Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [230]
VOC losses J. R. Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols., 1979–1987), I, pp. 75, 91.
The wreck of the Vergulde Draeck James Henderson, Marooned (Perth: St. George Books, 1982), pp. 42–155. The wreck site was rediscovered in 1963 by Graeme Henderson, who is now the director of the Western Australian Maritime Museum; he was then a schoolboy on a fishing expedition.
The three rescuers R. H. Major, Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia (Adelaide: Australian Heritage Press, 1963), p. 58. The real total may have been higher than this; a second party of eight sailors sent after the first three also vanished; their boat was found smashed to pieces on a beach, and it remains a matter of some doubt whether the crew ever got ashore. The VOC nearly lost a third boatload two years later, when another effort at rescue and salvage was made. Fourteen men from a fluyt, the Waeckende Boey, led by the steersman Abraham Leeman, were abandoned on the coast and had to sail their small boat back to the Indies. Most of them survived the voyage, but landed on the southern coast of Java many miles from Batavia. Only Leeman and three other men eventually reached the city alive. Henderson, marooned, pp. 95–155.
Evidence of survival Ibid., p. 96; Gerritsen, op. cit., pp. 48–63.
“. . . followed by the Zuytdorp . . .” Two other ships, the Ridderschap van Holland (1694) and the Concordia (1708) may have been lost on the Australian coast before this date. C. Halls, “The Loss of the Ridderschap van Holland,” The Annual Dog Watch 22 (1965): 36–43; Playford, Voyage of Discovery, pp. 4, 71n; Femme Gaastra, “The Dutch East India Company: A Reluctant Discoverer,” The Great Circle 19 (1997): 118–20. Halls’s view, that the Ridderschap van Holland sprung her mast, limped north to Madagascar, and fell victim to the pirate leader Abraham Samuel at Fort Dauphin on the southern coast, cannot be correct; Samuel did not arrive at the port until some time after July 1697. There certainly was a rumor that he had captured a Dutch ship and killed all her crew, but contemporary documents date this supposed event to January 1699; the vessel concerned was probably a small slaver. There were, however, plenty of pirate ships on the northern coast of Madagascar, based on St. Mary’s, that could perhaps have accounted for a wounded retourschip. Jan Rogozinski, Honour Among Thieves: Captain Kidd, Henry Every and the Story of Pirate Island (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2000), pp. 67–8.
The fate of the Zuytdorp Without a boat—the Zuytdorp’s pair must surely have been reduced to matchwood by the surf—their only real hope of rescue was to attract the attention of another Dutch ship as she passed along the coast. The cliffs offered good vantage points, and they had gone aground close to the spot where VOC ships normally made their Australian landfall, but any experienced hands among the survivors would have known that although fires were often seen along the shoreline, they were routinely attributed to the local Aborigines and ignored. It must have been for this reason that the Zuytdorp’s men went to the effort of hauling ashore eight bronze breech blocks for the swivel guns mounted on the poop. In the right circumstances these could have been loaded with shot and used to signal to passing ships. Unfortunately for the survivors, however, none of the guns could be got out of the stern before it broke up and drifted away. The breech blocks were then abandoned at the foot of the cliffs, where they were eventually rediscovered more than 200 years later.
There was plenty of driftwood about,