Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [132]
It was hardly necessary work, and on 12 October the merchant’s determination to retrieve every piece of VOC property resulted in a pointless accident that cost the lives of five more men. Jacob Jacobsz, the Sardam’s skipper, had been ordered to sail a small boat out to the reef to recover any flotsam that had become stranded there. The main object of the expedition was the recovery of a small barrel of vinegar that had been spotted on the coral on the preceding day, after which the boat was to carry on and search some of the outlying islets in the archipelago for driftwood and other objects from the wreck. Jacobsz took with him not only his quartermaster, Pieter Pietersz, and one of the Sardam’s gunners, but also two men who had been on the Batavia: Ariaan Theuwissen, a gunner, and Cornelis Pieterszoon, the retourschip’s under-trumpeter. The latter was almost certainly the same “Cornelis the fat trumpeter” named in the letter sent by Jeronimus to the Defenders at the end of July, who had survived both that attempt at betrayal and three attacks by the mutineers. The men had orders to return to the Sardam that evening if possible, but to stay out all night if that proved necessary. In the event, they did not come back, and on the afternoon of 13 October Claes Gerritsz, on the jacht, caught a last glimpse of Jacobsz’s yawl well out to sea, about nine miles from the ship. Soon afterward the wind began to rise and banks of rain swept in. The curtain of sea mist quickly swallowed up the boat and hid it from view.
That was the last anyone saw of Jacob Jacobsz and his men. Two days of storms prevented Pelsaert from launching a search for the missing yawl until 16 October, when a boat commanded by Jacob Jansz Hollert searched all the outlying islands without success; and though several columns of smoke were seen rising from the mainland on 4 November, giving rise to definite hopes that the men might have made a landfall there, a brief search of the Australian coast revealed no sign of the crew. The five sailors had to be given up for lost.
So obsessively did Pelsaert search for wreckage that his salvage work was not completed until the middle of November, six weeks after Jeronimus’s execution. During this time the hundred soldiers and sailors under his command had to guard the 30 survivors of the group that had signed oaths of allegiance to Cornelisz. The most dangerous of the surviving mutineers—they included Daniel Cornelissen and Hans Jacob Heijlweck, both of whom had killed several men—were still kept, bound hand and foot, in isolation on Seals’ Island. The remainder, though, were not confined, and since there were at least a score of them the possibility of another uprising could not entirely be discounted. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that Pelsaert decided to deal with another six of the remaining mutineers before leaving the Abrolhos.
The men concerned were Wouter Loos, Lucas Gellisz, Rogier Decker, Abraham Gerritsz, Claes Harmansz, and Salomon Deschamps, Pelsaert’s clerk, whose role in the death of Mayken Cardoes’s child had finally emerged. Loos, who was the only major figure in the group, was charged with allowing himself to be “made Captain of a troop of Murderers” and attacking Wiebbe Hayes and his Defenders, but not, at first, with any killings. The other five had all confessed to murder, but in each case Pelsaert and the members of the Broad Council observed that there had been extenuating circumstances. Deschamps, Gerritsz, and Harmansz, who had been forced to kill by Zevanck and his men, were all found to have acted under duress, and each was spared the death sentence. Decker and Gellisz were still more fortunate. Both had killed men in cold blood, “without any protest,