Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [232]
The Zeewijk and her survivors Hugh Edwards, The Wreck on the Half-Moon Reef (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
“. . . from New South Wales to China . . .” David Levell, “China Syndrome,” Fortean Times 123 (June 1999): 28–31. The distance between the two territories was supposed by these prisoners to be about 150 miles (it is actually 5,565 miles from Sydney to Beijing). The first recorded attempt was made by 20 men and one pregnant woman in November 1791; the last around 1827.
Evidence of survival Gerritsen, op. cit., pp. 70–81; Playford, Carpet of Silver, pp. 217–32. Gregory’s recollection may not be entirely reliable, as he recorded it only in 1885. Much of other evidence advanced by Gerritsen, such as the presence of what appear to be Dutch loan words in Aboriginal languages, have been subject to considerable criticism by specialists.
Unfortunately for the Aborigines of the western coast, the great majority died out soon after the first Europeans arrived with their guns, diseases, and modern agricultural practices, and evidence of the sort supplied by Daisy Bates and her contemporaries can never be more than merely anecdotal. It is also true that relations with passing sealers or the earliest settlers, or genetic mutation, could account for the light-skinned individuals found in the areas where the Zuytdorp survivors and the Batavia mutineers came ashore. Only genetic evidence is likely to prove at all conclusive; but since old Aboriginal skeletons are sometimes exposed by wind and water throughout Western Australia, it may eventually be found.
One clue that intermarriage between Dutch and Aboriginals did actually occur may already have emerged. In 1988 Phillip Playford, one of Australia’s leading experts on the Zuytdorp, was approached by a woman whose part-Aboriginal husband apparently suffered from porphyria variegata, a condition that can cause rashes, blisters, and sensitive skin. This disease is an inherited one and can be passed to children of either sex. It is also relatively rare, except among the white population of South Africa, where an estimated 30,000 people carry the gene for the condition.
Geoffrey Dean, a British doctor based in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, became aware of the unusual incidence of porphyria in the region in 1949 and devoted years to researching the family trees of all the sufferers he treated. He claimed to have traced all known cases of the disease to a single Dutch couple, Gerrit Jansz van Deventer and Ariaantje van den Berg, who were married at the Cape in 1688. Van Deventer had settled there in 1685, and his bride was one of eight orphans sent out to provide wives for the early burghers three years later. The couple had eight children, half of whom Dean showed must have carried the gene for porphyria variegata. Dean and Playford have suggested that the disease may have been introduced to Australia by an Afrikaner signed on to the Zuytdorp at the Cape to help make good the extensive losses among the crew that had occurred on the passage from the Netherlands, who survived the wreck and lived long enough to join an Aboriginal community.
A good deal of work remains to be done if this disease is to be traced to the arrival of Dutch mariners on the western Australian coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It remains entirely possible that it was introduced at a much later date, and its appearance in Australia cannot can be regarded as definite evidence for the long-term survival of Loos and Pelgrom and their compatriots. Nevertheless, evidence of interaction between VOC sailors and the Aborigines continues to emerge occasionally, and it is not impossible that a definite link will be established one day. Interview with Dr. F. W. M de Rooij, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 26 June 2000. De Rooij’s work in South Africa has confirmed Dean’s thesis that most South African porphyriacs can trace the source of their disease to their kinship with Ariaantje van den Berg. Playford, Carpet of Silver, pp. 227–32; Geoffrey Dean, The Porphyrias: A