Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [68]
The log was hardly a precision tool; the only way to time its progress along the side was to use a 30-second hourglass or a human pulse, and in any case it could not indicate the prevailing currents. Plotting a ship’s position correctly was thus all but impossible. Errors of 500 miles or more were commonplace, and it is in retrospect surprising that Dutch navigators did not find themselves cast up on the Australian coast more often than they did.
As they neared the end of their long journey, then, Jacobsz and his steersmen were trusting in dead reckoning and intuition to keep Batavia clear of the South-Land’s shores. The charts available on the ship were of at best limited use to them; the most up-to-date available, drawn in the summer of 1628, showed only broken fragments of the coast and the scattering of islands that the Dutch had occasionally encountered up to 60 miles off shore. Probably the skipper hardly bothered to consult them; in the early days of June he still believed he would not sight Terra Australis for another week or so.
In fact, a deadly obstacle now lay in the Batavia’s path. In 1619 the upper-merchant Frederick de Houtman—the brother of the man who had led the Eerste Schipvaart east in 1595—had stumbled on and lent his name to Houtman’s Abrolhos, the low-lying chain of reefs and islands that formed the principal obstacle to Dutch ships heading north along the Australian coast. He had been sailing from the Cape to Java in the East Indiaman Dordrecht (the same ship, groaning with age, was now a part of Pelsaert’s fleet) when he unexpectedly “came upon the south-land Beach” only six weeks out of Table Bay. Veering west and out to sea, the Dordrecht sailed north for 10 more days until De Houtman chanced on the islands of the Abrolhos where his charts indicated there should be only open sea. The surrounding reefs were plainly dangerous, and he did not survey them, merely sketching in their presence on his charts. The same islands were sighted by the Tortelduif*28 in 1624, but the skipper of that ship told few men what he had seen.
No other retourschip chanced on the Abrolhos before 1629, so Ariaen Jacobsz would have known nothing but the fact of their existence. No maps existed to tell him there were three groups of islands, stretched out south to north. No rutter recorded that even the largest of them was so low that the archipelago could not be seen from any distance, nor that it sprawled across almost a full degree of latitude, directly in the path of the Batavia. No instinct told Jacobsz that he should shorten sail by night and proceed cautiously by day.
When the ship struck, she therefore did so at full speed.
5
The Tiger
“Everything that has been done is not my fault.”
JERONIMUS CORNELISZ
IT WAS AS THOUGH THEY HAD BEEN CAST up on the edges of the world. Even today, on sullen afternoons, the islands of the Abrolhos are monochrome and listless—so drab they seem to suck the color from the sky. It is as if the archipelago lies somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, and the steel-tinged light suffusing it has filtered through a hundred feet of water. Deprived of sun, the sparse vegetation turns the color of old parchment; the clouds are dull and specked with quartz; even the sea is grey. The only thing alive there is the wind.
The gales blow endlessly throughout the southern winter, tearing up from the Roaring Forties and billowing so hard that they bend the low scrub double. Wind cracks and rattles canvas and whistles in the gaps between the coral. From May until July, the islands are swept repeatedly by storms, which rage for up to 10 days at a time, pile up surf against the reefs, and smash anything in their path, sending spray 30 or 40 feet into the air. The winds can rise to hurricane force—as much as 80 miles per hour, enough to ground the islands’ seabirds and knock the breath from any man who walks into them. They are made unbearable by the fact that there is virtually no shelter anywhere in the Abrolhos. On Batavia’s Graveyard, only a slight