Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [143]
As it happened, the predikant’s trials were not yet over. His role in the Abrolhos incident had come to the attention of Jacques Specx and the Council of Justice at Batavia, who wanted to know not only whether he had done all he could to oppose Jeronimus and his godless henchmen, but exactly how a minister of the Reformed Church had come to swear an oath of allegiance to a heretic. All the papers relating to Bastiaensz’s actions were turned over to the public prosecutor, who spent almost four months looking into the case, and it was not until the spring of 1630 that the predikant was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Batavian Church Council. Even then, the governor-general remained suspicious; between 18 and 22 April, he clashed on three separate occasions with the church authorities over their desire to proclaim Bastiaensz’s innocence from the pulpit. Specx plainly thought the predikant had displayed fatal weakness in the Abrolhos. Had a better man been assigned to the Batavia, he told the leaders of the Church Council, “things might not have gone the way they did.”
So Bastiaensz was called to account for his equivocal behavior on Batavia’s Graveyard and emerged with his reputation barely intact. The Church Council’s support at least meant that he could now preach anywhere in the lands under its jurisdiction, and it only remained to find him a suitable church. There was some talk of sending him to Surat, but it came to nothing, and it was only after a long while in Batavia that Bastiaensz was dispatched to the remote Banda Islands to minister to the troops guarding the world’s supply of nutmeg. The predikant remained in Java long enough to complete two years’ mourning for his dead wife and marry, in July 1631, Maria Cnijf, the widow of the Bailiff of Batavia. Shortly thereafter he departed for the Bandas, where he survived for at most 18 months before being struck down and killed by dysentery in the spring of 1633.
Gijsbert Bastiaensz, who had experienced so much on Houtman’s Abrolhos, now lies buried in an unknown grave on another long-forgotten island. News of his death was not forwarded to Batavia until the summer of 1634. Plainly it was not regarded as an event of any great significance.
Of the handful of people from Batavia’s Graveyard who did live to see the Dutch Republic once again, Judick Gijsbertsdr suffered more than most.
The predikant’s one surviving child had sailed on the Batavia as the eldest daughter of a family of nine. She arrived in Java a little more than a year later with only her father for company, quite destitute, and having survived scurvy and shipwreck, the brutal murder of her mother, two sisters, and four brothers, and two months as the “fianceé” of Coenraat van Huyssen. She was one month shy of her 22nd birthday, and her troubles were far from over.
Judick’s immediate concern would have been her precarious financial position. Her father’s investigation by the Church Council of Batavia kept him from working for several months after their arrival, and since the family had lost almost all of their possessions in the wreck, Bastiaensz and his daughter probably found it hard to make ends meet. Judick would have found it expedient to marry, and though her father’s poverty and her own loss of virginity might have rendered her an unattractive prospect in the United Provinces, the marriage markets of the Far East worked quite differently. White women were a rarity in Java, and pretty, single European girls were