Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [130]
The predikant witnessed the same bizarre exchange. “If ever there has been a Godless Man,” he wrote,
“in his utmost need, it was he; [for] he had done nothing wrong, according to his statement. Yes, saying even at the end, as he mounted the gallows: ‘Revenge! Revenge!’ So that to the end of his life he was an evil Man.”
Then Gijsbert Bastiaensz, who had more cause than most to hate Cornelisz, added a last thought. “The justice and vengeance of God has been made manifest in him,” he scrawled, “for he had been a too-atrocious murderer.”
9
“To Be Broken on the Wheel”
“And so he died stubborn.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
JERONIMUS TOOK QUITE SOME TIME TO DIE.
A gallows, in the seventeenth century, consisted of little more than two braced uprights, 10 to 15 feet high, joined by a thick horizontal beam from which men were strangled slowly at the end of a short rope. Two hundred years before the invention of the trapdoor and the drop, the only other piece of equipment that an executioner required was a ladder to prop against one of the uprights. The prisoner was driven up the ladder, arms tied, legs free, the noose already around his neck. The hangman tied the other end of the rope securely to the beam and then, with little ceremony, thrust one knee into the small of the condemned man’s back and launched him into space. The fortunate few died quickly of a broken neck, but in most cases the fall was not enough to guarantee an instant death and the man was strangled by the noose instead. This could be a lengthy process, lasting for up to 20 minutes, and most prisoners remained conscious for a good part of the time. The convulsive kicks and struggles of the dying man were reckoned good sport by the crowds who attended the public executions popular in Europe. Those lucky enough to secure a spot close to the scaffold could also witness the unpleasant aftermath of a slow hanging: uncontrolled voiding of bladder and bowels and, in some cases, involuntary erection at the moment of death.
Attempts were sometimes made to hasten the condemned man’s end; friends might be allowed to tighten the noose by pulling at his legs, while, in France, the executioner was required to swing out onto the crossbeam “and, placing his feet in the loop formed by the bound hands of the patient, by dint of repeated vigorous shocking terminate his sufferings.” It seems unlikely that such interventions were allowed in Jeronimus’s case, but unless tourniquets had been applied, the amputation of his hands would have led to loss of consciousness and death before the noose could do its work. The maximum allowable blood loss for a man of normal weight—around 160 pounds—is roughly two and a half pints. Cornelisz, who had lived on the sparse island diet for the best part of three months, almost certainly weighed a good deal less than that. He would have lost consciousness quite quickly, and died after losing around two pints of blood.
As was the custom, the predikant accompanied the condemned men to the scaffold in the hope that some, at least, would confess their sins. Jeronimus refused to talk to him and went to his death without the least show of remorse. “He could not reconcile himself to dying,” Pelsaert noted grimly, “or to penitence, neither to pray to God nor to show any face of repentance over his sins . . . . And so he died stubborn.” Cornelis Jansz, who witnessed the execution, was likewise shocked by Cornelisz’s refusal to admit his guilt, even as he stood bleeding by the gallows. Only a confession—and genuine contrition—could even begin to atone for the captain-general’s many sins, and Jeronimus’s resolve, the Defender thought, must have been rooted in his heretical beliefs. “He died,” Jansz wrote, “as he had lived, not believing there exists Devil or Hell, God or Angel—the Torrentian feeling had spread thus far.”
The other mutineers had less faith and were not so brave. Both Mattys Beer and Andries Jonas found that their courage failed them on their way to the scaffold, and each made a stumbling confession to cleanse