Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [141]
The Jambi adventure kept the commandeur occupied while he waited for the September monsoon winds that would finally take him back to Surat. The silver “toys” designed to please the Great Mogul and the cameo he had shipped to the East on behalf of Gaspar Boudaen were all destined for the court at Lahore, and Pelsaert must have been keenly aware that only the successful completion of this part of his mission was likely to restore him to full favor with the Gentlemen XVII. In the meantime, all he could do was put his own version of events in the Abrolhos in writing for his employers, the directors of the chamber of Amsterdam.
The Batavia journals, which contained a lengthy account of the events of the mutiny, reached Amsterdam in July 1630. The Gentlemen XVII read them and were unimpressed by the commandeur’s actions and behavior. By then, however, it was far too late for them to make their displeasure known. Pelsaert was already dying, most probably exhausted by the same illness that had all but killed him on board the Batavia during the journey from the Cape.
That fever, it appears, had never quite abated, and the commandeur had spent much of his time on board the Sardam in his bunk, “wholly ill and reduced to great wretchedness.” He must then have enjoyed a brief remission, during which he took part in the Jambi expedition, but by the middle of June his health had collapsed again, and he was struck down by a long and terminal illness that ended, the records of the Company attest, with his death some time before mid-September. He was then about 35 years old and had spent almost half his life in the service of the VOC.
Francisco Pelsaert thus survived his nemesis, Cornelisz, by no more than 11 months, and his career, which in the summer of 1628 had seemed to hold great promise, never recovered from the wrecking of his ship. In some respects, indeed, the commandeur was fortunate to have died at the moment that he did. The markets of India, which he had professed to understand better than any other Westerner, had changed fundamentally with the death of the Emperor Jahangir in 1627; the Great Mogul’s successor, Shah Jahan, did not share his taste for Western fripperies. The VOC came to the unwelcome realization that there was no longer any market for Pelsaert’s gold and silver toys. They had cost, it will be recalled, around 60,000 guilders, and so far as the Councillors of the Indies were concerned, blame for the debacle rested squarely with the late commandeur, who had pressed ahead with his commissions even after news of Jahangir’s death had reached him in the Netherlands.
There can be little doubt that this second failure, coming so soon after the loss of the Batavia, would have put an end to Pelsaert’s career. As it was, the high officials of the Company in Java—to whom the thankless task of finding buyers for the trade goods fell—complained bitterly about the impossibility of getting a good price for them. The plate, which the commandeur had confidently predicted would yield a 50 percent profit, was eventually disposed of in India—after six months’ fruitless haggling—for a “vile price” in 1632, but no amount of effort could persuade the Moguls to show any interest in Gaspar Boudaen’s Roman cameo, the fabulous jewel that Jeronimus had displayed to seduce the mutineers with dreams of unimagined luxury. It had accompanied Pelsaert’s toys to India, but no buyer could be found, and by 1633 it was in Batavia again. After years of being peddled unsuccessfully in Asia, it was put up for auction in Amsterdam in 1765. In 1823 the jewel was purchased by King Willem I for 5,500 guilders. It can now be seen in the royal coin collection in Leiden.