Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [54]
The problems began shortly after the ship sailed from Sierra Leone. During the crossing of the North Atlantic Ariaen Jacobsz had become infatuated with Creesje Jans. The skipper, who had left a wife at home in Durgerdam, somehow persuaded himself that he could attract Lucretia, who was not only married, but several degrees his superior in social status. He quickly learned otherwise. Creesje rejected his initial advances, but apparently she did so gently, for they remained for a while on friendly terms. But as the Batavia set course for the wagenspoor, and Creesje continued to resist, her relationship with Jacobsz began to deteriorate.
Jeronimus saw what Pelsaert and the rest had missed. As the Batavia left the African coast in her wake, he tackled Ariaen in private. “I chided him,” the under-merchant later recalled, “and asked what he intended with that woman. The skipper answered that because she was fair, he desired to tempt her to his will, and to make her willing with gold or other means.”
Jacobsz’s bribes appear to have been as unwelcome to Creesje as his earlier advances, and this time she must have told him so in blunter terms. Abruptly the skipper broke off the pursuit. But long before the ship approached the Cape, the irrepressible Ariaen had picked up another scent. This time the object of his affections was Zwaantie, and this time he was successful.
It never was explained whether the Batavia’s skipper seduced the maid because he desired her or simply to spite her mistress. Whatever the reason, the burgeoning relationship between Ariaen and Zwaantie placed Lucretia in a delicate position. It was impossible to keep secrets on board ship, and Jacobsz’s scandalous dalliance with the maid was soon a public humiliation for Creesje; but she could hardly avoid the skipper all the way to the Indies, and while they remained at sea he could make her life less than pleasant if he chose. Furthermore, it was unthinkable for a woman of her station to travel without a servant, but there was no obvious replacement for Zwaantie on board the Batavia. Creesje had little choice but to make the best of the situation.
As for Jacobsz and his mistress, they seem to have been united not only in their dislike of Lucretia—the skipper smarting from rejection, the maid from the real or imagined slights of her employer—but by their lustful natures. Ariaen was “crazed anew” by his passion for the servant girl, while Zwaantie, so the cook’s gossipy wife confided to Jeronimus as they approached the Cape, “was a whore” who denied her lover nothing. If the under-merchant desired proof of this allegation, it soon presented itself. Repairing to the officers’ privy in the stern one day, he opened the door to find the skipper already there, making love to Zwaantie in the awkward confines of the closet.
So the Batavia and her consorts neared the Cape of Good Hope. As Jan Huygen van Linschoten had predicted in his Reysgeschrift, the first indication that they were approaching land was the sight of Cape gannets—white birds with black-tipped wings that the Dutch called “velvet sleeves”—wheeling and calling around the convoy while it was still well out to sea. A day or two later, the sailors began to notice mats of broken, trumpet-stemmed reeds floating in the water and then the bones of dead cuttlefish bobbing on the waves. These were sure signs that the Batavia was within 30 miles of land.
They dropped anchor under Table Mountain on 14 April 1629, having been nearly six months at sea. The Cape was quite unlike the coast at Sierra Leone. It was delightful country, green and teeming with life. Since its discovery by Batholomeu Diaz in 1488, the Tavern of the Ocean had become a port of refuge for almost every European vessel heading east. English and Dutch,