Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [60]
The high boatswain’s tasks thus required him to be a first-rate seaman. With few exceptions, boatswains were men of long experience who had been promoted from the ranks, and their rough manners and coarse humor made them uncomfortable companions for the passengers in the stern. As the man charged with keeping order among the crew, Evertsz must have been brutal and decisive. As the man in day-to-day command of the ship’s 180 sailors, he was also well placed to pick out troublemakers. He was the ideal recruit to the mutineers’ cause.
It seems to have been the skipper who sounded out Evertsz, and Evertsz who found other mutineers to join them. Among their number were Allert Janssen, of Assendelft—a companion of Jacobsz’s who had already killed one man in the Dutch Republic—and Ryckert Woutersz, a loudmouthed gunner from Harlingen. Sensibly, the skipper and the high boatswain kept the names of these recruits to themselves, and even the other mutineers did not know exactly who was implicated in the plot. It is thus difficult to ascertain how many sailors were involved. There may have been as few as half a dozen of them at first.
One of the most unusual features of the plot on Pelsaert’s ship was the way in which its tentacles extended into every part of the vessel. Most mutinies were the work of a small, tight-knit group of sailors, but the rebellion planned on the Batavia encompassed merchants, cadets, and soldiers, too. It is possible to discern the devious hand of the under-merchant in this unprecedented development. Jeronimus was an articulate man possessed of great powers of persuasion. Those he so charmed came in the end to see him as a “seducer of men,” and he would certainly have had a good deal of influence among the VOC assistants on the ship. Given the traditional antipathy between the soldiers and the sailors of Jan Company, it was possibly his job to sound out the men down on the orlop, too.
Coenraat van Huyssen, the army cadet from Gelderland, may have been Cornelisz’s chosen instrument. Impetuous, hotheaded, with a lust for violence, Van Huyssen and his compatriot Gsbert van Welderen were in the vanguard of the mutineers’ party from the beginning. The young jonkers*21 soon took to sleeping with their weapons in their hammocks, and Van Huyssen boasted to the others that he would be “amongst the first who jumped with a sword into the Cabin, in order to throw the commandeur overboard.” Perhaps through him, the mutineers soon made the acquaintance of “Stone-Cutter” Pietersz, the lance corporal from Am-sterdam whose influence over the troops on board was roughly equivalent to the sway that Evertsz held over the sailors. Like the high boatswain, Pietersz was an important addition to the ranks of the mutineers. His role was probably to suggest the names of soldiers he could trust and to identify those whose loyalty to the Company was such that they would have to be disposed of when the mutiny was done.
Between them, the under-merchant, the high boatswain, and the corporal formed a uniquely dangerous triumvirate. With the skipper at their side, their influence extended to every corner of the ship, and the power they wielded was such that—even had word of the mutiny got out—the bravest man on board would have hesitated to denounce them to the commandeur. Together, they had every prospect of success.
To seize the ship, the Batavia’s rebels first had to separate their vessel from her consorts, and thus from all possibility of aid. This was the principal lesson of the repeated mutinies on board the Meeuwtje, which had only finally succeeded when the ship had become detached from her fleet. In the Batavia’s case it was easily accomplished; soon after the convoy left