Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [170]
The Dutch watch system Boxer, “The Dutch East Indiamen,” p. 93.
Ariaen Jacobsz It has not been possible to discover much information about the skipper of the Batavia. Drake-Brockman, in Voyage to Disaster, pp. 61–3, records the essential details of his career from 1616 onward. The surviving records of his hometown, Durgerdam, are meager. We know he was (or had been) married, and that his wife was a Dutch woman—one of the Batavia’s under-steersmen was his brother-in-law, according to JFP 19 Sep 1629 [DB 162]—but although the Durgerdam marital registers survive for this period, no reference to the marriage of an Ariaen Jacobsz could be found.
Already been a servant Records of Jacobsz’s service have not been traced back before 1616, when he was promoted to the post of high boatswain; Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 61. But this was a senior rank, and to reach it would almost certainly have required up to 10 years’ sea service, and quite possibly much longer. Jacobsz’s age is likewise unknown, but the records of his service, together with comments that he made to Jeronimus Cornelisz at the Cape (see chapter 4), imply he was significantly older than the upper-merchant, Pelsaert—who was 34. He was probably in his mid-40s in 1629, and it is not impossible that he was 50.
Jacobsz’s culpability for the wreck Pelsaert’s declaration to the Council of Justice, Batavia, 20 July 1629, ARA VOC 1098, fol. 223r–224r [R 214]. There is no reason to doubt Pelsaert’s statement that Jacobsz ignored the lookout’s warnings, since the skipper himself signed his declaration to confirm its truth.
Difficulty of identifying reefs in the dark It should not be assumed that Ariaen Jacobsz and Hans Bosschieter were uniquely negligent in allowing the Batavia to run aground. It was notoriously difficult to spot low-lying reefs by night, and the records of the period contain many similar instances of ships coming to grief after dark. The VOC ship Zeewijk, which was wrecked in the Southern Abrolhos in 1727, was also lost because members of her crew made the same mistake as Jacobsz: “ . . . We asked the look-out, who had sat on the fore-yard, if he had not seen the surf, and he answered that he had seen the same for even half an hour before, but had imagined it was the reflection of the moon.” Louis Zuiderbaan, “Translation of a journal by an unknown person from the Dutch East Indiaman Zeewijk, foundered on Half Moon Reef in the Southern Abrolhos, on 9 June, 1727” (typescript, copy in Western Australian Maritime Museum), entry for 9 June 1727. Similarly, the Spanish maritime historian Pablo Pérez-Mallaína cites a virtually identical incident that occurred when the New Spain fleet of 1582 neared Veracruz one night: “[One] ship was commanded by an impulsive and imprudent master who wanted to be the first to enter Veracruz, but in the darkness he was surprised by a strange brightness, first attributed to the light of the dawn but which finally proved to be the deadly whiteness of a reef, against which the ship crashed and broke into pieces. ‘And because for half an hour [the master] saw the sea whitening, like to foam of waves breaking, he asked the sailors to be on guard . . . and they all said it was the light of day.’ ” Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 179.
Timing of the wreck Pelsaert, in JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 122], gives the time as “about two hours before daybreak,” which, after making allowance for the time of year and prevailing local conditions, Drake-Brockman (op. cit., p. 122) put at about 4 a.m. I think it must have been slightly earlier, given that the watch would have changed at 4 and that it seems most unlikely Jacobsz would have stood the early morning watch.
“First a coral outcrop . . .” Pelsaert’s declaration, 20 July 1629 [R 212–4].
“Flung to the left . . .” Excavation of the ship in the 1970s revealed