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for historians. Contemporary Dutchmen were so obsessed with upholding their personal honor (for reasons that are discussed later) that almost anyone with any property or money occasionally resorted to solicitors to make a record of some controversial incident for possible use in a future legal action. The legal records therefore provide odd snapshots of the lives of people whose personal histories would otherwise have been completely lost. The incidents they record are, by definition, hardly representative of their subjects’ ordinary existence, but they were important nonetheless, and if the records’ contents can be somewhat sensational, it is also often possible to deduce a good deal from casual asides.

Books

The first noteworthy book on the Batavia was Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s Voyage to Disaster, published in Australia in 1963. Though it is chaotically organized, lacks any significant narrative, and is also poorly indexed, it does print a tremendous amount of original material, including—critically—the first full translation of Pelsaert’s journals into English. Drake-Brockman also conducted a good deal of research into contemporary Dutch archives—a laborious business for someone living in Western Australia years before the introduction of the Internet and e-mail. It is impossible not to admire Drake-Brockman’s results, and if the author discovered little about Cornelisz himself, she had great success in fleshing out the histories of Ariaen Jacobsz, Creesje Jans, and other major characters in the story. Forty years after its first publication, Voyage to Disaster remains an essential source book for all those interested in the Batavia.

More recently, a Haarlem scholar, Vibeke Roeper, reedited Pelsaert’s journals for publication in the Netherlands by the Linschoten Society. Her scholarly edition, De Schipbreuk van de Batavia, usefully prints a number of documents from the VOC archives that escaped Drake-Brockman and her collaborators.

Hugh Edwards, who helped to discover the Batavia’s wreck site, wrote the first narrative history of the whole incident. His Islands of Angry Ghosts is particularly valuable for its firsthand accounts of the early excavation of the wreck and the grave pits on Beacon Island. More recently Philippe Godard has gone over much of the same ground in a privately published volume, The First and Last Voyage of the Batavia. It adds little that is new, but very usefully prints hundreds of color photographs of the islands, the artifacts, and the documents in the case.

A Note on Citation

A large proportion of the existing primary source material on the Batavia has been published over the years—the first official documents by H. T. Colenbrander and W. Ph. Coolhaas, JP Coen: Bescheiden Omtrent Zijn Bedrijf in Indiï (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 7 vols., 1920–52), and the journals themselves, with extensive supporting material including Coolhaas’s sources, by Roeper and Drake-Brockman. Most readers will find it easier to obtain one of these books than to visit archives in the Netherlands and so, in referring to the primary sources, I have also added references to the printed editions as appropriate. These appear in the notes as [R], for Roeper, and [DB], for Drake-Brockman, followed by the relevant page numbers. Drake-Brockman has been my main source simply because my mother tongue is English; as it is by 30 years the older of the two works, it seems worth noting that Marit van Huystee, a Dutch linguist working for the Western Australian Maritime Museum, gives it as her opinion that its translations, by E. D. Drok, are excellent in almost every respect.

Prologue: Morning Reef

The details of the Batavia’s last hours at sea and of the aftermath of the wreck have been principally drawn from Pelsaert’s own account, JFP 4–8 June 1629 [DB 122–8]. I have made a few minor conjectures, based on standard Dutch nautical practice in this period—for which see Jaap Bruijn, F. S. Gaastra, and I. Schöffer, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols., 1979–1987) and C.