Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [163]
Nearly 400 years have passed since then, but the islands have hardly changed in all that time. Visions of the past persist in places such as these. At dusk on an October evening, with a full moon sailing in the sky, it is still possible to glimpse Jeronimus Cornelisz in the shadows on Seals’ Island. His body hangs there, swinging in the southwest wind that first brought him to the archipelago; the noose’s knot is tight under his ear and the head has snapped grotesquely to one side. The rope groans and creaks its way across the gallows tree, but the noise it makes cannot be heard. It is drowned out by the ceaseless shrieking of the mutton birds.
Footnotes
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*1Surnames were still relatively uncommon in the United Provinces in the early seventeenth century. Most people identified themselves using patronymics—Ariaen Jacobsz would have been the son of a man named Jacob. Because it was unwieldy to spell out the full patronymic, which in this case is Jacobszoon, it was also common practice to abbreviate written names by omitting the “oon” of “zoon” (son) and shortening “dochter” (daughter) to “dr” When spoken, the name would have been pronounced in full.
*2The officer in day-to-day charge of the crew and—other than his commissioned rank—the equivalent of a modern-day bos’n.
*3The equivalent of just over $4.5 million at today’s prices.
*4“Abrolhos” is generally held to be a loan word from Portuguese, a corruption of the sailor’s warning “abri vossos olhos,” or “Open your eyes.” A similar archipelago off the coast of Brazil is known by the same name.1
*5The word derives from the Greek theriake and is the root of the English treacle.
*6Van den Broecke, who evidently took real pride in her work, later testified before a solicitor that the resultant product tasted good.
*7The final flourishing of antinomianism actually occurred in Britain in the aftermath of the English Civil War, when a sect known as the Ranters espoused very similar ideas.
*8Commonly called the “Dutch East India Company” by historians to distinguish it from its rival, the English East India Company.
*9The name “Jan” is the Dutch equivalent of the English “John” and was the most common Dutch male name of the time. The VOC’s nickname thus reflected its status as the “everyman” company of the United Provinces—one that affected every citizen’s life for better or for worse.
*10Weapon of Zeeland.
*11The name means “World-grasper.”
*12De Jongh was an old enemy of Pelsaert’s, thanks to an incident in which the resident at Agra had paid a visit to his trading post carrying a Dutch flag before him, thus implying to the local Indians that he was the latter’s superior, which he was not. De Jongh retaliated by charging that Pelsaert “was considered by everyone to lie with every third word he said, and his mouth is rarely quiet.”
*13“The Hague of the Counts,” which is the Dutch name for The Hague.
*14Golden Lion.
*15When the stern of the Batavia was salvaged in the 1970s, archaeologists discovered large quantities of a black, phosphate-rich substance inside the hull. Analysis revealed the presence of gristle and cereal husks, suggesting the black mass was a layer of human feces deposited in what had probably been the bilges.
*16So called because the region was prone to prolonged calms, resulting in water shortages that sometimes forced transport ships to force overboard the horses that they carried.
*17Indeed the word strike itself has nautical