Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [153]
“the beams of a large vessel were discovered, and as the crew of the Zeewyck . . . reported having seen the wreck of a ship in these parts, there is little doubt that the remains were those of the Batavia . . . . We, in consequence, named our temporary anchorage Batavia Road and the whole group Pelsart Group.”
The island on which the ancient wreckage was discovered was given the name Pelsart Island, and the spot at which the timber was discovered—the debris consisted of “a heavy beam of timber with a large iron bolt through it, [which] on the slightest touch soon dwindled down to a mere wire from corrosion,” together with “a row of small glass demijohns*56 which, having stood there for the past 210 years, were half buried in the soil that had been accumulated around them and filled to about the same depth with the debris of insects and animals that had crawled in and perished”—was called Wreck Point. Proceeding north, Stokes named the middle islets the Easter Group, because he came upon them on Easter Sunday, 1840, and the most northerly part of the archipelago the Wallabis, after the marsupials that were found only on the two largest islands in the group.
Thus—at least so far as the public was concerned—the mystery of the Batavia’s last resting place had been solved, and the identification of Pelsart Island as the place where Cornelisz and the others had been wrecked was generally accepted for a further century. It was only when full accounts of the mutiny began to appear in English—a translation of one seventeenth-century pamphlet on the subject was published by a Perth newspaper in 1897—that the first doubts arose, as the geography of the Pelsart Group made it impossible to fix the positions of Seals’ Island, Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, or the High Island at all satisfactorily if Pelsart Island was assumed to be Batavia’s Graveyard. In 1938 a newspaper expedition led by a journalist named Malcolm Uren attempted to tackle this conundrum by positing that Gun Island, the most northerly island in the Pelsart Group, had actually been Jeronimus’s headquarters. Even this explanation, however, seemed to stretch the facts set out in the commandeur’s journals to breaking point, and Uren and his colleagues were forced to consider the possibility that the wreckage seen by the Zeewijk’s men might not have come from the Batavia at all. It could have been part of one of several Dutch retourschepen that had gone missing in the Indian Ocean over the preceding decades—perhaps the Ridderschap van Holland*57 (1694), the Fortuyn*58 (1724), or the Aagtekerke*59 (1726).
The confusion persisted until the early 1960s, when the Batavia’s wreck site was finally rediscovered. The first person to recognize that the ship must lie elsewhere in the Abrolhos was a novelist, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, whose thoughts on the subject were published between 1955 and 1963. Drake-Brockman’s interest in Batavia stemmed from her early friendship with the Broadhurst family, which had long held concessions allowing it to mine for guano on the Abrolhos. In the course of their excavations, the Broadhursts had unearthed an extensive collection of Dutch artifacts in the Pelsart Group of islands—old bottles, pots and cooking utensils, as well as a pistol and two human skeletons—which they thought must have come from the Batavia. Cornelisz’s story had enthralled Drake-Brockman as a child, and when she grew up she undertook her own research, corresponding with archives in the Netherlands and Java. It was Drake-Brockman who was the first to point out that, since Francisco Pelsaert had clearly seen and described wallabies during his time in the Abrolhos, the Batavia must have been wrecked in the Wallabi Group, almost 50 miles north of the position suggested by Lort Stokes. The approaches to the group were guarded by three large coral shoals, the Morning, Noon, and Evening Reefs. The novelist initially suggested that the wreck of the Batavia would be found somewhere on Noon Reef, in the middle of the group.
Drake-Brockman’s views, which were first advanced in an