Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [55]
Ships heading for the Coromandel Coast rarely put in at the Cape, but on board the Batavia and the Sardam, the Dordrecht, the Assendelft, and the little warship Buren, men readied the ships’ boats and carried the scurvy-ridden and the sick ashore. Landing parties set up sailcloth tents for them along the edge of the beach. Other seamen hunted sea lions and penguins along the beach, or fished and gathered mussels from the rocks while they waited for the Hottentots’ arrival.
It was Pelsaert’s duty to negotiate for supplies of food. The natives of the Cape had grown used to dealing with visitors from Europe. A mutually beneficial trade had sprung up, for the Hottentots had oxen and sheep to sell, and the sailors iron hoops and copper plates that could be fashioned into ornaments and spears. The rate of exchange seemed laughably advantageous to the Dutch, who on one occasion bartered a copper bracelet for a sheep, and on another received “three oxen and five sheep for a crooked knife, a shovel, a short iron bolt, with a knife and some scraps of iron, worth altogether perhaps four guilders in Holland.” But metal was hard to come by at the Cape, and for their part the Hottentots seemed content that it was they who had the better of the deals.
Neither party really understood the other. The Dutch thought the inhabitants of the Cape primitive and ugly, and their journals contain numerous disparaging comments concerning the near nakedness of the Hottentots and the foul smell of the animal fat they rubbed into their bodies to insulate against the cold. The Africans found the Dutch greedy and violent, and in the early years of the seventeenth century men on both sides died as a result of this mutual mistrust.
Pelsaert’s greatest problem was communication. Europeans could not understand a word of the extraordinary language of the bushmen, who talked by clicking their tongues—“their speech is just as if one heard a number of angry turkeys, little else but clucking and whistling,” one baffled merchant wrote—and when the Hottentots eventually appeared the commandeur had to rely on mimicry and mime to make his wishes known. Indeed, everything about the Cape “savages” seemed alien to the Dutch, and they were utterly repulsed by the Hottentot diet. The locals liked their meat uncooked, and their greatest delicacy, the Dutch observed, was the intestines of an ox, which they “ate quite raw after shaking out most of the dung.”
It took Pelsaert some time to secure the necessary supplies, and his absences ashore had consequences he could hardly have predicted. While Pelsaert was inland bartering for sheep, Ariaen Jacobsz took a boat and embarked on an illicit pleasure trip around the bay in the company of Zwaantie and his friend Jeronimus Cornelisz. Afterward the little group rowed from ship to ship in the southern dusk, enjoying the hospitality of the other vessels in the fleet until Jacobsz became thoroughly inebriated. The skipper’s behavior deteriorated rapidly, and he began to lash out with his fists and tongue. By the time the commandeur returned to the Batavia, several complaints had already been lodged against him.
The episode reflected badly on Pelsaert and his flagship and greatly worried the commandeur. “They went ashore without my knowledge when I had gone in search of beasts,” he recorded in his journal, “until the evening, when they sailed to the Assendelft where Ariaen behaved himself very pugnaciously, and at night time went to the ship Buren, where he behaved himself worse.” Jacobsz, the commandeur concluded, had been “very beastly with words as well as deeds.”
The skipper’s behavior was a serious problem for Pelsaert. The drunkenness and violence were bad enough, but the fact that Jacobsz had taken a boat without the commandeur’s permission was worse. It was clear that the skipper would have to be disciplined if the commandeur was not to lose face, and early the next morning Pelsaert called Jacobsz into