Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [124]
Water was poured slowly over the prisoner’s head, trickling down into the collar until it formed a pool around his chin. Failure to answer questions satisfactorily led to more liquid being added, until the man’s mouth and finally his nostrils were submerged. From then on, he had to drink in order to breathe; but each time he reduced the level of the water the torturer would add more from the jug, so that the interrogation proceeded with the prisoner alternately gulping down the water and gasping for breath.
If the man persisted in his denials, and the torture became protracted, the sheer quantities of water that he consumed would bloat him hideously, “forcing all his inward partes [and] coming out of his nose, eares and eyes,” as a contemporary English writer observed, and “at length taking his breath away and bringing him to a swoone or fainting.” When this happened, the prisoner would be cut down and forced to vomit so that the torment could begin again. After three or four applications of the torture, the man’s body would be “swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead,” and he would generally be ready to confess to anything that he was asked to.
Few men endured the water torture for this long, and Cornelisz was not one of them. It took some days, and several applications of the torment, but gradually the under-merchant was driven to confess not only to his plot to seize the rescue jacht, but also to the part that he had played in planning mutiny on the Batavia herself. Yet still he wriggled like a worm on a hook. Where there was little chance of misleading anyone, Jeronimus confessed freely to his crimes. He knew that Pelsaert had found copies of the oaths the mutineers had sworn to him, and he made no effort to deny that they existed. But where he could—where no other evidence existed—Cornelisz continued to blame Ariaen Jacobsz or David Zevanck for decisions that had actually been his own. Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, and Allert Janssen were brought in to confront him, at which he belatedly confessed to ordering the murders of three dozen people; but at no point did the apothecary admit to any involvement in the deaths of men killed by Zevanck, Van Huyssen, or Gsbert van Welderen. Then, on 28 September, when his interrogation was finally concluded, he suddenly recanted everything—“saying they [the witnesses] are lying, also that all he has confessed he has confessed because he has been threatened with torture; also that he knew nothing of the seizing of the ship Batavia”—and Pelsaert found himself confronted with the possibility that he would have to start the whole procedure once again.
“Therefore,” noted the commandeur,
“on account of his unsteady and variable confessions, practising crooked means—though by all people accused in his own presence in order to prove the same to be lies—have again and for the last time threatened him with torture and asked why he mocked us, because he has confessed and told everything freely several times.”
Cornelisz replied with a further lie: he had wished, he said, to delay matters sufficiently to be taken to Batavia “in order to speak again to his wife”—although he knew, as Pelsaert perhaps did not, that she was still in the Dutch Republic. Then, when the commandeur read out his statements and confessions “before all the people on the Island,” Jeronimus complained that a small detail was still incorrect: “Something was in it of which Assendelft,*47 Jan Hendricxsz and others accused him wrongly.” It was yet another delaying tactic; the law