Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [65]
The skipper remained sanguine, unaware that he himself was now suspected. He was certain that the commandeur was merely biding his time. Once the Batavia neared Java—and the support of the Dutch authorities there—Pelsaert would surely act, arresting suspects and clapping them in chains. This development could still be the signal for a mutiny.
By now, the plot was fairly well developed. Led by Jacobsz, a small group of dependable men would rise up in the small hours of the morning, when the great majority of those on board were asleep. They would batter their way into the commandeur’s cabin, seize Pelsaert and toss him into the sea, while the main body of mutineers broke out their concealed weapons and nailed down the hatches to the orlop deck to prevent the soldiers intervening. Once it became clear that the rebels had control of the Batavia, fear and greed would make it a simple matter to recruit the 120 or so sailors and gunners needed to run the ship. In the absence of any spare boats, or a convenient island on which to maroon them, the rest of those on board—200 or so loyal officers, useless passengers, and unwanted men—would have to follow the commandeur over the side.
The remainder of the plot was equally straightforward. With a powerful new ship at their disposal, the mutineers would turn to piracy. Putting in to Mauritius or Madagascar for supplies, they would prey on the rich commerce of the Indian Ocean for a year or two, until they had accumulated sufficient loot to make every man on board wealthy. When that had been achieved, they would settle down to enjoy their money well out of the reach of the VOC.
So the skipper and the under-merchant sat back and waited for Pelsaert’s reprisals. The commandeur would act, Ariaen predicted, when Batavia sighted the Australian coast.
For the men of the retourschip, the great red continent was little more than a void on the charts they carried. “Terra Australis Incognita,” they called it: “the unknown South-Land.” Even in 1629, its very existence was based more on supposition than on fact. Early geographers, such as the Greco-Egyptian Ptolemy, writing in a.d. 140, had imagined a world divided into four gigantic continents. Europe, and what was known of Africa and Asia, was believed to occupy the northeast portion of the globe. This massive land mass seemed to require a counterbalance. From the earliest days, therefore, world maps showed a giant continent south of the equator, girdling the Earth and in many cases joining South America and Africa to China.
As the Portuguese and Spaniards pressed southward in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it gradually became apparent that the South-Land could not be as big as had been supposed. Ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn without sighting it and sailed northwest across the Pacific and east through the Indian Ocean without finding any trace of the mysterious continent. By the time the VOC was founded, almost the only place left to look was the great blank that still lay south of the Indies and west of the Americas.
Contemporary globes and maps continued to indicate the presence of Terra Australis in this area. Over the years, elements of fantasy had crept into descriptions of the South-Land, and in the sixteenth century faulty interpretation of the works of Marco Polo led to the addition of three nonexistent provinces to maps of the southern continent. The most