Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [82]
Traitors’ Island was only half a mile away, and there was little time to waste. Zevanck and Van Huyssen ran to gather their familiar accomplices—Gsbert van Welderen, Jan Hendricxsz, and Lenert van Os—and hurried to the beach where they kept their boats. Two other members of Jeronimus’s gang came with them—they were Lucas Gellisz, a young cadet from The Hague, and Cornelis Pietersz, a common soldier from Utrecht—but this, it seems, was as many as their fastest yawl could carry. The seven men seized oars and steered southwest to intercept the rafts.
Pieter Jansz must have been alarmed to see the mutineers. The provost may well have guessed that Zevanck and his friends intended violence, for the murders of Hans Radder and Jacop Groenwald had taken place within sight of Traitors’ Island, but he soon realized that he could not evade the yawl. His clumsy rafts were so much slower than the neat rowing boat the Batavia’s carpenters had built that Zevanck and his men had little difficulty in catching him.
The rafts were in the middle of a stretch of deep water when the mutineers caught up with them. As the yawl came within hailing distance, Zevanck raised his voice and called out to Jansz, demanding to know where he and his companions were going. Then he ordered the provost to change his course and make for Batavia’s Graveyard instead.
While this was happening, the mutineers’ yawl had swung alongside the provost’s raft, and Gellisz, Pietersz, Hendricxsz, and Van Os swarmed from one to the other, armed and full of menace. Three or four of Jansz’s men attempted to escape by hurling themselves into the sea, where they quickly drowned. The rest offered little resistance, and in less than a minute Zevanck’s men had relieved the provost of his command. Soon both the rafts were heading for the under-merchant’s island.
Jansz must by now have become seriously concerned for the safety of his family, but there was little he could do to protect them. He and his men watched uneasily as Zevanck jumped into the shallows and ran up the beach to where Jeronimus was standing by the entrance to his tent. The two men consulted for a moment, then Zevanck turned and hastened back toward the rafts. “Slaet doodt!” he was shouting. “Kill!”
Lucas Gellisz had got into the water and was holding the rafts steady. Hendricxsz, Pietersz, and Van Os were still on board. Quickly, the three men drew their swords and cut down the provost and his child. Two, perhaps three, of the remaining men were also killed, as was Claudine Patoys’s child, but for once the mutineers had found themselves outnumbered, and four of Jansz’s party threw themselves over the side into water that came up to their waists. Two of them were sailors—friends named Pauwels Barentsz and Bessel Jansz, who both came from the little port of Harderwijk in Gelderland. The other pair were soldiers Claes Harmanszoon and Nicolaas Winckelhaack. These men had apparently not realized that Cornelisz himself had ordered the attack, for they staggered out of the sea loudly imploring the under-merchant for protection. Jeronimus gazed down as the four men sprawled at his feet, soaked and breathless, panicked, desperate. “Give them no quarter,” he declared.
Jan Hendricxsz had come running up the beach behind the men, his sword still in his hand. Now he lunged at Pauwels Barentsz, carving a great wound in his side. Barentsz fell backward onto the sand as Andries Jonas—another of Cornelisz’s followers and, at 40, the oldest of the mutineers—loomed over him and thrust a pike right through his throat, turning the sailor’s screams to blood-flecked gasps and pinning him down while he died. Hendricxsz, meanwhile, slashed at Winckelhaack, killing him immediately, after which he wounded Bessel Jansz. Rutger Fredricx came to join him, “striking the mentioned Bessel with his sword until he was dead”; then the locksmith, alone, slew Harmanszoon as he fled back through the shallows. That left only the three