Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [155]
It took more than a decade to complete the work of salvaging the wreck, but in the end a huge quantity of material was recovered from the reef and the surrounding islands. The most spectacular finds included a large portion of the stern, still almost intact after more than three centuries in the sea; 15 more of the cannon that Jan Evertsz and his men had tipped overboard on 4 June 1629; and the 137 giant sandstone blocks, carried as ballast, that together made up a portico for the castle at Batavia. A wide variety of other artifacts were also salvaged: apothecary’s jars and a surgeon’s mortar, probably once the property of Frans Jansz; stinkpots, grenades, and shot for the guns; the heel of a silk stocking; and coins from the money chests Pelsaert had left behind. There were more personal items, too: a quantity of Ariaen Jacobsz’s navigation instruments; some of the silverware the commandeur had ordered specially to sell to the Emperor of India, including a triangular salt cellar and a set of silver bedposts; and an engraved stamp that had once been used to seal correspondence. It bore the initials “GB” and must once have belonged to the predikant, Gijsbert Bastiaensz. Today, these pieces can be seen among the Batavia artifacts on display in the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle. The centerpieces of the collection are the retourschip’s stern—raised, carefully conserved, and reconstructed—and the castle portico, reassembled for the first time in nearly 400 years into a gateway more than 25 feet high.
On rough days, when diving on the wreck was impossible, the members of the Edwards expedition scoured the islands of the Wallabi Group for more evidence of the Batavia survivors. They had limited success. There was virtually nothing to find among the coral rubble, but Edwards and his companions did identify Long Island as Pelsaert’s Seals’ Island, and a year later, on West Wallabi, about five miles due west of Beacon, they succeeded in locating the remains of Wiebbe Hayes’s dwellings.
As early as 1879, a surveyor named Forrest had noted the existence of two rectangular “huts” on the island, and both can still be seen today. One was just inland from the sea, close to a feature known as Slaughter Point and in a commanding position overlooking the approaches from Batavia’s Graveyard and Seals’ Island. The other was further inland, in the middle of a flat limestone plain toward the center of the island. Both “huts” are built from coral slabs, which lie piled in a half-haphazard fashion to a height of about three feet. The structure closest to the sea has an internal wall, which divides it into two “rooms” of roughly equal size. It is quite large—almost 30 feet from end to end—and (at 6 feet) broad enough to allow the average Dutchman of Pelsaert’s time to lie stretched out inside it. With sailcloth added as a roof, the “hut” could conceivably have housed somewhere between 12 and 20 men. The inland structure is more simply built. It has one room, nearly square in shape, and—unlike its companion—it has an entrance on one side. Although its setting seems desolate at first glance, it has actually been placed only a few yards from one of the island’s largest wells.
Excavations at the coastal site unearthed fragments of Rhenish stoneware, iron fishhooks, and a ladle that had been crudely fashioned from a sheet of lead. One piece of ancient pottery bore the shield of Amsterdam and established that this building, at least, had been the work of Wiebbe Hayes. It had been positioned with a soldier’s eye, guarding the middle of a bay, so that attempts to approach it could have been detected while the attackers were still miles away. Once they had come ashore, Jeronimus’s mutineers would still have had to scale a small rock face, six feet high, to leave the beach and reach the structure. Hayes and his men, who occupied the high ground, would have had a good chance of defending it.
All this has led to the suggestion that