Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [168]
How Jansz obtained sight of Pelsaert’s manuscript, which should have been filed among the papers of the Amsterdam chamber, remains something of a mystery; but the pamphleteer is known to have had close contacts with several of the VOC’s directors, and Commelin’s earlier publications had already featured accounts based on official sources, which he must have purchased, clandestinely or otherwise, from employees of the Company. In any event, The Unlucky Voyage was a considerable success and was republished several times over the next two decades, keeping the Batavia’s name before the Dutch public. Commelin’s work was also swiftly pirated by other publishers, as was common at the time; in 1648 Joost Hartgers of Amsterdam brought out his own edition of the text, supplementing Pelsaert’s text with a lengthy letter by Gijsbert Bastiaensz that described events on Batavia’s Graveyard from the predikant’s perspective. The original MS of the letter is now lost, but it appears, from internal evidence, to be authentic. Two years later Lucas de Vries of Utrecht published a third variant, including in his edition a list of the rewards given to the Batavia’s loyalists. (C. R. Boxer’s “Isaac Commelin’s ‘Begin ende voortgangh’ ” in Dutch Merchants and Mariners in Asia 1602–1795, pp. 2–3, 5, and DB 4–5, 78–9, contain further information about Commelin, Jansz, and the various editions of The Unlucky Voyage.)
The other three surviving accounts have the advantage that they appeared shortly after news of the Batavia mutiny first reached the Netherlands, but they are considerably shorter. The first, a typical “news song” of the period, was published as Droevighe Tijdinghe van de Aldergrouwelykste Moordery, Geschiet door Eenighe Matrosen op ’t Schip Batavia [“Sad tidings of the most horrible murder done by some sailors of the ship Batavia”], an anonymous pamphlet containing a short explanatory preface and a song of 16 verses. The news song contains no information not available from other sources, but the information in it is so detailed that it is reasonable to suppose that the publisher had his information direct from a Batavia survivor [R 227–30]. The other two accounts appear in the anonymous pamphlet Leyds Veer-Schuyts Praetjen, Tuschen een Koopman ende Borger van Leyden, Varende van Haarlem nae Leyden [“Conversation on a canal-boat between a merchant and a citizen of Leyden, travelling from Haarlem to Leyden”]. One is an anonymous letter dated December 1629, written by someone who accompanied Pelsaert to Java in the Batavia’s longboat and returned with him to the Abrolhos. This letter includes the statement that Cornelisz was a Frisian, a fact that is nowhere mentioned in Pelsaert’s journals but that appears, from the research undertaken for this book, to be correct. It has been suggested that Claes Gerritsz, the Batavia’s upper-steersman, was the author; this is quite probable, but there is no evidence [R 49, 61]. The second letter, dated 11 December 1629, is the work of someone who was originally on Seals’ Island and later escaped to join Wiebbe Hayes. It, too, is anonymous, but it is fairly certainly the work of the assistant Cornelis Jansz [R 48].
Other Contemporary Sources
Background information on the main characters in the Batavia’s story has been drawn from the contemporary records of the Dutch Republic. All cities kept registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, and on the whole these still exist in either town or provincial archives. Where they do, it is usually possible to discover basic biographical information about local citizens, though in some cases—the baptismal records, which are Reformed Church documents and thus take no account of the birth of Catholics, Mennonites, and members of other religious minorities, are a case in point—the records can appear misleading.
Archives full of solicitors’ papers also survive for many cities, and these often offer rich pickings