Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [147]
Jeronimus’s wife had fallen a long way. Only a few months earlier she had been a respectable and—to all appearances—prosperous member of Haarlem’s upper middle class. Now she had lost her home, her business, and her husband. VOC officers could have a portion of their wages paid to their next of kin, so Jacobsdr would not have starved; nevertheless, she would hardly have been human had she had not resented the abrupt change in her circumstances.
Matters were made worse by Heyltgen Jansdr. Belijtgen’s former wet nurse continued to harass her long after Jeronimus was gone. As late as the summer of 1630 Heyltgen and her husband, Moyses Starlingh, came down to the Cornelissteeg one afternoon while Belijtgen was out and began to hurl torrents of abuse at her front door in front of her astonished neighbors. In the course of this tirade, Heyltgen was heard screaming her familiar insults; Jeronimus’s wife, the nurse called out, was a pig and a whore riddled with syphilis, and if she dared to leave her home Heyltgen would “cut her face and trample on it.” Receiving no response from the empty house, the wet nurse and her husband returned that same evening. Belijtgen was still not home, and Moyses tried to break down her door, loudly announcing he would wait for her inside. According to the neighbors, whose testimonies were recorded the next day, Starlingh was in a violent mood, and they feared that he would loot the property if he got in.
Heyltgen’s tirade must imply that the old dispute over Cornelisz’s son had still not been resolved, though it was now almost 18 months since Jeronimus had buried the boy. Whether or not Belijtgen Jacobsdr had taken legal action over her dead child cannot be said for certain, since Haarlem’s judicial archives are very incomplete. The one trace of what may be the same dispute occurs in the city burgomasters’ records, which often concern themselves with the resolution of petty quarrels between members of the lower classes. The relevant memorial, issued on 6 July 1629, concerns a wet nurse and a mother—neither, unfortunately, is named—who were told to make their peace in a dispute over a child. Both women were bound over, and the nurse was ordered to pay to the mother seven shillings’ compensation. If the parties concerned were indeed Belijtgen and her tormentor, it must be assumed that the burgomasters’ attempts at arbitration had no lasting effect—and observed that the compensation paid seems minimal in the extraordinary circumstances. But such, perhaps, was the price of an infant’s life in the early seventeenth century.
What happened next remains unknown; the fracas in the Cornelissteeg is the last sign of Belijtgen’s life in Haarlem. Three weeks later, on 7 July 1630, news of the Batavia tragedy reached the Dutch Republic on the ship Wapen van Rotterdam,*52 and within days the details of the mutiny were circulating in pamphlets and printed laments. Cornelisz’s bloody role in the affair thus became notorious, and one can imagine that his wife found it impossible to remain in Haarlem.
Did Belijtgen return to wherever she called home? There is no way to know for certain. The meager remains of her unfortunate existence provide no resolution for her story; like her enigmatic husband, she lived and died in history’s penumbra—a shadow figure whose origins and motives remain unknown, and whose real character and hopes, and loves and fears, can now only be guessed at.
Upon the coral islets of the Abrolhos, all sign of the Batavia and her crew soon disappeared.
The wooden hulk of the retourschip, already battered almost beyond recognition by the sea, did not take long to vanish beneath the waves. Caught between the ceaseless pounding of the breakers and the reef, Pelsaert’s flagship disintegrated plank by plank until