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By Root 364 0

mutiny, but also that these views were in themselves only a part of a larger and more complex personality—a personality he plainly believed was evil. In his journals, Pelsaert recoils almost visibly from this recognition, just as a snail that has been prodded by a twig retreats into its shell. And, like the snail, the commandeur had no more than an incomplete understanding of what it was that had touched him. It was as though he had just seen a truth that had lain masked by the easy denunciations of the official record: “Godless,” “evil-minded,” “innately corrupt.” “See how miraculously God the Lord reveals godlessness before all the people,” the commandeur had written piously of Jeronimus’s refusal to come to church; but what he really meant was that he had caught a glimpse—as it were from the corner of his eye—of someone living far beyond the bounds of conventional morality and godliness.

Time was now fast running out for all the mutineers. The first day of October dawned so grimly stormy that the planned executions had to be postponed; the seas were so high that it was dangerous to make the generally easy voyage across the deep-water channel to Seals’ Island. But this respite was only temporary; the next day it was calmer, and a group of carpenters went over to begin building the gallows. Seals’ Island is the only place in the vicinity of Batavia’s Graveyard where the soil is deep enough to support such structures; there is a good landing place on the west side of the channel, toward the southern end of the islet, and a ridge just inland with enough sand and guano-encrusted earth on it to sink the posts. The carpenters used spare lumber from the Sardam, and perhaps the Batavia’s driftwood, too, and when they had finished they had put up two or three large scaffolds, with room enough for seven men.

Once that work was done, the prisoners were summoned. Pelsaert was there to supervise the execution of justice, and Bastiaensz to console the men and save their souls, if that were possible. There, too, was Creesje Jans, who had not talked to Jeronimus since his capture nearly a month earlier. An hour before the executions were due to begin, and in the hearing of some of the Defenders, she at last came close enough to the captain-general to catch his eye. Pelsaert was not present to record this last brief encounter; but Wiebbe Hayes was there, and he listened while Creesje reproached her former captor in the strongest terms. “She bitterly lamented to the said Jerome,” the newly promoted sergeant noted later, “over the sins he had committed with her against her will, and forcing her thereto. To which Jerome replied: ‘It is true, you are not to blame, for you were in my tent 12 days before I could succeed.’ ”

Creesje was not the only person on Seals’ Island anxious to confront Cornelisz before he died. The other condemned mutineers, who had once been the captain-general’s creatures, had greatly resented his betrayal of them under interrogation, and they now loudly demanded that Jeronimus be strung up first, “so that their eyes could see that the seducer of men [had] died.” This request reflected their desire for revenge, of course, but also a real fear that if they died first the apothecary might yet talk his way out of punishment. They crowded round the under-merchant as he was dragged toward his execution—Hendricxsz and Van Os, Jonas and Allert Janssen, Fredricx and Beer—and they hooted and hissed at him. They saw him kneel before the hangman so that his hands could be removed (a contemporary print suggests that the amputations were crudely performed, with a hammer and a chisel). And at the very end, they gathered beneath the gallows to watch as he ascended.

The assembled people on the island saw one last drama played out on the scaffold. “They all shouted at each other,” Pelsaert recalled. “Some evil-doers shouted ‘Revenge!’ at Jeronimus, and Jeronimus shouted at them. At last he challenged them, as well as the council, before God’s Judgement Seat, that he wanted to seek justice there with them, because he had not been