Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [148]
The islands of the Abrolhos bore witness for a little longer to the Dutchmen who had lived and died there. In their frantic search for anything of value to the VOC, Pelsaert and his men had picked Batavia’s Graveyard almost clean of debris. But on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, a few scraps of sailcloth fluttered on the scrub, and the remains of the Defenders’ dwellings still testified to their stubborn refusal to surrender.
There were less tangible signs of human intrusion, too. Beneath the surface of the island, the freshwater lenses that had floated in the waterholes and saved the lives of Hayes’s men had been drained off by thirsty Dutchmen, leaving the water in a number of ancient wells so brackish it was all but undrinkable. The animal population had been substantially reduced, and several colonies of tammars and sea lions—which had survived in unchanging balance for several thousand generations—had been hunted almost to extinction during the Defenders’ three-month war with Cornelisz’s band.
Then there were the seven bodies on Seals’ Island. The dead mutineers had been left to dangle from the makeshift gallows that the Sardam’s carpenters had thrown up for them, and by the time the ropes—rotted by salt-laced gales of rain—finally sagged and snapped, the island birds would have all but picked the corpses clean. Before long the gallows would have toppled and fallen too, leaving little more than piles of bones and wood to bleach and crumble slowly on the strand.
Across the deep-water passage between the islands, on the deserted and infertile skeleton of Batavia’s Graveyard itself, an altogether stranger change occurred. When the survivors of the wreck had landed, they had found the isle a barren place. Its sandy soil was too poor to support much life, and, scoured clean by the wind, it had long been all but devoid of vegetation. In the early 1630s, however, new patches of undergrowth sprang up among the coral outcrops, establishing themselves where the soil was deep and clear of birds’ nests and debris. For a decade or more, the northern portion of the island bloomed.
The explanation for this unexpected fertility lay a foot or two beneath the surface, where the bodies of Jeronimus’s victims rested in their shallow graves. As they decomposed, the remains of Hendrick Denys, Mayken Cardoes, the predikant’s family, and all the rest released their nutrients into the earth, providing freshly fertile ground for the spores of tea-tree scrub and dandelion, and the site of each burial pit was soon marked by a little wreath of stubborn greenery. Slowly, over many years, the plants consumed the cadavers, enveloping them in a dense black mass of probing roots. They fed off them until they were quite gone, and—in doing so—transformed death into life, and burial into rebirth.
Epilogue
On the Shores of the Great South-Land
“They shall be put ashore as scoundrels and death-deserving delinquents, in order to know once, for certain, what happens in this Land.”
FRANCISCO PELSAERT
WOUTER LOOS AND JAN PELGROM, the two mutineers whom Pelsaert had marooned on 16 November 1629, were never heard from again.
Their immediate prospects of survival were fair. Wittecarra Gully, at the southern end of Gantheaume Bay, is one of the few places on the Western Australian coast where water can always be found. In the southern winter a small stream flows down the gully into salt marshes along the shore, and though the water in the gully is brackish and unpalatable by the coast, and dries up altogether in the summer, a spring about two miles upstream would have provided a steady supply of fresh water—even during the dry season—for anyone prepared to venture inland. The more substantial Murchison River is only a few miles to the north, and though food is not