Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [56]
Jacobsz smoldered while his men slaughtered cattle on the beach and packed the fresh meat into empty barrels. Down below, the carpenters and caulkers finished their repairs and made things ready for the voyage across the Southern Ocean. They were ready to weigh anchor by 22 April, having spent only eight days at the Tavern of the Ocean—less than half the typical duration of a visit to the Cape.
The Batavia that sailed from Table Bay was not the ship that had left Amsterdam the previous October. Ten of her men were dead and now she creaked with fatigue and crawled with vermin. She was full of tired and squabbling passengers. But in this the Batavia was no different from the majority of East Indiamen that sought shelter at the Cape and could count herself more fortunate than many. What made Pelsaert’s flagship unique was not that there was unrest, but the exalted rank of those embroiled in the dispute. So long as the commandeur and the skipper of a retourschip acted together, rivalries and sexual jealousy among the crew could be dealt with easily enough. But once the two most senior men on board took issue with each other, there was no one to restrain them or their growing enmity.
Up on the quarterdeck, Jeronimus stood with his friend the skipper as Jacobsz nursed his wounded pride. “By God,” muttered the old sailor, glancing at the other vessels in the fleet, “if those ships were not lying there, I would treat that miserly dog so that he could not come out of his cabin for fourteen days. And I would quickly make myself master of the ship.”
This was dangerous talk. What the skipper threatened was mutiny, and if Pelsaert had heard what was being said he would have been within his rights to have Jacobsz thrown overboard or shot. But Jeronimus neither demurred nor went to tell the commandeur.
The two men stood in silence for a while, and the skipper’s words hung in the autumn air as Cornelisz considered them. At length the under-merchant spoke.
“And how would you manage that?” he asked.
4
Terra Australis Incognita
“I am for the devil.”
ARIAEN JACOBSZ
SLOWLY, OVER SEVERAL DAYS, the bones of a plot emerged. Hunched together at the rail as the Batavia plowed through the rough waters east of the Cape, the skipper and the under-merchant planned a mutiny that would give them control of the ship. They spoke of ways of subduing the majority of the crew, and the necessity of murdering those who would not join them. They lingered in pleasurable debate as to Pelsaert’s fate and thought of turning pirate and preying on the commerce of the Indian Ocean. They dreamed of a comfortable retirement in some Spanish port, far beyond the reach of the VOC. Above all, they talked because they needed one another.
It seems to have been Cornelisz who turned the skipper from a mere malcontent into a mutineer. Ariaen Jacobsz was no longer young. Two decades at sea—and several debilitating voyages to the East—had made the skipper tough, but the years had drained him of his vigor. The six-month journey to the Cape had exhausted him. Though it was common for the skippers of East Indiamen to find their supercargoes an irritant, Jacobsz was no longer sure he had the energy to turn his mutinous thoughts into deeds. Much as his hatred of Pelsaert gnawed him, left to himself he would probably have grunted and chafed without ever taking action. Months later, Cornelisz would recall that as they stood together at the stern, he heard his friend repeat a single sentence over and over again: “If I were younger,” Jacobsz had muttered, “I would do something else.” But with his friend the under-merchant beside him, Ariaen felt