Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [75]
What, then, was he to do if a Dutch rescue ship arrived? To a man as ruthless as Cornelisz, the answer appeared obvious. A jacht might carry a crew of no more than 20 or 30 sailors, so few they could be overwhelmed in a well-planned attack. Given the support of enough determined men, he could make himself the master of a rescue ship. There would be no need then to go to Java. Instead he could pursue the plan he had conceived in the Southern Ocean: turn pirate, make a fortune, and retire to some foreign port to enjoy the fruits of his endeavor.
Even if there turned out to be no rescue and no voyage, Cornelisz could see advantages to freeing himself from the restraints he labored under in the Abrolhos. As things stood, there were distinct limits to his power and authority. His suggestions might always be respected, and his orders generally obeyed, but there were still four other councillors on the raad, and he could be outvoted. The matter was made more serious by the fact that Jeronimus’s colleagues did not share his views on the need to hoard their limited supplies. Frans Jansz and the other councillors, the under-merchant had begun to think, would kill them all with their ridiculous insistence on eking out a ration to every man, woman, and child on the island. That was something he could not allow to happen.
Sometime during the third week of the month, therefore, Jeronimus made up his mind to instigate the mutiny that he had planned on the Batavia. The circumstances were, of course, now very different. There was no longer any ship to seize; the under-merchant’s closest ally, Ariaen Jacobsz, had deserted him; and—most importantly—it would no longer be nearly such an easy matter to control the majority of loyalists in the crew. But the Cornelisz’s goals had hardly changed. Jeronimus sought wealth, power, comfort, and security, and he was prepared to go to any lengths to secure himself these luxuries.
It took the under-merchant perhaps a week to recruit the men he needed to seize power on the island. Exactly how he managed this was never revealed in any detail. The survivors’ situation—stranded, short of food and water, and apparently abandoned by the VOC—no doubt made his task easier than it would otherwise have been, and the fact that up to a dozen of the sailors and soldiers who had been ready to mutiny on the retourschip had found themselves trapped on Batavia’s Graveyard was a significant advantage. But he also had his own abilities to call on—a quick, if perverse, mind and a pathologically charming tongue.
The Jeronimus of Pelsaert’s journals remains at best a half-drawn figure: ruthless and deadly, certainly, yet also someone whose real personality has always been obscured by layer upon layer of lies and special pleading. But he was, it seems, a truly charismatic figure—able to persuade a varied group of men that their interests were identical to his—and his talk of the wealth and luxury that might yet lie within their grasp certainly made enticing listening for men trapped in the grey surrounds of Houtman’s Abrolhos. Cornelisz was obviously and genuinely clever, and so vital that he stood out among the failures, novices, and second-raters who peopled the Batavia’s stern. He was also self-assured and eloquent in a way that awed men who were neither. The rabble of the gun deck and the educated assistants of the stern alike seem to have found him irresistible. Long before the end of June he had gathered about two dozen followers around him and felt ready to put his plans into action.
Most of Jeronimus’s men had been with him on the Batavia. The most valuable of them were a handful of army cadets, men such as Coenraat van Huyssen and Gsbert van Welderen who had sailed for Java