Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [16]
Belijtgen, on the other hand, suffered agonies after the birth. The midwife she had hired, an Amsterdam woman named Cathalijntgen van Wijmen, turned out to be uncouth, deranged, and dangerously incompetent. During her stay in Haarlem, Cathalijntgen danced and sang compulsively, confessed to suffering from “torments inside her head,” and slept with an ax beside her bed. During Belijtgen’s labor, she left part of the placenta in the new mother’s womb. The decaying afterbirth became infected, and Cornelisz’s wife contracted puerperal fever as a result.
This illness was a serious matter. In the seventeenth century, puerperal fever was frequently a lethal condition, and it made it impossible for Belijtgen to care for her son. Dutch infants of all classes were generally breast-fed by their mothers; it was universally agreed to be the best way to safeguard an infant’s health, and wet nurses were seldom employed in the United Provinces unless the mother was physically incapable of producing milk. Belijtgen had no such difficulty; for a month or more before the birth, as was common at the time, her husband had paid an old woman named Maijcke van den Broecke to suckle his wife’s breasts in order to stimulate the flow of milk.*6 But while she lay wracked with fever, Cornelisz’s wife could not feed the child, and Jeronimus was forced to seek a nurse. His choice fell on a woman named Heyltgen Jansdr, who lived in an alleyway off the St. Jansstraat in the north quarter of Haarlem.
Cornelisz and his wife seem to have been notably poor judges of character. Their midwife had already proved to be a madwoman, and in Heyltgen Jansdr they had unearthed a similarly disreputable character. The least inquiry among her neighbors and acquaintances would have revealed her as a woman of hot temper and low morals, who was known to be unfaithful to her husband and who suffered from a mysterious and long-term illness. But, for whatever reason, the apothecary did not trouble to discover this.
It proved to be a fatal error. Within a few weeks of being placed with Heyltgen, the baby was extremely sick; within a few months he was dead. On 27 February 1628, eight months before he sailed on the Batavia, Jeronimus Cornelisz buried his infant son in the church of St. Anna, Haarlem.
The apothecary was devastated. The death of small children was a commonplace at a time when half of all the children born within the Dutch Republic expired before they reached puberty. Yet there was nothing ordinary about the death of Jeronimus’s child. The baby had not died of fever or convulsions, or any of the other diseases that usually accounted for infant mortality. He had died of syphilis.
The final agonies of Cornelisz’s infant son would have been hard enough for his parents to bear. Babies who contract syphilis die bleeding from the mouth and anus and also suffer considerably from open sores and rashes, so much so that they are sometimes described as looking “moth-eaten” at the moment of death. But for Jeronimus and Belijtgen the prospect of disgrace would have been as difficult to endure. Their families and neighbors were likely to assume that the boy had contracted the disease from his mother and that, in turn, implied that one or other of the parents had not been faithful. For a well-bred couple, living in a respectable part of town, this was a very serious concern. Their customers, meanwhile, would wonder if they might not catch the pox from their apothecary. For a fledgling business, this could be catastrophic.
It is very probable that Jeronimus’s pharmacy was in financial difficulty even before the death of his son. The renewal of