Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [114]
Wiebbe Hayes was a competent soldier and a good leader. It was the Defenders’ good fortune that Jeronimus Cornelisz was neither. The captain-general had no military experience and, it would appear, little grasp of strategy. As soon as it emerged that Hayes and his men were still alive, Cornelisz must have known that they would have to be dealt with, for fear that they would alert a rescue ship. Yet it was not until the last week of July that Jeronimus resolved to move against them. By then Wiebbe had had at least two weeks to make his preparations; he and his men were a much more formidable enemy than they might have been a fortnight earlier.
Perhaps Cornelisz understood this. Probably he had become aware that the Defenders outnumbered the mutineers, and certainly he recognized the difficulty of launching an assault without the advantage of surprise. For these reasons the captain-general decided to begin his campaign by exploiting the well-known antipathy between the soldiers and the sailors of the VOC in order to divide Hayes’s party.
He wrote a letter, warning of treachery. The sailors on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, Jeronimus alleged, had plotted to betray their comrades. “They have in their possession (unknown to you) a Compass, in order to go thus secretly with the little skiff to the High land.*42” To “maintain justice, and punish the evil-doers,” he urged the soldiers to hand over all the sailors on the island for punishment: “Give to our hands Lucas the steward’s mate, Cornelis the fat trumpeter, Cornelis the assistant, deaf Jan Michielsz, Ariaen the gunner, squinting Hendrick, Theunis Claasz, Cornelis Helmigs and other sailors who are with Your Hons.”*43 If they would also return a boat—the one Aris Jansz had taken during his escape from Batavia’s Graveyard a few days earlier—the apothecary added, the soldiers and the mutineers could still be the very “greatest and truest brothers and friends”—and, indeed, look forward to enjoying “still more bonds and mateships.”
In composing this devious epistle, Cornelisz displayed his absolute conviction that his actions in the Abrolhos were not only justified, but sanctioned by law. He wrote as the head of the ship’s council, and apparently in the hope, if not the expectation, that his orders would be obeyed. He explained that the refugees who had saved their lives by fleeing to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island were in fact “evil-doers who deserved death on account of mutiny,” and he even commented on the “particular liking and trust” he had for Hayes himself. This was more than the self-delusion he had shown in wooing Creesje Jans. The letter was a product of Jeronimus’s certainty that he was the legally ordained leader of all the Batavia survivors and the conviction that his actions were inspired by God.
As his emissary, Jeronimus chose Daniel Cornelissen, the young cadet who had helped to drown several of the first victims of the mutiny. On 23 July the youth was rowed to Hayes’s Island, where he somehow made contact with the half dozen French soldiers among the Defenders. These men had been selected as the letter’s addressees, apparently in the hope that they would be better swayed by Cornelisz’s mendacity than the Dutch. But even the Frenchmen did not believe in the mutineers’ sincerity, and rather than receiving Cornelissen as an ambassador, they seized him and took him captive. The cadet was bound and brought to Hayes, who confiscated the letter and imprisoned him.
False diplomacy had failed. Now Jeronimus tried violence. Two or three days after Daniel Cornelissen’s disappearance, during the last week of July, Zevanck and Van Huyssen gathered 20 men and attempted to subdue Wiebbe by force. As Hayes had calculated, the mutineers’ boats were spotted while they were still well out to sea, and their crews had to slip and stumble their way across seaweed-strewn mudflats to reach the shore. The Defenders came to meet them with their homemade weapons, and there was some sort of encounter on the beach. Exactly what occurred was not recorded, but it appears that the mutineers