Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [70]
All this left at best half a dozen men to control and lead more than 170 frightened, cold, and hungry people, perhaps a quarter of whom were foreigners with an imperfect grasp of Dutch. To make matters worse, this tiny handful of officers could no longer rely on fear of the VOC to back up their orders. Authority was now a matter of persuasion, compromise, and cooperation—something none of them would have experienced before.
The caliber of the men on the island left a great deal to be desired. The only officer of any rank was Frans Jansz, the surgeon, whose popularity among the crew was no substitute for his inexperience of command. Nevertheless, in the first few days after the wreck, it would appear to have been Jansz who began to organize the survivors and who set about establishing a council to lead them, as was required by the customs of the VOC.
Jan Company was run by councils and committees. The Gentlemen XVII controlled the business as a whole, and each chamber had its own board of directors. In Java, even the governor-general worked through the Council of the Indies, and the highest authority in any VOC flotilla was not the fleet president, acting alone, but the Brede Raad, or Broad Council. While the ships were at sea, every upper-merchant and skipper in the squadron was entitled to a seat on this council, which dealt not only with any questions of broad strategy but also with criminal offenses. Because it was commonplace for the vessels of a fleet to become separated on their way out to the Indies, however, each retourschip also had its own ship’s council, with a normal membership of five. This council would typically consist of the skipper and the upper-merchant together with the vessel’s under-merchant, upper-steersman, and high boatswain, but the raad that was now set up on Batavia’s Graveyard was, necessarily, very different.
In all likelihood, the surgeon’s main supports would have been the predikant and the one real figure of authority on the island—the provost, Pieter Jansz. It had been the latter’s task to administer discipline on board ship, although his authority derived largely from the skipper and he actually ranked somewhere below the cooper and the carpenter in the Batavia’s hierarchy. It might be conjectured that the remaining members of the council would have been a petty officer, representing the sailors on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Salomon Deschamps, Pelsaert’s clerk, who was the most senior VOC employee actually on the island. This group would probably have turned to Gabriel Jacobszoon, the corporal of the 70 or more soldiers in the survivors’ party, for assistance; his men were a natural counterbalance to the sailors on the island. But even with the corporal’s support, the council lacked natural authority and probably struggled to keep order in the face of any real opposition from the men.
The need for such a body had been starkly demonstrated during the first day on Batavia’s Graveyard. At first the survivors’ chief emotions must have been relief, curiosity about their new environment, and considerable uncertainty as to what they should do next; but it would have taken only a short time to explore the island, and by the afternoon of 5 June the first pangs of hunger and thirst had unquestionably driven at least a few people to take what they needed from their limited supplies.
In some respects this was a natural reaction; the survivors knew that there was more food and water on the wreck and did not realize that foul weather, and the rioting soldiers and sailors still on board, had prevented Pelsaert and Jacobsz from salvaging more barrels from the stores. Nevertheless, once it became clear that some people were helping themselves to the barrels on the island, others would have hurried to secure a fair share for themselves. Already the once-disorganized mass of people on the island had begun to coalesce into small groups, half a dozen