Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [115]
Zevanck and Van Huyssen returned to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island on 5 August. On this occasion they brought with them their entire gang, but they had not improved their tactics. Once again the men from Batavia’s Graveyard made a long drawn-out approach across the mud; once again the Defenders were prepared for them. Hayes’s troops met the mutineers in the shallows, “up to their knees in water,” and prevented them from reaching land. The mutineers showed no more stomach for a fight than they had the previous week; again there were no casualties on either side. The second assault on Hayes’s Island was as unsuccessful as the first.
After that the captain-general made no more attacks on the Defenders for a while, and the civil war in the Abrolhos lapsed into an uneasy truce, which lasted for the best part of a month. A few of the Defenders had family on Batavia’s Graveyard, but Wiebbe Hayes showed no inclination to counterattack Cornelisz’s men, and in retrospect his caution seems perfectly justified; secure though they were in their well-prepared positions, Hayes’s troops would have been badly exposed to Jeronimus’s swords and pikes in more open fighting. For their part, the mutineers now knew that they could not inflict serious casualties on Wiebbe’s men without taking greater risks themselves. Some sort of new plan was evidently required.
The problem became urgent at the end of August, for time had turned against the mutineers. Each passing day increased the risk of the long-awaited rescue ship appearing, and as the wet season in the Abrolhos neared its end, their supplies of water dwindled. The more impulsive members of the captain-general’s gang—Van Huyssen and Andries Liebent among them—grumbled at the strict rationing they were expected to endure; they knew by now that the Defenders had abundant food and drink and declared that they would rather fight to take Wiebbe’s island than live in increasing misery on their own.
Under pressure to take action, Jeronimus himself began to plan a third attempt to ambush Hayes. Manipulative by nature, the captain-general greatly preferred deceit to frontal assaults. Rather than launch a third attack, he conceived the idea of a bogus offer of peace—“to come to an accord with them, in order, under the cloak of friendship, to surprise them by treason at an opportune time.” He would go, he said, to Wiebbe’s island bearing gifts.
Cornelisz’s scheme was more subtle than those of Van Huyssen and Zevanck, but hardly well thought out. He knew that Hayes’s troops required blankets and fresh clothing—after three months in the islands, their shirts and breeches were torn and dirty, and their shoes, which had been cut to pieces on the coral, had been replaced with rough clogs carved from planks of driftwood—while his men needed fresh water. There was cloth to spare on Batavia’s Graveyard, and he hoped that Wiebbe might exchange fresh meat and water for clothing and red wine. A parlay on the beach would give his men the chance to talk to the Defenders, sow seeds of dissension, and then, perhaps, persuade some of them to come over to the mutineers, “under cover, as friends, in order to help murder the others”; but Jeronimus never explained how the mutineers were to bribe their counterparts, or arrange a betrayal without Wiebbe realizing what was going on. Cornelisz’s cunning had once been an asset to the mutineers but now his inability to think things through, coupled with an invincible belief in his own rightness, would cost them dearly.
The parlay took place on 2 September. The day before, Gijsbert Bastiaensz had been sent to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with proposals for a peace treaty. The Defenders