Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [111]
A second mutineer only narrowly avoided the same fate. The Batavia’s senior cooper, Jan Willemsz Selyns, was a hanger-on who had played only a minor role in the killings and had perhaps failed to show the necessary enthusiasm for Jeronimus’s schemes. On 5 August, Cornelisz sent Wouter Loos and Hans Jacobsz Heijlweck to dispatch the cooper in his tent; but Loos, who had felt no compunction in hacking Mayken Cardoes to death two weeks earlier, liked Selyns, and instead of killing him he begged the captain-general to spare the artisan’s life. Jeronimus, surprisingly, gave way, and nothing more was heard of the matter; but that afternoon, when the under-merchant ordered the murder of another potential defector, Heijlweck was among the four men chosen for the task, and Wouter Loos was not.
The new object of Cornelisz’s suspicions was Frans Jansz. The surgeon appears to have retained a good deal of influence in the archipelago—no doubt because of his involvement in the first survivors’ council—and for a while he and David Zevanck had competed for the captain-general’s favor. Zevanck won this contest, becoming Jeronimus’s chief executioner; but the assistant did not forget Jansz and was irritated to find him “in the way” on more than one occasion. The surgeon, meanwhile, retained a certain degree of independence. He was not one of Jeronimus’s band (that is, he did not sign the oath of 16 July); but he took part in some of its operations, and as he was still the most senior member of the Batavia’s crew in the islands, the mutineers could not ignore him altogether. Exactly what Jansz said, and did, in the survivors’ camp after Cornelisz supplanted him was never written down and is now lost. What we do know is that the under-merchant did not trust him and decided to remove him because “he would not dance exactly to their pipes.” The four men chosen to kill him accepted the commission eagerly. They were Lenert van Os, Mattys Beer, Heijlweck, and Lucas Gellisz.
By now they were well schooled in the art of murder. The surgeon was taken to one side “on the pretext of searching for seals,” and when he was well away from any source of help, his executioners fell on him together. Their attack was unusually violent, indeed excessively so, and suggests a certain personal antipathy: “Lenert Michielsz first stabbed him with a pike right through his body; after that, Hans Jacobsz [Heijlweck] smote his head with a Morning star, so that he fell down, and Mattys Beer has cleft it quickly with a sword.” Each of these blows would have been fatal on its own, but Lucas Gellisz wanted to make certain, and he “stabbed Mr Frans in his body with a pike,” finishing him off. “Which Gruesomeness,” it was subsequently observed, “he could just as well have omitted, because the man was already so hacked and stabbed.” The four men watched the surgeon die, then went to tell Cornelisz that Jansz would not, after all, be running off to Wiebbe Hayes.
As it turned out, Jeronimus had every reason to fear Hayes and the soldiers he had abandoned six weeks earlier. The captain-general’s scouts—like Pelsaert and the sailors in the longboat before them—had spent very little time on the two large islands to the north of Batavia’s Graveyard. They had gone ashore for perhaps an hour or two, found each in turn as rocky and barren as the rest of the archipelago, and seen no evidence of pools or wells. But the scouts had made a