Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [38]
By late summer, then, Pelsaert found himself restored to favor. He would sail to Surat with his silver plate, the Gentlemen XVII decreed, traveling via the East Indies. The main autumn fleet was due to leave home waters late in October 1628 under the command of Jacques Specx of the Hollandia—a member of the Council of the Indies and one of the most senior and experienced traders in the VOC. It was expected to include several retourschepen of the largest kind, including the brand-new Batavia.
Though still being completed at the Peperwerf, Batavia already had a skipper. Ariaen Jacobsz’s safe handling of the Dordrecht had so impressed the directors of Jan Company that they had chosen him, of all their sailors, to command the new ship on her maiden voyage. She had an under-merchant, too, in the untried, untested Jeronimus Cornelisz. All that she now required was an upper-merchant of ability and wide experience. One candidate seemed particularly suitable.
Francisco Pelsaert joined them just before they sailed.
3
The Tavern of the Ocean
“Now and then persons of strange opinion come here.”
JACQUES SPECX
A GREAT FLEET WAS ASSEMBLING NEAR THE ISLAND OF TEXEL. Nearly a dozen huge East Indiamen lay at anchor in the Moscovian Roads while the sea around them swarmed with small boats full of sailors and barges packed with ballast for the holds. The Batavia was there, with several other large retourschepen moored close by—the Dordrecht, ’s Gravenhage,*13 Nieuw Hoorn, and Hollandia. A group of smaller vessels, fluyten and jachten, had anchored close inshore. The whole fleet was alive with preparations for the long voyage east.
It was now late October 1628. Autumn was the busiest time of year for the VOC; weather conditions in the Atlantic favored a fast passage to the Indies for ships that left the Netherlands before Christmas, recruitment became easier as Holland’s summer sailors became desperate for work, and ships reached the Indies at the perfect time to load fresh crops of spices. Before they could depart, however, each vessel had to take on board not only a cargo and a crew, but all the supplies required to sustain her for up to a year at sea. Into her 160-foot length the Batavia now had to pack 340 people with all their personal possessions, many tons of equipment, and materiel for the garrisons of the East.
Up from the barges came several thousand barrels of supplies, then sailors’ sea chests by the hundred. Wood for the galley stove and ammunition for the guns were stowed below, and the deck was festooned with coils of rope and cable. Over the sides swarmed a multitude of ill-dressed sailors, whom Jan Evertsz and his men drove to work with curses and knotted lengths of rope. Next came the soldiers—a handful of young company cadets and noncommissioned officers leading a hundred undernourished men off to five years of garrison duty in the Indies—and finally, when the work of loading had been done, Jeronimus Cornelisz and the merchants of the VOC.
In all probability, the Frisian apothecary had never before stepped aboard a ship the size of the Batavia. Like most landsmen, his initial impressions of an East Indiaman were most likely wonder at her great size and alarm at the apparent frenzy up on deck. There are accounts, written by awestruck German soldiers, that testify to the remarkable impression a fully rigged retourschip made on those who came alongside her for the first time; “true castles,” they were sometimes called, which seemed enormous when approached from sea level in a boat. Looking up as they came alongside, many merchants felt quite dwarfed by the sheer wooden walls that towered out of the water all around them and by the massive masts and yards soaring almost 200 feet into the air above their heads.
The chaos up on deck must have been even more disconcerting—the planking strewn with a disordered mass of gear, and ragged sailors rushing to and fro in response to orders the landsmen did not even understand. The constant motion of the anchored ship—which rolled incessantly