire to be a murderer strange and perhaps a little wearing, but Cornelisz evidently approved of it. He did nothing to curb Pelgrom’s daily rampages around the island and twice attempted to oblige the boy by finding him a victim. Jeronimus’s first choice was Anneken Hardens, one of the women kept for common service. Perhaps she had failed to give satisfaction or was chosen to help keep her husband, Hans, in line (the mutineers, it will be recalled, had already strangled the couple’s daughter, Hilletgie). In any case, Pelgrom was brought to the under-merchant’s tent one night and told that he could kill her. Andries Liebent and Jan Hendricxsz were to assist him. Jan, it seems, “was very glad, and he went quickly,” but he was also small and weak for his age and in the end Hendricxsz and Gsbert van Welderen had to strangle Anneken, using her own hair ribbon, while Liebent and Pelgrom held her legs.
The cabin boy would not give up. For two more weeks he pestered Cornelisz continually, until Jeronimus at last gave way. By this time the number of people on the island had been reduced to the point where only a small group of useful artisans remained alive alongside the mutineers themselves. One of their number was Cornelis Aldersz of Yplendam, a boy kept busy mending nets. On 16 August, when almost a week had passed without a murder on the island, Jeronimus decided that they could do without him.
As soon as he heard that Aldersz was to die, Pelgrom “begged so very much that he be allowed to do it” that Cornelisz agreed. Once again, however, the boy found himself frustrated by his puny body:
“Jeronimus said to him, ‘Jan, here is my sword, which you have to try on the Net-Maker to see if it is sharp enough to cut off his head.’ Whereupon he was very glad. Zevanck, hearing the same, maintained that he was too light for that. Meanwhile Mattys Beer came, who asked if he might do it, which was granted to him. So he took the sword. Jan would not willingly give it because he wanted to do it himself, but [Beer] tore it out of his hands and took it immediately to Gillis Phillipsen*41 in order to file it sharp. Meanwhile Jan was busy blindfolding the boy in the presence of Jeronimus, who said to [him]: ‘Now, be happy, sit nicely, ’tis but a joke.’ Mattys Beer, who had the sword under his cloak, [then] slew him with one blow, cutting off his head.”
Cornelisz, Zevanck, and Beer found this incident tremendously amusing. But Pelgrom, who had “daily begged that he should be allowed to kill someone, because he would rather do that than eat or drink,” did not share in their laughter: “When he was not allowed to cut off the head of the foresaid youngster, Jan wept.”
The decapitation of the net-maker was a mere diversion for the captain-general, a game played to pass the time one afternoon. But other murders that occurred at about the same time had a more serious purpose, for though the mutineers had won undisputed control of their little patch of coral, they could still not feel entirely secure. Even Jeronimus could not control every aspect of life on Batavia’s Graveyard, and, elsewhere in the archipelago, the soldiers who had been left to die of thirst on the islands to the north were still alive. Cornelisz, like so many dictators, was consumed by the fear that his followers might either cheat or challenge him, or defect to his enemies at the first opportunity.
The first man to fall foul of the captain-general in this respect was Andries de Vries, the assistant whose life had been spared by the mutineers. Andries had unwisely formed a friendship with Lucretia Jans, who, in the first weeks of July, was still resisting Jeronimus’s efforts at seduction. News of their relationship aggrieved Cornelisz; grimly, he forced De Vries to swear “that if ever in his life he talked to her [again], he would have to die.” On 14 July, the day after he had been