Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [146]
But without some sort of confession, the true extent of the skipper’s involvement in the mutiny could never be known.
The problem confronting the Councillors of the Indies was thus a simple one. They certainly believed Jacobsz to be guilty, at least to some degree, of the charges ranged against him. But they also felt that Pelsaert shared the blame for what had happened on Batavia and afterward, not least for his lax handling of the skipper. All that was certain, Van Diemen concluded, was that “a completely Godless and evil life has been conducted on the mentioned ship, of which both the skipper and Pelsaert are greatly guilty, may the Almighty forgive their sin.” Because of this, the Councillors clearly thought that it would be unwise to take the commandeur’s allegations entirely at face value; and since the only other evidence against Jacobsz came from the mouths of now-dead mutineers, only a full confession could establish Ariaen’s guilt. In the absence of any such admission, the existing stalemate could endure indefinitely.
The case against the skipper was thus reduced to a simple test of will, and to everyone’s frustration, Ariaen remained in prison as late as June 1631, the charges still unproven despite the belated application of torture. “Jacobsz,” Van Diemen noted in frustration, “skipper of the wrecked ship Batavia, is still imprisoned, although [he] has several times requested a relaxation and a return to the fatherland; on the strong indictment of having had the intention to run off with the ship [he] has been condemned to more acute examination.” In the meantime, the Councillor suggested, the Gentlemen XVII might wish to examine the papers pertaining to the case and “give an order in this matter.”
What happened to Ariaen when he was tortured again (for that is what Van Diemen’s comments meant) remains a mystery. No further reference to the skipper has been found in the records of the VOC, and, frustratingly, all the transcripts of his interrogation—which might have shed a good deal of light on events on the Batavia—have vanished, too. It seems unlikely that Jacobsz was released, and if he had been executed one might expect to find some reference to the fact in the record. More probably he died of injury or illness in his cell. The skipper had already survived two years in the malarial dungeons under Castle Batavia—an achievement equal in its own way to his voyage in the longboat—but it would be almost two years more before a reply could be expected from the Gentlemen XVII, and that was more than even he was likely to endure.
Zwaantie Hendricx, Creesje’s loose-moraled servant, likewise disappears from the records of Jan Company. The likelihood is that she, too, perished in the fortress, dying some time between December 1629, when she was definitely in custody, and June 1631, by which time Jacobsz was being held alone. Just possibly, however, she walked free for lack of evidence, to make her own way in the Indies.
If so, the girl would soon have found herself in an uncomfortable position. She had no employment; there was little demand for expensive European maids in a settlement supplied with abundant native labor; and her marriage prospects were far worse than those of Judick and Lucretia. With Ariaen locked up and likely to remain so, though, Zwaantie would have had little option but to wed; had she then remained in Batavia she, like every other emigrant, would have had a less than even chance of seeing the Netherlands again. Imprisoned, she could hardly have survived—but even free the odds are that she died in Java, a wife but not, perhaps, a much-changed woman.
Half a world away from the squalid dungeons of Castle Batavia, off one of the cramped and crowded streets that twisted their way through Haarlem’s poorer quarters, ran a narrow little alleyway called the Cornelissteeg. The houses there were small and