Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [90]
“On 20 July, at night, he was fetched out of his tent by Jacop Pietersz, who took him into Mayken Cardoes’ tent, where David Zevanck, Jan Hendricxsz and Cornelis Pietersz of Utrecht were, who said to him that they were not certain of his faithfulness [and] therefore took a Young Suckling child from the lap of the foresaid mother, Mayken Cardoes, and said to him, ‘Deschamps, here is a Half dead child. You are not a fighting Man, here is a little noose, go over there and fix it so that we here on the Island do not hear so much wailing.’ Then he, Deschamps, without protest, has taken the child outside the tent and has strangled it, an act of very evil Consequence.”
Mayken Cardoes’s baby was the first of the Batavia survivors that Cornelisz attempted to murder himself, and it would also be the last. Yet by the time Deschamps had squeezed its barely begun life from it, the infant had become the 105th person to die at the under-merchant’s hands. By now fewer than 60 people were still alive on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Jeronimus was close to doing what he had set out to do: “to have murdered or destroyed all the people until the amount of 45 or less.”
Of all the families on the island, by far the largest was the predikant’s. Gijsbert Bastiaensz and Maria Schepens had been blessed with a total of eight children, seven of whom had sailed with them on the Batavia. In an age in which half of all the children born in Europe died before reaching adulthood, Bastiaensz had been exceptionally fortunate to lose only one child in infancy. Even more remarkably, the predikant’s wife, his servant girl, Wybrecht Claasen, and all seven of the children had survived the many rigors of the voyage: running aground on the Walcheren Banks, the long journey to the Abrolhos, the shipwreck, five waterless and agonizing days on Batavia’s Graveyard, the maid’s struggle to fetch water from the hulk, and finally 20 days of terror at the hands of Jeronimus Cornelisz.
Bastiaensz enjoyed a certain status, it was true—one that had guaranteed him and his family good rations on the ship, and some protection on the island, too—but under the circumstances, the fact that he still had all his family around him must have seemed perfectly miraculous to the rest of the Batavia survivors: proof, if any were required, that the predikant truly was a man of God.
Of the minister’s children, four were boys. The eldest, who had been given his grandfather’s name, was called Bastiaen Gijsbertsz; he was 23 years old, and since he was sufficiently well educated and mature to do useful work, he had been given the rank of VOC assistant and spent the voyage helping Pelsaert with his clerical work. His brother Pieter Gijsbertsz was four years younger, but though certainly old enough to join Jan Company he had not done so; it is possible that—since Bastiaen was evidently unsuited to life as a predikant—Gijsbert’s second son was destined for the clergy. The other boys were still of school age: Johannes was 13 and Roelant, the youngest child of all, was only 8.
The minister’s daughters were Judick, Willemijntgie, and Agnete. Judick was the second child; she was 21 and thus of marriageable age. In so large a family she must have spent a good deal of her time helping her mother with the younger children, although Willemijntgie, at 14, was also nearly grown-up. The youngest girl, Agnete, had celebrated her 11th birthday shortly before they had reached the Cape.
On an island where women were outnumbered 9 or 10 to 1 by men, Judick could not help but attract attention, the more so because there were no more than three unmarried women on Batavia’s Graveyard. Soon she was being courted by Coenraat van Huyssen, the young cadet who was by now the murderer of half a dozen people. Being good-looking and a minor member of the nobility, as well as a leading member of Cornelisz’s blood council, Van Huyssen had some claim to be the most eligible of the island’s many bachelors, and unwelcome though his attentions were in most respects, they at least saved the girl