Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [145]
The answer appears to lie in the church records of Cuick’s hometown, Leyden, where Creesje and her husband stood as godparents to no fewer than four children of Pieter Willemsz Cuick and his wife Willempje Dircx between September 1637 and December 1641. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that this Pieter Cuick was Jacob the soldier’s brother, and at least possible that his wife, Willempje, was none other than Lucretia’s stepsister—the same Weijntgen Dircx with whom she had lived in the Herenstraat in Amsterdam almost 20 years before.
Once allowance has been made for the extravagant variations in the spelling of proper names that were all too common at this time, therefore, it would appear that Creesje’s second husband may have been her own stepbrother-in-law. This discovery may well explain Creesje’s willingness to marry, as it were, beneath herself. Alone and friendless in an unknown town far from everything she knew, it would have been natural to seek out any familiar face. Jacob Cuick, whom Creesje may perhaps have known and liked in Holland, could well have seemed a better choice than a stranger who could not begin to understand her extraordinary tribulations.
Lucretia Jans and her new husband disappear from sight after 1641. They do not seem to have dwelled in Leyden, where no further trace of their existence can be found, and perhaps went to live in Amsterdam, where the surviving records are so enormous and so poorly organized that it is difficult to search for them. It can be said with some confidence that no Jacob Cornelisz Cuick was ever interred there, but one tantalizing clue can still be found to his wife’s fate: at the beginning of September 1681, a Lucreseija van Kuijck died in Amsterdam and was buried there on the sixth day of the month. If this Van Kuijck was really Creesje of the Batavia, she had survived into her late seventies and outlived her suitors and her persecutors alike—some small recompense, perhaps, for the suffering she had endured.
While Creesje Jans tried to make a new life in the Indies, Ariaen Jacobsz remained rotting in the dungeons of Castle Batavia. The skipper had been confined there since the middle of July 1629, arrested on the strength of Pelsaert’s accusations, and held—along with Zwaantie Hendricx—on suspicion of plotting mutiny.
From the beginning, Jacobsz resisted all attempts to make him talk. His physical stamina must have been immense; that he survived not only the sea voyage to Batavia in an open boat but a long spell in a squalid prison, doubtlessly interspersed with none-too-gentle questioning, was a remarkable achievement. Zwaantie, too, was interrogated about her actions on the ship, but little progress seems to have been made during the time that Pelsaert was absent in the Abrolhos.
Even the problem of exactly who had arranged for Evertsz and his men to attack Lucretia Jans was never resolved to the Company’s entire satisfaction. “The skipper,” Specx conceded in a note to the Gentlemen XVII,
“was very much suspected that [this] had happened with his knowledge, yea, even with his aid and at his instigation; about this he, and a certain other female who had been the servant of Lucretia have been examined by the fiscaal and brought before the Council of Justice, but through the obscurity of the case no verdict has yet been given.”
From these comments, it appears that Ariaen had consistently proclaimed his innocence, and that Antonij van den Heuvel had failed to extract anything resembling a confession even after the commandeur’s return from Batavia’s Graveyard with fresh evidence and accusations. “We do not think that [Jacobsz] is wholly free,” the governor-general concluded cautiously,
“being certain that if he had publicly maintained