Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [172]
Value of the jewels taken from the wreck The total was first calculated, with an exactness entirely typical of the VOC, at 20,419 guilders and 15 stuivers. (There were 20 stuivers in one guilder.) This figure was later revised upward to 58,000 guilders, for reasons that are not clear (see chapter 5). Antonio van Diemen to Pieter de Carpentier, 30 November–10 December 1629, ARA 1009 [DB 42, 49].
“It won’t help at all . . .” JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 124].
Indiscipline below Interrogation of Allert Janssen, JFP 19 Sep 1629 [DB 194–6]; interrogation of Lenert Michielsz Van Os, JFP 23 Sep 1629 [DB 185–6]; interrogation of Mattys Beer, ibid. [DB 189]; verdict on Cornelis Janssen, JFP 30 Nov 1629 [DB 242]; verdict on Jean Thirion, ibid. [DB 243].
Further actions after the wreck JFP 5–8 June 1629 [DB 125–8].
Houtman’s Abrolhos J. A. Heeres, The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765 (London: Luzac, 1899), pp. 14–8; Günter Schilder, Australia Unveiled: The Share of Dutch Navigators in the Discovery of Australia (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1976), pp. 75–6.
Naming Batavia’s Graveyard Green, Stanbury, and Gaastra, op. cit., p. 99.
“It was better and more honest . . .” JFP 5 June 1629 [DB 125–6].
Chapter 1: The Heretic
The full history of Jeronimus Cornelisz has never been written before and has had to be pieced together from fragmentary references in surviving Dutch archives—in particular the Old Solicitors’ Archive, Haarlem, and the Municipal Archive, Leeuwarden. The most useful general study of Dutch Anabaptism is still Cornelis Krahn, Dutch Anabaptism: Origin, Spread, Life and Thought, 1450–1600 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), but James Stayer’s Anabaptists and the Sword (Lawrence, KA: Coronado Press, 1976) deals specifically with the Anabaptists’ attitudes to violence and relations with the state. For details of the Torrentian scandal, I have relied on Govert Snoek’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis, De Rosenkruizers in Nederland: Voornamelijk in de Eerste Helft van de 17de Eeuw. Een Inventarisatie, and the biographies of A. Bredius, Johannes Torrentius (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1909) and A. J. Rehorst, Torrentius (Rotterdam: WL & J Brusse NV, 1939). On the peculiar story of the Rosicrucian order and their supposed beliefs, I turned to Snoek and to Christopher McIntosh, The Rosy Cross Unveiled: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Occult Order (Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1980), and on the social structure of Haarlem in the 1620s to the work of Gabrielle Dorren, particularly “Communities Within the Community: Aspects of Neighbourhood in Seventeenth Century Haarlem,” Urban History 25 (1998). No history of medicine in the Netherlands is as detailed as Brockliss and Jones’s recent The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and I have used this work, with some caution, as a guide to the equivalent “world” of the Dutch Republic.
Life expectancy in the Indies 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), I, 170; Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), p. 242.
“A great refuge . . .” Quoted in Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, 151. The VOC’s soldiers were “louts from the depths of Germany,” it was commented, and according to a saying current in the Holy Roman Empire at the time, “Even a man who has beaten his father and mother to death is too good to go to the East Indies.” C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 135; R. van Gelder, Het Oost-Indisch Avontuur: Duitsers in Dienst van de VOC, 1600–1800 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1997), p. 149.
“Cornelisz came originally from Friesland . . .” Earlier authorities have generally been content to label Jeronimus a Haarlemmer, assuming he was born in the town where