Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [71]
By evening on the second day, 6 June, the people on the island had begun to realize their mistake. There had been no more rain; a thorough search of the whole island had revealed no wells; and Pelsaert’s one attempt to bring more water had failed in circumstances that suggested there would be no others. The survivors were already suffering from thirst but, without boats, they had no means of leaving Batavia’s Graveyard to search for water. All 180 of them were trapped on an arid prison—one that, without another rainstorm, would quickly kill them.
As the drought continued into a third day, and then a fourth, the survivors’ agonies became intense. Without water, their bodies swiftly became dehydrated; after a day or so, saliva thickened into an unpleasant paste, and soon after that their mouths ceased to produce it altogether. Thereafter the symptoms only became worse: tongues hardened and swelled; eyelids cracked; the eyes themselves wept tears of blood. Throats became so dry that even breathing seemed difficult.
Ten of the people on the island died. The old and young would have been the first to weaken, but after four or five days without water all of the survivors would have been affected to a considerable degree. They clung to life by adopting the strategies that shipwrecked men and castaways have always turned to. Most, from the predikant down, drank their own urine; a few threw aside their caution and gulped seawater; a third group chewed incessantly on lead pellets in the vain hope that they could generate enough saliva to afford at least some relief. It is very likely, though the sources do not mention it, that they also killed seabirds and sea lions in order to drink their blood.
None of these methods of relieving thirst are particularly effective. Drinking one’s “own water,” as Gijsbert Bastiaensz put it, would have helped the survivors to reduce the risk of dehydration, but urine contains so many salts that it is worse than useless for quenching thirst. So too is seawater, and though it can be safely drunk in small quantities, one and a half pints—which contains the equivalent of an adult male’s daily requirement of salt—is the most that should be consumed in a single day. But the Batavia’s survivors had no way of knowing this. So potent is the folklore on the subject, which insists that drinking seawater leads invariably to madness, that they, like most shipwrecked sailors, no doubt refused it until they were already so dehydrated that it would have done them much more harm than good.
After three or four days without water, sheer desperation forced the people on the island to try to get fresh supplies from the wreck. There was not yet enough driftwood to build a raft, but the predikant’s servant-girl, whose name was Wybrecht Claasen, was a strong swimmer, and she volunteered to try to reach the ship without one. The Batavia was almost a mile away, but it was possible to wade across at least part of the shallows, and after two attempts the girl contrived to reach the reef. She hauled herself onto a rock within hailing distance of the ship, calling for a rope, and the people on the wreck hurled over a line. Claasen tied the rope around her waist and was hauled on board through the breakers—“not without great danger to her life,” as one of those watching from the island observed.
Remarkably, the maid did manage to return safely to Batavia’s Graveyard. It does not seem possible that she brought much water with her, but even a small amount would have helped to revive them and, in any case, her exploit was important from a purely moral point of view. It was the first real triumph the survivors had enjoyed since