Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [59]
The former sentence involved pinioning a man’s hands behind his back and tying a long, stout rope around his wrists. Lead weights were secured to his feet and he was then dropped 40 or 50 feet toward the sea, falling until the rope went taut. The sudden deceleration inevitably dislocated the mutineer’s shoulders, and his wrists and arms were often shattered, too. The man was then twice hauled back up to be dropped again, a punishment that in his broken state was even more painful than the fall itself. Having been dropped three times, the mutineer would then usually be lashed as well.
Keelhauling, which was a Dutch invention, was generally regarded as an even more severe punishment. Sentence was carried out by tying a man’s arms together above his head and binding his legs. He was given a sponge to bite down on, and a long rope was then passed under the keel of the moving ship and the ends secured to the sailor’s limbs so he could be pulled from one side of the vessel to the other. When the idea was first conceived, keelhauling almost always resulted in the death of the condemned man, who would either be cut to pieces by the barnacles covering the bottom of the ship or decapitated as he smashed into the hull. The ingenious Dutch found a solution to this problem, and soon each VOC ship was supplied with a special full-body harness, made of lead and leather, into which a man could be strapped. The harness was equipped with a flag on a long pole. By adjusting the length of the ropes until the flag was a certain height above the water, it was possible to ensure that the mutineer was dragged under the keel rather than across it, and the lead harness protected him from any incidental contact. Keelhauling, too, was generally repeated three times before the punishment was completed. Nevertheless, in an era in which only one man in seven could swim, it was such a terrifying ordeal that the full sentence was often not completed for fear that the victim would drown.
Soldiers and sailors desperate enough to risk such punishments would hardly balk at killing the officers who would inflict them, and the men whom Cornelisz and Jacobsz recruited to their plot were undoubtedly a rough lot. Significantly, however, they also included a number of senior officers and experienced soldiers and sailors of the sort required to run Batavia successfully.
A good deal of care would still have been required. Rumors traveled swiftly below decks, and the slightest word to the upper-merchant might have proved fatal. But on a retourschip crewed by the dregs of the Amsterdam waterfront there were always malcontents and, between them, the skipper and the under-merchant knew of several men who could be tempted by the lure of easy money and spurred by hatred for the VOC. The first man Ariaen approached appears to have been the bos’n’s mate, who was a cousin of the skipper and presumably a man in whom Jacobsz had full confidence. The most important addition to the ranks of the mutineers, however, was unquestionably the bos’n himself.
Jan Evertsz, the Batavia’s high boatswain and thus the most senior officer—after Jacobsz and the three steersmen—on the ship, came from Monnickendam, a small fishing port on the coast north of Amsterdam with a reputation for producing a particularly brutal sort of sailor.*20 He was probably still in his twenties, and it was his job to implement the orders of the skipper, with whom he necessarily had a close relationship. Like other high boatswains, Evertsz most likely stood watches while at sea and would have been on his way to becoming a skipper himself. “As the master is to be abaft the mast,” one contemporary authority explained, “so the boatswain, and all the common sailors, are to be afore the mast . . . . The boatswain is to see the