Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [166]
We are fortunate this is the case. The Dutch archives covering the country’s Golden Age are still voluminous, but the material they contain largely concerns the doings of the moneyed classes, and records of those who owned no property and had little money—those, in other words, who made up the great majority of the Batavia’s passengers and crew—are largely nonexistent. Nor were there newspapers to record sensational events or reporters to take an interest in the experiences of the Batavia’s survivors. Taken together, Francisco Pelsaert’s detailed summaries of the evidence he heard on Batavia’s Graveyard make up one of the most complete accounts of a single mutiny that survives in any language, for it was comparatively rare for a large group of mutineers to be captured and tried together.
Pelsaert’s version of events is contained within the commandeur’s MS journal of the Batavia’s maiden voyage, which has been preserved among the VOC papers now in the Algemeen RijksArchief in The Hague. The journal has been bound up among the volumes of correspondence received annually from the Indies and now occupies folios 232r–317r of the volume known as ARA VOC 1098. An earlier volume of Pelsaert’s, which concerned the outward voyage of the Batavia from Amsterdam to the Abrolhos, was thrown overboard by the mutineers and lost when the commandeur’s cabin was ransacked after the wreck. The surviving account covers the period from the wreck on 4 June 1629 to Pelsaert’s final return to the East Indies in December of the same year.
The journals vary considerably from page to page in content and tone. In places they are little more than a traditional ship’s log; elsewhere they become a personal account of the author’s experiences in the aftermath of the mutiny. The bulk of the manuscript, however, consists of lengthy summaries of Pelsaert’s interrogation of the Batavia mutineers, followed by what appear to be more or less verbatim transcripts of the verdicts handed down to the guilty men.
The journals have been assembled in roughly chronological order. However, it is evident from the arrangement of the documents that they were not written contemporaneously. Each of the major mutineers is dealt with separately, the account of his interrogation in the third week of September being immediately followed by the verdict passed on him on the 28th of the month, after which the account moves back to the interrogation of the next man, and so on. At one point in this compilation [ARA VOC 1098, fol. 278v], the writer has crammed in some additional testimony concerning the mutineer Mattys Beer, made on the day of his execution, in a blank he had previously left at the bottom of one of the pages. This may indicate that the journals were written up in their current form between the passing of the sentences on 28 September and the hanging of the principal mutineers on 2 October. On the other hand, the sheer bulk of the testimony is such that it is perhaps more likely that all the accounts were taken down in rough during the interrogations, and then copied into journals later, while salvage operations were proceeding or even during the survivors’ voyage to the Indies, which occupied the period from mid-November to 5 December. In that case it may be that the compiler simply mislaid Beer’s final confession when he was writing up his account of the mutineer’s examination and was forced to interpolate this evidence when it eventually emerged from the pile of papers on his desk.
It would, anyway, be unwise to treat Pelsaert’s journals as a spontaneous, contemporary account of the Batavia mutiny. A good deal of care must have gone into their compilation, and they were unquestionably edited in the course of the work. Thus the summaries of the various interrogations are just that—summaries, put into the third person—and