Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [42]
This strict segregation served several purposes. It reinforced status and emphasized the divisions that existed on board between soldiers and sailors, officers and men. But it was also a practical measure. Seamen and troops were placed on separate decks because long experience had shown that they did not get along and would fight if they were billeted together. Ordinary seamen were to stay before the mast to minimize the ever-present threat of mutiny, and the entrance to the officers’ quarters in the stern was fortified for the same reason.
The soldiers came off worst from these arrangements. Their quarters were two decks down on the orlop—what the Dutch called the “cow-deck”—where the roof beams were so low it was impossible to stand upright, and which was so close to the waterline that it was equipped with neither vents nor portholes to provide a minimum of air and light. The orlop was actually part of the hold, and on return journeys it became a spice store. Uncomfortable though it was, it was not unknown for the troops to remain confined to this dark and airless deck for all but two 30-minute periods each day, when they were brought up under escort to taste fresh air and use the latrines.
The soldiers of the VOC were a particularly motley collection, misfits gathered more or less indiscriminately from all over northern Germany, the United Provinces, and France. A number came from Scotland, and there was even one Englishman—whose name appears as “Jan Pinten” in the records of the voyage—among the soldiers on the Batavia. The troops were largely untrained, and at a time when local dialects and thick provincial accents were the norm, many found it difficult to understand each other, let alone the orders of their officers.
There is little evidence of any solidarity among soldiers of the VOC; thievery and casual violence were rife, and the only bonds that seem to have formed were friendships of convenience between men who hailed from the same town or district. Friends would keep an eye on each other’s possessions, share food and water, and nurse each other if they fell sick. It was important to find a companion like this. Those who had no friend to turn to when they succumbed to illness might be left to die; retourschepen were fitted with sick bays in the bows, but officers and seamen received priority for treatment. A typical Dutch sailor, it was observed, “shows more concern for the loss of a chicken in the coop than for the death of a whole regiment of soldiers.”
On the Batavia the majority of the troops were German. A number came from the North Sea ports of Bremen, Emden, and Hamburg, where the VOC maintained recruiting centers to gather up the dregs of the waterfront. Though some were decent men—it was not unknown for the younger sons of honorable but impoverished families to seek their fortunes in the Company’s army—they were, on the whole, a potentially dangerous group of malcontents.
The soldiers were led by a Dutch corporal, Gabriel Jacobszoon, who had come on board with his wife. Jacobszoon was assisted by a lansepesaat (lance corporal) from Amsterdam called Jacop Pietersz, whose nicknames—he was variously known as steenhouwer, “stone-cutter,” and cosijn, which means “window-frame”—suggest a man with the considerable strength and bulk required to control the brutal men under his command. The Stone-Cutter and the corporal were in turn responsible to the young VOC cadets who were the only military officers on board, and who did not themselves share the discomforts of the orlop deck.
These youths were frequently junior members of old noble families whose lands, in the time-honored tradition, were passed down from a father to his eldest son,