Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [49]
At the captain’s table, there was no rationing. Pelsaert and Jacobsz, Cornelisz, and Creesje ate meat or fish three times a day, and on special occasions 11- or 12-course feasts were served in the Great Cabin. It was a way to pass the time.
Boredom tested the patience of everyone on board during the long voyage south toward the Cape. In between meals, the passengers and crew passed the time with gossip and games. There was singing and sometimes the crew staged amateur theatricals. Gambling with dice was popular, though technically illegal, and draughts and tick-tack—a form of backgammon—were widely played. A few, chiefly among the officers, read for recreation, though most of the books available were the religious texts that the VOC, in a rare moment of piety, had determined to supply to all its ships. (Sir Francis Drake himself, on his voyage around the world, is known to have whiled away the hours by coloring in the pictures in his copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.) The handful of women on board knitted or wove lace; on some voyages, old records attest, they even took over in the galley on occasion, fed up with a diet of bread “which lay like a stone in their stomachs.” The sailors enjoyed rougher sports. Fistfights were tolerated as an amusing diversion, and when they could the men played the “execution game,” a contest involving forfeits that included being smeared with pitch and tar. This game was so dangerous that it could only be played with the express permission of the skipper.
Disputes flared rapidly amid the boredom and the heat. The fights that were not about the rations generally concerned the living space, or lack of it. With more than 330 people crammed into a ship only 160 feet long, privacy was almost impossible to come by. The men fought over space to lay their sleeping mats, and so disruptive was the problem of theft that stealing was punished almost as severely as murder. The temptation was great, however; most of the sailors and soldiers on board were almost destitute—they would hardly have been risking their lives in the Indies otherwise—and minor theft was a continual problem on every Dutch ship.
It was during this period of indolence and tedium that Jeronimus Cornelisz first revealed his heterodox views to the people of the Batavia. Talk in the Great Cabin in the stern turned quite frequently to matters of religion, and from time to time—far now from the grasp of the Reformed Church—the under-merchant enjoyed shocking the assembled company with his thoughts on some bit of doctrine. He was an unusually eloquent man and talked so persuasively that even his more inflammatory beliefs were somehow rendered almost palatable. Jacobsz and his officers, who seldom encountered educated men, found his smooth tongue almost hypnotic. The merchant was, in any case, careful not to stray too far into outright heresy. “He often showed his wrong-headedness by Godless proposals,” the predikant recalled, much later on, “but I did not know he was Godless to such an extent.”
In time, Cornelisz’s practiced charm seems to have made a great impression on the skipper, and somewhere off the coast of Africa the two men became friends. They had a number of interests in common, and the many hours the ship spent becalmed in the tropics provided them with ample opportunity to become better acquainted. It is safe to assume they touched on two subjects more than once: the fortunes to be made in the Spiceries, and the beauty of Lucretia Jans.
Creesje commanded the attention of many of the officers in the stern. With the exception of the provost’s wife, who seems to have been considerably older, she was the only woman of any rank on board the Batavia. That alone would have been enough to engage the interest of men denied much female company for several months on end, but her remarkable beauty, which is attested to in the records of the voyage, undoubtedly