Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [233]
“. . . purely anecdotal evidence . . .” Even today, speculation as to the existence of Dutch survivors has not entirely died away, and the most recent discovery is, in fact, also one of the strangest. It concerns reports of an expedition into the interior of Australia that set out from Raffles Bay, at the end of the Coburg Peninsula in the Northern Territories, some time prior to 1834. (Raffles Bay was the site of a British military outpost established in 1818 and abandoned in 1829, which may date the expedition more precisely.) This party included a Lieutenant Nixon, and it was on his private journals that newspaper reports concerning what appeared to be a whole colony of white people living in the interior were eventually based.
Nixon and his colleagues, it appears, explored the interior of the Northern Territories for two months. One day, to their considerable surprise, they reached a spot quite different from the untamed wilderness they had been traversing: “a low and level country, laid out as it were in plantations, with straight rows of trees.” Exploring further, Nixon then encountered “a human being, whose face was so fair, and dress so white, that I was for a moment staggered with terror, and thought I was looking at an apparition.”
The “apparition” spoke in broken Dutch, which—remarkably enough—was understood by Nixon, who had spent time in the Netherlands in his youth. It thus emerged that the local people believed they were descended from the survivors—80 men and 10 women—of a Dutch ship that had been wrecked on the coast many years earlier. This group had been forced by famine to go inland, where they had established their colony and lived off maize and fish from a nearby river. They were now led by a man who claimed descent from a Dutchman named Van Baerle, and “did not have books or paper, nor any schools; their marriages were performed without any ceremony, they retained a certain observance of the Sabbath by refraining from daily labours and performing some sort of superstitious ceremony on that day all together.” Evidently they had refrained from mixing with the local Aborigines.
This tale could be a nineteenth-century hoax, and it would be unwise to accept it at face value without any supporting evidence. However, research by Femme Gaastra, the noted Dutch historian of the VOC, has discovered that an assistant named Constantijn van Baerle was indeed lost, with 129 others, on the ship Concordia, which vanished in the Indian Ocean some time in 1708. Van Baerle is not a particularly common surname in the Netherlands; just possibly, then, this discovery corroborates Lieutenant Nixon’s original report. Femme Gaastra, “The Dutch East India Company: A Reluctant Discoverer,” The Great Circle 19 (1997): 117–20, citing the Leeds Mercury of 25 Jan 1834, p. 7 col. a. The sponsors and the purpose of the expedition remain a mystery. Its members are reported to have been conveyed back to Singapore on a merchant ship, which may suggest it was not naval in origin. From an examination of the map, it would appear that the Coburg Peninsula—which lies 700 miles to the east of Batavia—and the interior of Arnhem Land generally are far from the first places one would look for the survivors of a ship that had sailed west from Java and was apparently last