Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [117]
In the space of perhaps five minutes, the balance of power in the Abrolhos had shifted for good. The mutineers had lost their leader and his principal lieutenants, while Hayes had won the first real victory in the indecisive island civil war, immeasurably strengthening his men’s morale. The Defenders had secured the wine and clothing they had coveted, for the mutineers’ supplies had been abandoned on the beach when they were captured. Individual survivors were also affected by what had happened; Judick Gijsbertsdr, for instance, had lost both of her protectors; her father, left by chance among the loyalists by the swift collapse of his diplomacy, remained on Hayes’s Island, while her husband-manqué Coenraat, run through by Wiebbe Hayes’s nail-tipped pikes, lay dead on the beach.
Of all the Batavia’s people, none experienced a more dramatic reversal of fortune than Jeronimus Cornelisz. When he stepped ashore that day, the captain-general was the undisputed master of the survivors, gleefully wielding the power of life and death. His absurd costume of gold-trimmed laken had marked him as a man of great self-regard and consequence, compared with whom the ragged Defenders seemed to be no more than a rabble. Half an hour later, though, Cornelisz had at last experienced for himself something of the terror he had inflicted on Batavia’s Graveyard. He had been deposed, deprived of his authority, tightly bound, and no doubt harshly treated, too; worse, the aura of invincibility that had once surrounded him—and in which he himself certainly believed—had been unceremoniously stripped away.
The captain-general’s humiliation was compounded by the quarters that the Defenders found for him. For three months Jeronimus had dwelled in a large tent packed with looted clothes and treasure, taking his pick of the salvaged food and drink. Now he was hurled into a limestone pit some way inland and made to help feed Hayes’s men. Into the hole the Defenders tossed the birds they caught, for their prisoner to pluck for them, and at the bottom lived Cornelisz, spattered with guts and feathers. For every nine birds that rained down on him, eight had to be surrendered to Wiebbe Hayes. The ninth he was allowed to keep, as “salary.”
Still smarting from the disastrous setback of 2 September, the remaining mutineers regrouped on Batavia’s Graveyard and elected a new leader. The only remaining member of Cornelisz’s council—Stone-Cutter Pietersz, the ineffectual and unpopular lance corporal—was passed over. In his place, the 32 survivors of the under-merchant’s band elected Wouter Loos.
Loos was a professional soldier who came from the southern Dutch town of Maastricht. He was considerably younger than Jeronimus, being about 24 years old, but unlike Cornelisz and his cohorts he did possess some military ability; this, in the aftermath of a devastating defeat, no doubt helps to explain his election. He had long been one of Cornelisz’s favorites and had participated in several murders, but unlike the captain-general he took no great pleasure in killing for its own sake. Under his command, the massacres on Batavia’s Graveyard ceased, and the remaining people on the island*44 ceased to live in constant terror of their lives.
Nevertheless, in most respects Wouter’s regime differed little from Jeronimus’s. Strict rationing remained in force. The women from the lower deck were still “kept for common service,” and Loos himself shared Creesje’s tent,