Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [40]
Gijsbert Bastiaensz was later to confess that he had entirely failed to recognize the undertows that lurked beneath Jeronimus’s superficial decency. This failure was hardly surprising. The predikant was an honest and straightforward sort, of little intuition and less experience, whose horizons had until quite recently been limited to his calling and his church. Dordrecht was noted for its uncomplicated orthodoxy. A minister from such a town would hardly have encountered a creature quite like Cornelisz before.
Bastiaensz, it seems, was a typical example of the Indies predikant. Because the Reformed Church was quite devoid of missionary zeal—the doctrine of predestination implied there was little point in converting heathens—it was never easy to persuade ministers to serve in the east. The few who went were seldom members of the Calvinist elite. They were, rather, “hedge-preachers”: artisans whose religious views were frequently naive, and who, while preaching economy and restraint, were often in financial difficulties themselves.
The predikant of the Batavia was all these things and more. Gijsbert Bastiaensz was a member of the working classes of the Dutch Republic, who made a living with his hands and attended to church business when he could. He had little formal education. But—like Jeronimus Cornelisz—he was a man on the verge of ruin, forced by the threat of bankruptcy to seek redemption in the east.
The minister’s early life had been comfortable enough. His father, Bastiaen Gijsbrechtsz, had been a miller, and Gijsbert followed him into what appears to have been a well-established family business. In February 1604 he was married to Maria Schepens, the daughter of a Dordrecht wine merchant, and—as was common at the time—the couple produced a large family. There were eight children in all, four boys and four girls, and no fewer than seven survived infancy. The fact that so many of the children lived, and that their father was able to provide for them, suggests that—for the first two decades of the century at least—Bastiaensz controlled a profitable mill.
By the time that he was 30, the miller had become an elder of the Reformed Church of Dordrecht. Between 1607 and 1629, Gijsbert Bastiaensz served no fewer than five two-year terms on the town’s church council, a proud record that suggests he was among the best-respected (and most strictly orthodox) churchmen in the town. Further proof of this contention can be found in the voluminous legal records of Dordrecht, where the predikant appears as an arbitrator, an executor, and a witness who stood surety in a number of legal cases. All of these were solemn duties assumed only by those whom the public trusted—men of unimpeachable integrity.
For all that, the mill that the predikant owned and ran for a quarter of a century was not a very grand one. He relied for his living on a rosmolen (a horse-powered mill) rather than one of the newer and more efficient windmills then becoming widespread in the Netherlands. During the severe depression of the 1620s, the owners of rosmolens often struggled to make a living, while millers who ground corn more quickly and more cheaply using windmills prospered. Gijsbert Bastiaensz was one of many who could not compete. Between 1618—when he appears in the town records as a landowner with his own mill and 12 rented acres of grazing for his horses—and 1628, the predikant’s financial position disintegrated. At around the time that Jeronimus was transferring all his worldly goods to the merchant Vogel, Bastiaensz was signing his home and mill over to his own creditors.
His good name and his faith were of no help now, and there were no church livings to be had in Dordrecht. With eight mouths to feed, the predikant applied to be a preacher in the Indies. He was in Amsterdam by the second week of September,