Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [228]
Epilogue: On the Shores of the Great South-Land
It is impossible to say with any certainty what became of the Dutch survivors thrown up on the Western Australian coast. The most important sources, which are archaeological, are well summarized by Phillip Playford, the rediscoverer of the Zuytdorp wreck, in his Carpet of Silver: the Wreck of the Zuytdorp (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1996), which is probably the most interesting and best-researched contribution to the subject yet published. The case for survival is put by Rupert Gerritsen in And Their Ghosts May Be Heard . . . (South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994), though many of his most important points have subsequently been rebutted. For the archaeology of the Batavia victims’ skeletons, I turned mainly to Myra Stanbury (ed.), Abrolhos Islands Archaeological Sites: Interim Report (Fremantle: Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 2000), Juliïtte Pasveer, Alanah Buck, and Marit van Huystee, “Victims of the Batavia Mutiny: Physical Anthropological and Forensic Studies of the Beacon Island Skeletons,” Bulletin of the Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology 22 (1998), and Bernandine Hunneybun, Skullduggery on Beacon Island (BSc Hons dissertation, University of Western Australia, 1995).
The fate of the two mutineers “Instructions to Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom de By van Bemel,” JFP 16 Nov 1629 [DB 229–30]; J. A. Heeres, The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765 (London: Luzac, 1899), pp. 64–7; Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Voyage to Disaster (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), pp. 81–3; Gerrilsen, pp. 64–8, 224–32; Playford, pp. 237–42.
The champan As Drake-Brockman points out (op. cit., pp. 123n, 229n), Pelsaert’s nowhere else uses the word champan in his journals. Normal ship’s boats are referred to throughout as boot—a longboat or yawl—or schuijt—a small jolly-boat or dinghy. It defies belief that the commandeur would have supplied the two mutineers with a VOC boat, which he would certainly have had to account for on his return to Batavia, particularly as it would have meant leaving himself and the people on the Sardam without a single boat of their own.
Wittecarra spring The spring could be seen in its original state as late as 1967, but by 1996 it had dried up due to the extraction of groundwater from a nearby bore. Phillip Playford, Voyage of Discovery to Terra Australis by Willem de Vlamingh in 1696–97 (Perth: Western Australian Museum, 1998), p. 47.
“. . . the first western vessel . . .” The identity of the first Westerners to discover the fifth continent remains a matter of dispute. George Collingridge, author of The Discovery of Australia: a Critical, Documentary and Historical Investigation Concerning the Priority of Discovery in Australasia Before the Arrival of Lieut. James Cook in the Endeavour in the Year 1770 (Sydney: Hayes Brothers, 1895), and Kenneth McIntyre, in The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years Before Captain Cook (Medindie, South Australia: Souvenir Press, 1977), have both argued for the primacy of the Portuguese, and a date somewhere in the sixteenth century. This is not unlikely, although some of the specific evidence these authors advance—early maps, and, in particular, the discovery of “Portuguese” cannon off the northwest coast—has since been called into question. There is, in addition, a tradition on the southern Australian coast of a so-called mahogany ship, popularly