Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [186]
Jacobsz and the Dordrecht Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 61.
Chronicle and remonstrantie Ibid., pp. 21–32; Kolff and van Santen, op. cit., pp. 1–2, 44.
Pelsaert in the United Provinces The plate showed scenes that would be familiar to the Muslim emperors—one example, recovered from the wreck site and now on display in the Western Australian Maritime Museum, is a one-foot silver jar portraying an Islamic purification ceremony. Cf. V. D. Roeper (ed.), De Schipbreuk van de Batavia, 1629 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), pp. 10, 13.
“. . . designed to the upper-merchant’s own specifications . . .” Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 36.
“. . . traveling via the East Indies . . .” The prevailing winds in the Indian Ocean meant that, in normal circumstances, it was actually faster to sail to India via Java than it was to go directly there, battling adverse winds and currents on the voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to Surat.
Jacques Specx He was born in Dordrecht in 1589, the son of an immigrant from the Southern Netherlands, and sailed for the Indies as an under-merchant in December 1607. Specx traveled to Japan and opened up a new trade there, becoming the first head of the Dutch factory on the island of Hirado (1610–13 and 1614–21). Recalled to the Netherlands in 1627 to brief the Gentlemen XVII in person on Japan, he was appointed to command the main autumn fleet sailing to the Indies in the autumn of 1628. W. P. Coolhaas, “Aanvullingen en Verbeteringen op Van Rhede van der Kloot’s De Gouveneurs-Generalen Commissarissen-Generaal van Nederlandsch-Indiï (1610–1888),” De Nederlandsche Leeuw 73 (1956): 341; F. W. Stapel, De Gouveneurs-Generaal van Nederlandsch-Indiï in Beeld en Woord (The Hague: Van Stockum, 1941), p. 19.
Chapter 3: The Tavern of the Ocean
No detailed accounts survive of the first leg of the Batavia’s journey east. The ship’s journal and letters home, left under a “post office stone” at the Cape of Good Hope, seem to have been lost and certainly never reached the Netherlands; and Pelsaert’s own papers were thrown overboard by rioting sailors in the Abrolhos. Because of this, some of the details in my account have been drawn from general Dutch experience, and a description of a typical passage in the late 1620s constructed from sources such as Jaap Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols., 1979–1987) and Bruijn’s “Between Batavia and the Cape: Shipping Patterns of the Dutch East India Company,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11 (1980).
Dordrecht The proper name of the ship was the Maeght van Dort (which means Virgin of Dordrecht), but she seems usually to have been known simply by the diminutive.
“Autumn was the busiest time of year . . .” Three main fleets sailed to Java every year—one in April, another in September, and the last at Christmas. The Christmas fleet had always been the largest. Its crews were expected to endure the miseries of the Dutch winter, but by the time they neared the equator there were generally fresh winds to carry them across the doldrums, and the fleet arrived in the East in good time to be unloaded and repaired before the return voyage began in November. Ships that left at Easter enjoyed better weather in European waters, but less favorable conditions once they reached the Atlantic. The third, September, sailing occurred while the Dutch were enjoying their great autumn festivals, and the ships that departed at this time of year were known as the kermis, or fair, fleet. The kermis fleet was a recent innovation, and in 1628 only two ships a year were sent east this early in the autumn. From this it will be seen that the fleet commanded by Jacques Specx and Francisco Pelsaert fell outside the normal run of VOC operations. Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, 62–3; Bruijn,