Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [77]
Within a day or two, the mutineers returned, reporting to Jeronimus that they had found nothing of any value in the Abrolhos. Like Pelsaert and his sailors, the under-merchant’s men had searched the two large islands to the north without finding any sign of water. They had also visited a pair of smaller islets, one less than half a mile away on the western side of the deep-water channel that ran along one side of Batavia’s Graveyard, and the other a little farther to the south. The closer of the islets was a long, thin, sandy spit that ran north to south for nearly a mile and was crowned with a narrow ridge covered in coarse grass and low vegetation; it was home to large flocks of birds and hundreds of sea lions—so many that the boats’ crews took to calling it Seals’ Island—but the few pools discovered at its southern tip were brackish and undrinkable. The other, which was the islet where Ariaen Jacobsz had set up his temporary camp, was just as desolate. The mutineers found nothing there but a few empty biscuit barrels, and the cay itself, which they named Traitors’ Island in bitter remembrance of the men who had abandoned them, was a mere pancake of loose coral. Its one resource was driftwood, which littered the entire southern shore.
Neither of these islands could possibly support more than a handful of people for any length of time, but the under-merchant did not care. “He said that the number who were [on Batavia’s Graveyard] together, about 200, must be reduced to a very few,” Gijsbert Bastiaensz recalled, and Cornelisz glibly announced that his men had made important discoveries. “Those people coming back again had got enough information that there was not any consolation there for any Human Beings,” remarked the predikant, “but the Merchant ordered them to say that there was water and good food for the people; whereupon some others were ordered to go, and others went of their own accord to know truthfully if there was Water.”
One group of about 40 men, women, and children were taken to Seals’ Island. They were provided with a few barrels of water and promised that fresh supplies would be ferried to them whenever they were needed. A smaller party, 15 strong and commanded by the provost, Pieter Jansz, traveled to Traitors’ Island. They took with them all the tools they needed to make rafts on the islet. Jeronimus had promised them that they could make their way to the larger islands to the north as soon as the boats were ready.
Shortly afterward, towards the end of the third week of June, it was announced that the “High Land” to the north was also to be colonized. These two large islands had now been searched for water twice without success—by Pelsaert on 6 June and by Zevanck and his men a fortnight later—but the survivors on Batavia’s Graveyard did not know this, so there were no protests when a third detachment, 20 strong, was sent to hunt for hidden wells. Almost all of the members of this party were troops who had remained loyal to the Company; they included “some of the boldest soldiers,” the predikant believed. Jeronimus saw to it that they were only lightly equipped and ensured that they were issued neither weapons nor a boat. The men were told to light signal fires when—or if—they found fresh water and were promised that they would be picked up when the fires were seen. In fact, Cornelisz had no intention of returning for them and hoped that they might die of thirst.
The group sent to the High Land included two young cadets, Otto Smit and Allert Jansz, but its real leader seems to have been a private from the small town of Winschoten in Groningen whose name was Wiebbe Hayes. Nothing at all is known about Hayes’s background, age, or military