Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [112]
The smaller of the two land masses, which lay farthest to the north, was two miles from end to end and about a mile and a half across. At its center stood the only hill in the entire archipelago, a modest hummock rising 50 feet above the sea; in consequence it was called the High Island. Its neighbor, just under a mile away to the southwest, was larger still—more than three miles long and not far short of two miles wide. Hayes and his troops established their base there, and in time it became known as “Wiebbe Hayes’s Island.” The two isles were connected by the mile-wide muddy causeway that Wiebbe had used to cross from one to the other.
Had Pelsaert and the skipper had the sense to explore the archipelago with any thoroughness, they would surely have transferred the survivors of the wreck to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, which offered far more in the way of natural resources than Batavia’s Graveyard and could have supported the whole company for months. Like the smaller islets in the archipelago, it was surrounded by rich fishing grounds and alive with nesting birds, but to the soldiers’ surprise, it also turned out to be full of new and unknown hopping animals, which they called “cats”—“creatures of miraculous form, as big as a hare.” These were tammars, a species of wallaby indigenous to the Abrolhos, and as the soldiers soon discovered, they were easily caught and delicious cooked.
Most significant of all, the island turned out to have wells. They were not easily located, and both Pelsaert and Jeronimus’s scouts might be forgiven for having failed to uncover them, but in the end Hayes’s men discovered them by searching under the limestone slabs that lay scattered on the ground throughout the island. They appear to have found at least two good wells, one near the coast and the other toward the middle of the island, and possibly more; one cistern had 10 feet of water in it and an entrance large enough for a man to climb down into it. Between them they contained so much fresh water that it would hardly have been necessary to ration it.
Life on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island was thus far easier than it was on Batavia’s Graveyard. “The Lord our God fed us so richly that we could have lived there with ten thousand men for a hundred years,” wrote Cornelis Jansz, who had reached Hayes from Seals’ Island, with the pardonable exaggeration of a man who had survived the desert islands of the south to find himself living in a land of plenty. “Birds like doves we could catch, five hundred in a day, and each bird had an egg, as large as a hen’s egg.” They hunted wallabies, slaughtering “two, three, four, five, six or even more for each person,” and found fishing spots where they could haul in “40 fish as large as cod” in only an hour.
Wiebbe Hayes must have wondered why all contact with Batavia’s Graveyard had ceased as soon as he and his men were put ashore on the High Island, and become still more perplexed when the signal fires he lit to announce the discovery of water went unanswered. Lacking boats, he and his men could hardly investigate, however, and they may have remained ignorant of events elsewhere in the archipelago until the second week of July, when the first parties of refugees staggered ashore with horrifying tales of murder and massacre to the south. Over the next few days, at least five different groups made the difficult passage across more than four miles of open water, sitting on little homemade rafts or swimming behind planks of wood. The new arrivals included the eight men who somehow escaped the general massacres on Seals’ Island, and nearly 20 who contrived to slip away from Batavia’s Graveyard itself in groups of four and five. Between them, these men more than doubled the strength of Hayes’s force and kept him and his soldiers well informed concerning Cornelisz’s activities.
The news that Jeronimus’s men had gone to Seals’ Island and massacred