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By Root 290 0

in the comparative luxury of the stern and discovered they had little taste for life on Batavia’s Graveyard. They were young—no more than 21—and inexperienced, and so were unlikely to dispute the under-merchant’s leadership. And since they knew how to handle weapons, the common people on the ship instinctively deferred to them. Several soldiers, led by lance corporal Jacop Pietersz, had also been part of the conspiracy on the retourschip. The best of these were German mercenaries, who were also mostly strong and young; Jan Hendricxsz, from Bremen, was 24, and Mattys Beer, of Munsterbergh, was no more than 21. These men, along with several of their comrades, may well have seen action in the Thirty Years’ War,*29 gaining invaluable military experience along the way. The third and smallest group of mutineers consisted of a few men from the gun deck, mostly sailors whom Jacobsz had recruited but had been unable to take with him on the longboat. The skipper’s good friend Allert Janssen, who had been among the party that assaulted Creesje Jans, was the leading member of this group.

The Batavia mutineers had concealed their true numbers so effectively that it is now impossible to say with any certainty which of the other members of the under-merchant’s gang had been recruited on the ship. It seems likely that Rutger Fredricx, a 23-year-old idler from Groningen, was among the first men to be approached—he was the Batavia’s locksmith, and his skills would have been invaluable to mutineers who needed to imprison or restrain up to 200 of their colleagues. One or two of the VOC assistants were also aware of the conspiracy, and since they must have worked closely with Jeronimus on board the retourschip it may be that they, too, were among the earlier recruits. The remainder of the under-merchant’s followers appear to have been approached after the Batavia was wrecked. They would probably have been recruited from among the friends of the existing mutineers, or those who complained most bitterly about the discomforts of island life.

One of the assistants was of particular importance to Jeronimus. His name was David Zevanck, and he came from a rural area a little to the north of Amsterdam. Zevanck, like the others, was still young, and there are indications that he came from a good family, one that owned property and had some pretensions to gentility. How he had come to sail with the Batavia remains unknown. As one of the ship’s clerks, he must have been an educated man, but there was also a hard edge to his character. He was physically strong and handy with a sword, and of all the people on the ship, he was perhaps the closest to Cornelisz in ambition, ruthlessness, and character. Now he became the under-merchant’s principal lieutenant, organizing the men for him and ensuring that his orders were obeyed.

Beginning in the third week of June, Cornelisz began to plot rebellion, “acting very subtly and gradually, so that in the first 20 days it could not be perceived.” The under-merchant detached his followers from the other survivors, billeting them in two tents together with their weapons, and he collected all the other swords and muskets on the island into a central store that he alone controlled. Next, he prevented the ship’s carpenters from putting into action a plan to build their own small rescue vessel from the wreckage of the retourschip, and he began to look for ways of reducing the number of people on Batavia’s Graveyard. The latter was a necessary precaution, he and Zevanck agreed—both to conserve the limited supplies and to reduce the risk that their conspiracy might be uncovered. As things stood, the mutineers were still outnumbered about six to one by the other men on the island. The intention was to reduce the disparity by half.

The under-merchant’s solution to this problem was simple but effective. He sent his followers to explore the islands, using the first of the little skiffs that the carpenters had built from fragments of driftwood. Their purpose was not so much to find freshwater wells and new colonies of sea lions