Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [3]
It was at some time after 3 a.m., when the alertness of the crew was at its lowest ebb, that the lookout, Hans Bosschieter, first suspected that all was not well. From his position high in the stern, the sailor noticed what appeared to be white water dead ahead. Peering into the night, Bosschieter thought he could make out a mass of spray, as though surf was breaking on an unseen reef. He turned to the skipper for confirmation, but Jacobsz disagreed. He insisted that the thin white line on the horizon was nothing more than moonbeams dancing on the waves. The skipper trusted to his own judgment, and he held the Batavia’s course, sailing on with all her canvas set.
When the ship struck, she therefore did so at full speed.
With a tremendous crash, the Batavia impaled herself on the half-hidden reef that had been lying in her path. In the first second of impact an outcrop of coral 15 feet beneath the surface tore the rudder half away; then, a moment later, the ship’s bow hit the main body of the reef. Massive though she was, Batavia’s forward momentum brought her lurching out of the water, and her foreparts ground their way over the first few feet of the obstacle in a roar of shattered rock and splintered wood. The whole ship howled as shards of coral gouged their way along her sides, and her hull trembled from the blow.
Up on deck, Jacobsz and Bosschieter and the other men of the midnight watch were flung to the left and sent staggering against the Batavia’s sides and railings as the ship smashed into the reef. Down below, in the dark and crowded living spaces, the rest of the ship’s passengers and crew, another 270 people in all, were tipped from their hammocks and sleeping mats onto the deck. Lamps and barrels, crockery and ropes torn from their fastenings rained down on their heads, and in an instant the ordered, sleeping ship became a pitch-black pandemonium.
It took only a second or two for the Batavia to shudder to a halt. The coral cradle that the ship had torn out of the reef forced her stern down into the water and twisted her hull at an unnatural angle, like a human body broken in a fall. The noise of the initial collision rolled away into the darkness, to be replaced by the roar of breakers striking the hull and shouts of fear and panic from below.
The upper-merchant was the first on deck. Pelsaert had been lying half-asleep in his cabin in the stern, only a few feet from the spot where Jacobsz and Bosschieter had been standing, and the impact of the collision had thrown him out of bed. Picking himself up off the cabin floor, he hurried up, still clad in his nightclothes, to discover what had happened.
He found the ship in chaos. The Batavia had taken on a list to port and her timbers were shaking under the repeated pounding of the waves, which piled up under her stern and kept her bottom grating ominously against the coral. A cold veil of sea spray—thrown up by the impact of the surf against the hull—hung in the air all round the ship, and wind whipped the spume across the decks and into the faces of the half-naked men and women who now began to swarm up through the hatches from below, soaking and half-blinding them as they emerged.
Pelsaert fought his way onto the quarterdeck. The skipper was still there, yelling orders to the crew. Even the upper-merchant, with his limited knowledge of the sea, could tell immediately that the situation was serious. “What have you done,” he screamed to Jacobsz over the general din, “that through your reckless carelessness you have run this noose around our necks?”
The Batavia’s position was indeed desperate. Not only was the ship stuck fast on the reef; her 10 great sails still billowed from the yards, pinning her ever more firmly to the coral. The timbers of the bow had been crushed in the collision, and though there were as yet no serious leaks below, it seemed from the groaning of the hull that her seams might burst at any moment. Worst of all, they were lost. The Batavia—at least in Jacobsz’s opinion—was nowhere near any known shoal or coast. None of the other officers