Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [137]
Andries Liebent, Hans Frederick, and Olivier van Welderen also received new sentences. The three “delinquents” (Pelsaert’s word) were tied to a pole and flogged severely, after which they were put in chains and sent away from Batavia to endure three years of exile; Frederick—who had helped to kill three men—was made to wear a heavy wooden halter around his neck as well. In the circumstances none is likely to have survived their exile long enough to return a free man. The young sailor Cornelis Janssen was flogged and branded as a looter and a mutineer. Claes Harmansz, who was just 15, was flogged as well. Isbrant Isbrantsz, who was an officer and the one mutineer to consistently protest that he had acted under duress, was the only man treated with real leniency. His sentence was to stand, “with a halter round his neck,” to watch the execution of justice.
The worst punishment of all was reserved for Stone-Cutter Pietersz. Like Jeronimus himself, the lance corporal had taken little active part in the killing on Batavia’s Graveyard, though he had taken part in the massacre of the survivors on Seals’ Island and helped to organize the murder of the predikant’s family. He had, however, played an active part in plotting the mutiny on the Batavia, and as one of Cornelisz’s councillors he had helped to determine who should live and who should die. Because Hayes and Pelsaert had, between them, denied the authorities in Java the chance to punish David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen, much less Jeronimus himself, Pietersz was now made to pay for all their sins. For though he played a lesser role in the mutiny than any of those men, his guilt could hardly be denied. On the last day of January 1630, “Lieutenant-General” Pietersz was taken out to be “broken from under upwards, and the body put upon a Wheel.”
Breaking on the wheel, as it was generally known, was the most painful and barbaric method of execution practiced in the Dutch Republic and was, in effect, a form of crucifixion. In Pietersz’s case the condemned man, stripped to a pair of linen drawers, would have been led out to a scaffold on which had been assembled a huge cart wheel—still fitted with an axle—a bench, some ropes, and a thick iron bar. He would have been lashed, spread-eagled, to the bench and positioned so that the executioner had easy access to his limbs. Taking up the heavy bar, and with great concentration, this man would have proceeded to smash the bones in the prisoner’s arms and legs, starting with the fingers and the toes and working slowly inward. The aim was to completely pulverize each limb, so that when Pietersz was lifted from the bench onto the wheel, his upper arms were broken in so many places that they could be twisted and bent to follow the circumference of the wheel, while his legs were wrenched backward from the thighs, forced right around the outer rim, and tied off with the heels touching the back of the head. The latter operation was difficult to complete without allowing the broken femurs to protrude, but a skilled executioner took pride not only in ensuring that his victim remained fully conscious throughout the operation, but also in crushing his bones so thoroughly that the skin remained intact. As a further refinement, it was common for the condemned man’s ribs to be stoved in with several further blows, so that every breath became an agony.
Once the grisly operation had been concluded, Pietersz’s wheel would have been hoisted upright and the axle thrust deep into the ground close by the scaffold so that the Stone-Cutter’s final moments could be witnessed by the assembled crowd. Death—generally as the result of internal bleeding—might take hours; in a place such as Batavia, the dying man’s pain and distress would have been exacerbated by the cloying heat and the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that would have filled his eyes and mouth. The strongest men sometimes survived into a second day, and Pietersz, a brawny army veteran, may not have lapsed into unconsciousness