Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [57]
In his journal, Pelsaert eventually came to realize this. “Jeronimus Cornelissen,” he mused,
“having made himself a great friend and highly familiar with the skipper, moulded their similar intelligence and feelings into one, the skipper being innate with prideful conceit and Ambition, so that he could not endure the authority of any over him. Moreover, he was mocking and contemptuous of all people. Further, he was inexperienced or inept in getting on with people, in so far as it did not concern sea-faring. But Jeronimus, on the contrary, was well-spoken and usually knew how to polish the Truth of his lying words; he was far more sly and skilled in getting on with people . . . So that Jeronimus was the tongue of the skipper and served as pedagogue to insinuate into him what he should answer if I wanted to speak to or admonish him.”
As for Cornelisz, he cared little what befell Francisco Pelsaert. He encouraged the skipper’s fantasies simply because he knew he could not seize Batavia by himself. To do that he would need sailors, whose loyalty he did not command, and the ability to navigate, which only Ariaen and his steersmen possessed. Granted the men and the skills he needed, however, Jeronimus scented a prize greater than mere revenge. As he well knew, the lumbering Batavia contained riches greater than any he could dream of earning in the East.
Cornelisz had motives of his own for mutiny. As the owner of a failed business, with an abandoned wife and a dead child, he had no particular desire to see the United Provinces again. As a near-bankrupt seeking his fortune in the Indies, he was engaged in an enterprise that left him not much more than a 50/50 chance of coming back alive even if he was successful. And as a VOC officer with ready access to the Great Cabin in the stern, he had seen the dozen chests of money there and knew they contained a fortune that would allow anyone who seized it to spend what was left of his life in consummate luxury. Furthermore, as someone of decidedly heretical beliefs, the under-merchant simply did not experience the pangs of guilt and conscience that a pious Dutchman might have felt in plotting rebellion and murder.
In this, as in so much else, Jeronimus Cornelisz was unique; it was unheard-of for an officer of the VOC to mutiny. Skippers, too, were generally loyal. But Jeronimus and Ariaen began to look for confederates among the crew, confident they would find men enough to follow them. The soldiers and sailors of the Dutch East India Company were always ready to revolt.
Harsh treatment, poor wages, and the terrible conditions on the voyage to Java frequently combined to produce outbreaks of trouble on board VOC ships, although the unrest generally fell well short of the sort of bloody uprising Cornelisz and Jacobsz had begun to contemplate. Most mutinies were little more than shipboard protests, which flared up rapidly and were over quickly. They were led by ordinary seamen—the ringleaders were almost always foreigners, not Dutchmen—and usually took the form of a complaint against conditions on board, or concerns about the seaworthiness of a tired old ship. They rarely involved much violence and might more accurately be described as a form of strike.*17 Such mutinies were generally settled by concessions—perhaps by increasing rations or an agreement to restrain excesses in discipline. Once the officers had recovered control of the ship, it was normal to treat the majority of the rebels relatively leniently. One or two ringleaders would almost certainly be executed, if they could be identified, but most of those involved could at least hope to escape with their lives.
Full-fledged mutinies, led by a relatively small group of men who had actively conspired to take over a ship, were extremely rare. They required careful planning, access to weapons—which were generally kept under lock and key in the ship’s armory in the stern—and the cooperation