Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [121]
“We learned from their own confessions, and the testimony of all the living persons, that they have drowned, murdered and brought to death with all manner of cruelties, more than 120 persons, men, women and children as well, of whom the principal murderers amongst those still alive have been: Lenert Michielsz van Os, soldier, Mattys Beer of Munsterbergh, cadet,*45 Jan Hendricxsz of Bremen, soldier, Allert Janssen of Assendelft, gunner, Rutger Fredricx of Groningen, locksmith; Jan Pelgrom de Bye of Bommel, cabin servant, and Andries Jonas of Luyck, soldier, with their consorts.”
Other names were also mentioned. Those of councillors David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and Jacob Pietersz cropped up several times in the course of the interrogations. Nevertheless, the evidence of Jan Hendricxsz and his fellow mutineers seemed conclusive on at least one point. Jeronimus Cornielsz had been the cause of all the trouble.
Hayes brought Jeronimus aboard late that same afternoon. The captain-general arrived under close guard. Stripped of his men and all his power, he was reduced to something of a curiosity. Even now, however—disheveled, tied up, stinking of decomposing birds, with his red cloth finery in tatters—Cornelisz plainly retained something of his weirdly compelling aura, the hypnotic fascination that had bound the mutineers together and made men willing to kill for him. Nor had two weeks of plucking feathers in a limestone pit deprived him of his facile tongue, his agile mind, or his ingenuity. Francisco Pelsaert, a less clever and a much less complex man, hardly knew what to make of his former deputy. “I looked at him with great sorrow,” wrote the commandeur,
“such a scoundrel, cause of so many disasters and of the shedding of human blood—and still he had the intention to go on . . . . I examined him in the presence of the [Sardam’s] council, and asked him why he allowed the devil to lead him so far astray from all human feeling, to do that which had never been so cruelly perpetrated among Christians, without any real hunger or need of thirst, but solely out of bloodthirstiness.
“[Jeronimus] answered, that one should not blame him for what had happened, laying it on David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and others, who have been killed, that they had forced him and willed him to do it; that also one had to do a great deal to save oneself; denied that he had ever had the intention to help in the plan to seize the ship Batavia, and as to the idea of seizing any jacht that might come, he said Zevanck had proposed this, to which he had only consented on account of his own safety without meaning it. For, firstly, he believed that they would never be delivered; [and secondly] that skipper Ariaen intended to throw the commandeur overboard [from the longboat] . . . . In this manner he tried to talk himself clean, with his glib tongue telling the most palpable lies, making out that nowhere had he had a hand in it, often appealing to the [other mutineers], who would say the same thing.”
Unable to penetrate this barrage of untruths for the time being, Pelsaert halted the interrogation at dusk. There were other things to do: salvaging the wreck and subduing the remaining mutineers, who were still on their island. Cornelisz was returned to his prison in the forecastle, and next morning, before dawn, Pelsaert took the Sardam’s boat to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, where he armed 10 of the Defenders with swords and muskets. At daybreak