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By Root 302 0

of Castle Batavia itself. Coen had not lived to see the triumph of his armies. The governor-general had collapsed and died, aged 42, on 21 September—the day before Jacques Specx and the remainder of the VOC’s autumn fleet (of which Pelsaert’s squadron had once formed a part) came to anchor in the roadstead outside the town. The cause of death was apparently heart failure. Coen had been ill before, with dysentery, but his death was sudden and so unexpected that it gave rise to some startling rumors. The most popular attributed his seizure to the arrival of Specx, whose daughter, Sara, Coen had only recently had flogged before the town hall. It was said that Coen had been promenading on the balcony of his quarters on the afternoon before his death when he saw the autumn fleet appear on the horizon. “There is Sir Specx, my successor,” he is supposed to have prophesied, before dropping dead from the fear of what Specx would do to him when he discovered what had happened to his daughter.

Whether he truly died this way or not, Jan Coen’s last prediction did come true. Jacques Specx was appointed governor-general of the Indies three days after his predecessor’s death. It thus fell to him, and to the fiscaal, Antonij van den Heuvel, to consider the case of the surviving Batavia mutineers, who were landed from the Sardam late in the first week of December and—it seems safe to assume—taken at once to the appalling dungeons beneath the citadel, where Ariaen Jacobsz was still confined pending further investigation of his role in the mutiny.

There were 14 of them in all: the eight men whom Pelsaert had just dealt with, another five, including Salomon Deschamps and Lucas Gellisz, whose cases had been considered in the Abrolhos, and finally the lonely figure of Stone-Cutter Pietersz—once lieutenant general of Jeronimus’s band but now a mere lance corporal once again—who had still not been heard at all. At least some of those who had come before the Sardam’s council had already been punished by the time the jacht reached Batavia (there is some doubt whether Pelsaert had dealt with Daniel Cornelissen and the others sentenced at the end of November), but even those men could not be certain they would be released. The governor-general of the Indies enjoyed absolute power within his dominions, and he could do with them as he liked.

The men were left to rot in prison while Specx and his councillors considered how to handle the Batavia affair, and their cases were not finally decided until the end of January. Pelsaert’s leniency seems to have struck Specx as quite excessive, and as the mutineers had feared, the governor-general had no compunction in setting the commandeur’s verdicts to one side. On 31 January 1630, the survivors of Cornelisz’s gang were brought up from the cells and told they faced much sterner punishments for the crimes they had committed on Batavia’s Graveyard.

Five more mutineers were hanged. The worst of them, Daniel Cornelissen, had his right hand amputated before the sentence was carried out. Hans Jacob Heijlweck joined him on the gallows, and so did Lucas Gellisz. Salomon Deschamps, the pathetic clerk who had been forced to strangle Mayken Cardoes’s half-dead baby, died alongside them; the commandeur had protected him in the Abrolhos, but even Deschamps’s long acquaintance with Pelsaert was not enough to save him from the vengeance of the Council of the Indies.

The identity of the fifth man to hang has never been certain. When the time came to pass sentence on the minor mutineers, Specx and his Council seem to have found themselves torn between the urge to punish all of Jeronimus’s men and the feeling that the youngest and most impressionable of them might deserve some mercy. Confronted with Rogier Decker, who was 17, and Abraham Gerritsz, the 15-year-old runaway whom Pelsaert had picked up in Sierra Leone, they ruled that only one should die. The manner in which the matter was decided was a torment in itself. The boys were to

“draw lots which of the two shall be punished with the Cord, and he who shall draw himself