Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [53]
Cruel sports such as this were among the few permitted outlets for the baser instincts of the men. Violence and disputes were severely punished, and the total lack of privacy made any form of sexual activity all but impossible for those who lived before the mast. On the great majority of East Indiamen this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there were no more than a handful of women on board—and most of those were either married or prepubescent. A few of the men (though not, it seems, too many) were active sodomites, but the penalties for being caught engaging in a homosexual relationship were draconian; if the commandeur decreed it, the lovers could be sewn, together, into a sailcloth shroud and thrown alive into the ocean. The great majority of such affairs were thus conducted not among the men of the lower deck but between officers and common sailors, since the officers alone had access to private cabins and the status to coerce their partners (some of whom, at least, were unwilling) into silence.
The Batavia, however, carried an unusual number of female passengers. There were at least 22 women on the ship, and although most were married and were traveling to the Indies with their husbands, a few were to all intents and purposes unattached. This was a little peculiar, as the VOC had already learned from bitter experience that to allow unmarried women to sail alongside several hundred young men—all tight-packed together with little to occupy them for anything up to nine months—inevitably led to trouble.
As early as 1610 the Company’s first attempts to procure wives for its lonely merchants in the Indies had ended in humiliation when Governor-General Pieter Both was dispatched to Java with 36 “spinsters” who turned out to be prostitutes. A few years later Both’s successor, Jan Coen, abandoned the attempts he had been making to purchase slave girls in the East and had the orphanages of the Netherlands scoured for young Dutch women instead. “You, Sirs,” Coen lectured the Gentlemen XVII in his uniquely blunt style, “would only send us the scum of the land, [and] people here will sell us none but scum either . . . . Send us young girls, and we shall hope that things will go better.” These “company daughters” were packed off to the Batavia and provided with food and clothing on the voyage east on the understanding that they would marry when they got there. Most were between 12 and 20 and sailed with only a single chaperone to look after groups of up to several dozen girls. Unsurprisingly, even the plainest of the “daughters” attracted the unwelcome attentions of the crew long before the coast of Java appeared over the horizon.
By 1628 Jan Company had learned from these mistakes. It was now rare for any women, other than the wives and daughters of its most senior merchants, to be granted permission to sail out to the Indies. But for some reason the VOC’s proscriptions appear to have been flouted on the Batavia. It is probable that some of the women who found their way on board, including a group of half a dozen sailors’ wives, were actually stowaways. Certainly councillor Jacques Specx, who commanded the larger half of that year’s Christmas fleet, uncovered a host of whores and common-law spouses on the ships in his flotilla, writing home from the Bay of Biscay: “We want for nothing save honest maids and housewives in place of the filthy strumpets and street wailers who have been found (may God amend it) in all the ships. They are so numerous and so awful that I am ashamed to say any more about it.” Pelsaert appears to have checked his ships less scrupulously than Specx. Any stowaways on the Batavia managed to remain hidden until it was too late to send them back.
Among the unchaperoned women on Pelsaert’s ship were the alluring Lucretia Jans and Zwaantie Hendricx, her traveling companion and maid. They made an unlikely couple: Creesje patrician and aloof, her servant Zwaantie earthy and available. Whether Zwaantie had been Lucretia’s maid in Amsterdam is not known; it has been suggested