Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [41]
In another cabin in the stern, Creesje Jans sat amid the handful of personal possessions she had been permitted to bring on board. She was 27 years old and had been married to a VOC under-merchant named Boudewijn van der Mijlen for nearly a decade, but her decision to join him in the Indies requires some explanation. Van der Mijlen had sailed for the East without her, apparently in 1625 or 1626, and it was most unusual for an under-merchant’s wife to follow later and alone. In Lucretia Jans’s case, however, the archives of her native Amsterdam provide a ready explanation for her presence on board the Batavia. Creesje was an orphan whose three infant children had all died, one by one. By 1628 she had no reason to stay in the United Provinces. Boudewijn, wherever he might be, was all that she had left.
Creesje had never known her father, a cloth merchant who died before she was born. When she was two years old, her mother Steffanie had remarried and her stepfather, a naval captain named Dirk Krijnen, had moved the family first to the Leliestraat, in a fashionable and wealthy quarter of Amsterdam, and eventually to the Herenstraat—then, as now, one of the more expensive and prestigious addresses in the city. Creesje’s mother died in 1613, when her daughter was only 11 years old, and the girl became a ward of the Orphan’s Court, while continuing, it seems, to live with her stepfather; sister, Sara; and a stepsister, Weijntgen Dircx. Within a few years, however, Krijnen too was dead, a loss that may have helped to propel Lucretia into her early union with Boudewijn van der Mijlen.
The bride was 18 on her wedding day. According to the marriage register, Creesje’s husband was a diamond polisher who lived in Amsterdam but came from the town of Woerden. The couple’s three children—a boy named Hans and two girls, Lijsbet and Stefani—were born between 1622 and 1625, but none lived to reach the age of six. Such misfortune was exceptional, for even in the seventeenth century child mortality generally ran at no more than one infant in every two, and it is possible that the children may have succumbed to some epidemic. There is, however, no evidence of this; nor is much known of Boudewijn’s business affairs. All that can be said is that he, too, most likely suffered badly in the recession of the 1620s. Certainly no successful diamond merchant would voluntarily join the VOC only to be sent, as Van der Mijlen was, to Arakan—a stinking, disease-ridden river port in Burma—to deal in slaves for the greater glory of Jan Company.
Boudewijn had received orders to sail for Arakan in the autumn of 1627, when he was living in Batavia, and it took so long—up to a year—for letters to travel from there to the Netherlands that Creesje was surely unaware her husband would not be in Java when she arrived. It seems equally improbable that her voyage was planned 12 months or more in advance, and that he knew she would be leaving the Republic. Most likely the last of Creesje’s children died some time in 1628 and she, weighed down with grief, made the more or less impulsive decision to rejoin her husband, sending perhaps a letter in advance and settling her remaining affairs in time to secure a berth on the Batavia. She took with her no more than a few belongings and a lady’s maid. Like Cornelisz and Bastiaensz, Creesje Jans had little reason to look back.
So much for the passengers in the stern. Like all East Indiamen, the Batavia was a segregated ship, in which the accommodation got more spartan as one moved toward the bow. Those of middling rank, particularly the “idlers” (specialists such as the surgeons, sailmakers, carpenters, and cooks who were not expected to stand watch