Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [61]
Next, and far more problematically, the under-merchant and the skipper had to recruit a large enough body of men to enable them to take control of the Batavia. On the Meeuwtje, which was a smaller vessel, a core of 13 rebellious sailors had been identified, but, given the eventual disappearance of the vessel, others must have remained undetected. On other East Indiamen, groups of up to 60 malcontents conspired to seize their ships. In their first month back at sea, Jacobsz and Cornelisz persuaded somewhere between 8 and 18 men to join them. Ranged against 300 neutrals and company loyalists, this was nowhere near enough to guarantee success. Further action was required.
While the skipper and the under-merchant pondered what to do, and the Batavia nosed her way southward into the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean, Pelsaert himself offered an apparent solution to their problem. A day or two after they had sailed from the Cape, the commandeur fell dangerously ill.
The nature of Francisco Pelsaert’s malady is nowhere specified, but it kept him in his bunk for weeks and came so close to killing him that his recovery was not expected. His illness appears to have been a fever of some sort, possibly malaria contracted during his time in India. Had the upper-merchant succumbed, Cornelisz and Jacobsz could have taken control of the ship by right, without the need for mutiny. So—unknown to all but a handful of the passengers and crew—throughout late April and early May 1629 the fate of the ship lay in the hands of one of the most important of all the members of the Batavia’s crew. He was named Frans Jansz and he came from the old North Quarter port of Hoorn.
Jansz was the Batavia’s surgeon. His practice was conducted from the tiny dispensary on the gun deck, which was scarcely more than five feet square, and his only tools were a set of surgeon’s saws, a small apothecary’s chest, and—because all seventeenth-century surgeons doubled as barbers—a handful of razors and some bowls. With these scant resources, and the assistance of an under-barber, Aris Jansz, he was responsible for the health of all 320 people on the ship.
Of all the officers on board Batavia, Frans Jansz was probably the most popular among the passengers and crew. In the course of a typical journey from the Netherlands to Java, almost 1 in 10 of a retourschip’s crew would die, and a much larger number would fall ill and require treatment. If the proportion of the sick and the dead exceeded certain ratios, the ship would become unmanageable and might be lost together with its crew. Jansz, then, was the chief hope not only of Francisco Pelsaert, but of all those on the Batavia who wished to reach the Indies without undue drama.
It is not possible to say whether or not the Batavia’s surgeon was worthy of the trust that the ship’s crew placed in him, but the likelihood is that he was not. The Gentlemen XVII always experienced great difficulty in attracting competent medical men. The dangers of the journey east were such that no successful physicians or apothecaries could possibly be induced to go to Java. Even reputable barber-surgeons were hard to come by. Unlike merchants, surgeons had relatively few opportunities to profit in the East, and since they endured similar risks, the standard of those who could be lured to serve at sea was often very low.
On a good many East Indiamen, indeed, the problem of obtaining decent treatment was exacerbated by the dangers of the job. Shut up in their dispensaries below decks and constantly exposed to sick and dying men, the mortality