Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [128]
Whether or not Jeronimus really believed, at this point, that his God would intervene to save him is an interesting question; it would not have been out of character for him to have entertained such thoughts. But Pelsaert plainly guessed that the apothecary’s boasts meant that he intended to commit suicide. He issued special orders to the guards, demanding extra vigilance and warning them not to allow anyone to smuggle the prisoner anything that he could use in such an attempt.
Security was, however, still a problem in the Abrolhos. Although the mutineers were kept safely away from the other survivors, they were not in any modern sense in prison on Seals’ Island. There were no thick-walled cells to lock them in; their quarters were merely tents, and it was impossible to prevent so many men from mixing with their guards. In these circumstances, and especially when Pelsaert was still unaware of the real extent of the mutineers’ support, it was unusually difficult to ensure that the prisoners were kept isolated. Jeronimus had already been able to write two letters to his friends back in the Netherlands, full of tall tales of the conspiracies against him and outraged assurances of his innocence; these he had smuggled to Jacob Jansz Hollert, the Batavia’s under-steersman, in the hope that he would send them home. As it happened, Hollert had given the letters to Pelsaert instead, and they had been opened by the Broad Council and found to be “contrary to the truth, in order to cover up his gruesome misdeeds.” But if it was possible for Cornelisz to pass notes out of his tent, it was also easy enough for him to receive contraband. At some time prior to 29 September the apothecary had obtained some poison, which was perhaps a remnant of the batch that had been mixed to dispose of Mayken Cardoes’s child; and, that night, he took it—either in fulfilment of his own prophecy, or because he had at last despaired of divine intervention.
The effect was not at all what he had hoped. The poison, Pelsaert wrote, was not strong enough to do its job, for although it “started to work at about one o’clock in the morning, so that he was full of pain and seemed like to die,” it left Jeronimus writhing in hideous agony without actually killing him. “In this great anxiety,” the commandeur noted with just a trace of satisfaction,
“he asked for some Venetian theriac. At last he began to get some relief . . . but he had to be got out of his prison certainly 20 times during the night, because his so-called miracle was working from below as well as from above.”
By morning on 30 September, a Sunday, Cornelisz was sufficiently recovered to be called from his tent to hear the preacher’s sermon with the other prisoners. He alone, however, refused to join the party, vowing to have nothing at all to do with the minister. This refusal to seek solace in religion less than a day before the scheduled executions struck the commandeur as remarkable, and it was only now, at the end of the whole story, that Pelsaert finally began to comprehend the true significance of the under-merchant’s heresy. Jeronimus’s strange ideas had cropped up from time to time during his interrogation, particularly in connection with the suppression of Bastiaensz’s preaching on the island, but they had become so bound up with his litany of lies, half-truths, and self-deception that the members of the Broad Council seem to have largely disregarded them, seeing the captain-general’s theology as little more than another of the devices that he used to control his men. The other councillors were bluntly practical men, of strictly orthodox religious views. Confronted with the reality of the murder, rape, and pillage that had gone on in the archipelago they did not feel compelled to explore a merely ideological charge of heresy.
The commandeur, who had a better education than the rest and at least some imagination, was perhaps the only man in the Abrolhos who—at this late remove—finally understood not only how Cornelisz’s beliefs had helped to mold the shape and nature of the