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By Root 487 0

he sailed to Batavia’s Graveyard, “where the rest of the scoundrels were, in order to capture and secure them.” Half a dozen mutineers had stayed on the island, including Wouter Loos, Lenert van Os, and Mattys Beer; but when they saw a boatload of fully equipped soldiers disembarking on the beach, even these hardened men surrendered without a fight. Pelsaert had them securely bound and immediately began to search the island for the Company’s valuables, and in particular the casket of jewels he had landed on Traitors’ Island three and a half months earlier. He was pleasantly surprised to discover his hoard intact, down to and including the Great Cameo of Gaspar Boudaen—“these were all found,” he wrote later, “except a ring and a gold chain, and the ring has been recovered hereafter.” In the course of hunting for the valuables, the commandeur’s search parties also found fresh evidence of the mutiny in Jeronimus’s tent. From various bundles of papers they recovered copies of the oaths that the mutineers had sworn to Cornelisz and Loos and the promises that the women kept for common service had been forced to make. These and other incriminating documents were handed to Pelsaert.

The commandeur must have encountered Lucretia Jans during this short stay on Batavia’s Graveyard, but he makes no mention of their meeting in his account of the mutiny. Creesje had spent the last two weeks sequestered with Wouter Loos and had been treated comparatively decently since Jeronimus’s capture, but having lived through shipwreck, extreme thirst, and repeated rape, she was a different woman from the lady Pelsaert had known aboard the Batavia. There must also have been other reunions at about this time—Jan Carstensz, one of Hayes’s men, with his wife Anneken Bosschieters; Claes Jansz the trumpeter with his Tryntgien; the predikant with his daughter Judick—but the awkwardness, and what was said, and how they explained themselves one to the other, are likewise passed over without comment in the journals; they can only be imagined.

That evening, with the search complete, Pelsaert rowed over to the wreck. It was unusually calm, and the Sardam’s boat was able to approach the site without much danger. There was little enough to see:

“We found that the ship was lying in many pieces, [and that] all above water had been washed away except a small piece of bulwark . . . . A piece of the front of the ship was broken off and thrown half on the shallow; there were also lying 2 Pieces of Cannon, one of brass and one of iron, fallen from the mounts.—By the foreship was lying also one side of the poop, broken off at the starboard port of the gunners’ room. Then there were several pieces of a greater or lesser size that had drifted apart to various places, so there did not look to be much hope of salvaging much of the money or the goods.”

The upper-merchant nevertheless drew comfort from a statement made by Reyndert Hendricxsz, the Batavia’s steward and one of the unwilling mutineers. He had been employed as a fisherman and, venturing out to the wreck one day, had seen several of the money chests lying on the bottom. These, it seemed, should still be there, and Pelsaert resolved to search for them on the next calm day.

In the meantime, the commandeur continued his interrogation of the prisoners. Pelsaert was legally bound, under Dutch law, to administer justice as quickly as possible, and to that end he assembled the Sardam’s council and then enlarged it with two men from the Batavia in order to form a Broad Council, which alone had the power to try criminal cases. The members of the Sardam’s raad were the commandeur himself, the jacht’s skipper, Jacob Jacobsz Houtenman,*46 Sijmon Yopzoon, the high boatswain, and Jan Willemsz Visch, who was probably the Sardam’s provost. The Batavia’s representatives were Claes Gerritsz, the upper-steersman, and his deputy, Jacob Jansz Hollert; on at least one occasion Gijsbert Bastiaensz was drafted onto the council, too, to take the place of someone unavoidably detained. Rather more remarkably, the clerk tasked with