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from the average Australian. Their colour was neither black nor copper, but that peculiar yellow which prevails with a mixture of European blood.” Gregory was disappointed to discover no evidence that they possessed technology unknown to other Aborigines. Thirteen years later the Perth Gazette reported encounters with “fair complexioned” natives with “long light coloured hair flowing down their shoulders.” Men of this sort could be met with along the Gascoyne, Murchison, and Ashburton Rivers, according to a station hand named Edward Cornally; and other nineteenth-century writers also suggested that fair hair was commonplace among the Nanda peoples. Daisy Bates, a controversial Australian writer who actually lived for four decades among various Aboriginal tribes in Western and Southern Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made similar observations of the people of the Gascoyne and Murchison valleys. “There is no mistaking the heavy Dutch face, curly fair hair and heavy stocky build,” she believed. Other supposedly European characteristics, such as blue eyes, great height, and a propensity to baldness, have also been attributed to the people of the same tribes.

It is difficult to know what weight to give such purely anecdotal tales, and if Bates and the other early observers were correct, the men they saw were more probably descendants of men from the Vergulde Draeck or Zuytdorp than the offspring of Loos and Pelgrom. Nevertheless, the accumulated evidence does suggest at least the possibility that these ill-matched mutineers lived on in the South-Land’s interior. The two men were thus, at least in a symbolic sense, every bit as much the founders of modern Australia as were Captain Cook and the British convicts who settled there from 1787. And, if they did survive long enough to befriend the west coast Aborigines, they may have taken local wives and outlived Pelsaert and Hayes, fathering sons whose children’s children still live, unknowing, in Australia today.

For many years, the location of both the Batavia’s wreck site and the islands where Cornelisz had established his short-lived kingdom remained almost as mysterious as the fate of the Dutch sailors washed up on the South-Land. This was hardly surprising. The Abrolhos were scarcely ever visited; the wreck itself had already all but vanished beneath the waves by the time Pelsaert left the islands; and even in the seventeenth century there would have been relatively little sign that the murderous events described in the commandeur’s journals had ever taken place.

The Batavia’s story itself was too bloody and dramatic to be forgotten quickly; it was kept alive, in the Dutch Republic at least, by books and pamphlets in the seventeenth century, and in travel narratives and histories of the Indies in the eighteenth. Ariaen Jacobsz’s feat in navigating the ship’s longboat all the way to Java was remembered, too—though ironically the little boat’s progress from the Abrolhos to the Sunda Strait was marked as the “Route de Pelsart” on the world maps drawn by Guillaume de l’Isle between 1740 and 1775. Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century recollections of the events of 1629 had faded. Jeronimus Cornelisz was little more than a half-forgotten nightmare, and the Batavia’s wreck site had been completely lost.

It was not until 1840, when Houtman’s Abrolhos were finally charted by a Royal Navy hydrographic survey, that public interest in the Batavia was rekindled. The surveying work was conducted by Lieutenant Lort Stokes, RN, sailing in Charles Darwin’s old ship HMS Beagle, and it was only at this late date that the archipelago was definitely shown to fall into three distinct groups, stretching north to south for a total of about 50 miles. Stokes had read accounts of the voyages of the Dutch East India Company and was aware that both the Batavia and the Zeewijk had been lost somewhere in the Abrolhos, so his interest was naturally piqued by the discovery of ancient wreckage on a large island in the southernmost group. “On the south-west part,