Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [157]
In the years since 1960, digging on Beacon Island had revealed more skeletons. The remains of as many as 19 of the 70 or so people who are known to have died on Batavia’s Graveyard have been uncovered from three main sites. Persistent rumors suggest that local fishermen have stumbled across other graves but prefer simply to rebury any bones they find.
The known remains are telling enough. Jeronimus’s victims did not die well. With only one exception, their bodies were thrown into grave pits and buried carelessly. Many bore not just the unmistakable signs of violence, but scars inflicted by illness, injury, and malnutrition earlier in life. These skeletons bear mute testament to the privation and desperation that drove men and women to travel to the Indies in the 1620s.
Three of the bodies are male, and one is female; the rest are so undeveloped or so badly damaged that their sex cannot be determined. Seven, at least, were found in a single grave pit, into which their bodies had been tipped with little ceremony so that they lay huddled close together just below the surface. Two others, adult males, had been interred side by side a little way away, and a third—the remains of an 18-year-old—also lay nearby. This last corpse is said to have been found with a musket ball lying inside the chest cavity. If so, it ought to be the body of Jan Dircxsz, the Defender shot in the mutineers’ final assault on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island and the only person reported to have died of gunshot wounds throughout the whole course of the mutiny.
Together, the Batavia corpses represent a broad cross section of the retourschip’s passengers and crew: the oldest is that of a man (or, perhaps, a heavyset woman) aged about 40 or 45, and the youngest a child who was no more than five or six when his or her life was ended. Several of the skeletons show signs of scurvy, and many of the teeth have been scratched and scoured by the sand that found its way into the rough island diet. The young child’s teeth have been worn down by constant grinding brought on by severe stress.
Of all the bodies, the most complete and best preserved is one recovered during the original Batavia expedition. It was found by the east corner of Dave Johnson’s house on Beacon Island, buried face up in about 15 inches of soil. The remains are those of a tall man—he was only just under six feet in height—who had been somewhere between 30 and 39 when he died.*60 He must have come from a relatively poor family: the skeleton still shows growth-arrest lines of the sort caused by bouts of malnutrition, and the teeth and jaw are badly diseased, perhaps as the result of scurvy. Bony excresences cover parts of the pelvis; they seem to have been caused by a severe blow inflicted just below the stomach. The victim’s injuries had been badly treated; the man who bore them would have been in constant pain.
A detailed examination of this skeleton, carried out in 1999 by Dr. Alanah Buck, a forensic scientist from the Western Australian Centre for Pathology and Medical Research in Perth, showed that the victim had died after being struck over the head by a right-handed assailant who had stood almost directly in front of him to deliver the attack. A single vicious blow, apparently inflicted with a sword, had left a two-inch cut mark on the victim’s skull. The resultant concussion may have been severe enough to kill; at the very least the