Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [120]
Wiebbe Hayes’s task was to find Pelsaert, persuade him to believe his undeniably amazing account of what had happened in the islands, and then warn the people in the Sardam before the murderers could surprise them. The mutineers’ one hope was to get aboard the Sardam and attack before her crew realized they were in danger. Jeronimus had been quite right to predict that the rescue jacht would be only lightly manned, to leave room for large parties of survivors; she had left Java with a crew of only 26, and perhaps a quarter of those men were with Pelsaert in the boat. The remaining sailors, finding armed mutineers among them, might yet be overwhelmed; and if they were, Jeronimus’s gang would control the one means of escape from the Abrolhos. The Defenders would have to come to terms or be abandoned, and the mutineers might thus secure the freedom of their captain-general. As for Pelsaert—still standing on the beach trying to discern who was in the fast-approaching boat—his difficulty would lie in deciding whom he should believe.
It was a while before the commandeur at last made out the identity of the people in the yawl. They came “rowing round the Northerly point,” he later recalled, “and one of them, a man named Wiebbe Hayes, sprang ashore and ran towards me, calling from afar: ‘Welcome, but go back on board immediately, for there is a party of scoundrels on the islands near the wreck, with two sloops, who have the intention to seize the jacht.’ ” The Defenders’ leader had just sufficient time to gasp out a brief summary of events in the archipelago before the commandeur, suddenly alert to the danger he was in, made off to warn the Sardam. As he jumped into his boat, Pelsaert ordered Hayes to bring Cornelisz to him, “bound”; then he pulled like fury for the jacht.
Hayes and his men had won their race with the mutineers, but not by much. Pelsaert was still some distance from the Sardam when he “saw a sloop with people rowing come round the Southerly point of the High Island.” It was the mutineers’ boat, coming on with steady strokes, and the commandeur had barely enough time to scramble up the sides of the jacht and alert the crew before the sloop pulled alongside. One look at the 11 men on board—dressed in their ostentatious laken uniforms, dripping with gold and silver braid and crewing a vessel filled with swords and cutlasses—was enough to convince Pelsaert that Hayes’s story was true. At his command, the swivel guns on the Sardam’s poop were leveled at mutineers’ boat and men with pikes lined the deck. Thus reinforced, the commandeur felt ready to repel boarders. He hailed the boat, demanding: “Wherefore do you come aboard armed?”
Even now, Jan Hendricxsz and the other cutthroats in the sloop were not quite ready to surrender. “They answered me that they would reply to that when they were on the ship,” Pelsaert recalled, but by now he was thoroughly alarmed and would not permit any such thing. A brief standoff ensued, the men in the boat refusing to lay down their arms and the Sardam’s men threatening to open fire, and it was only when it at last became apparent to the mutineers that their cause was hopeless that they threw their weapons overboard and clambered, unarmed, onto the jacht. Each man was seized the moment that he stepped on board, securely bound, and locked up in the forecastle.
Pelsaert began the process of interrogation that same afternoon, at once anxious and appalled to discover the true extent of the disasters that had engulfed the archipelago. Most of his information came from “a certain Jan Hendricxsz from Bremen, soldier,” who immediately and freely confessed to having killed “17 to 20 people” on the