Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [91]
The preacher and his daughter now found themselves in an impossible position. “Coenraat van Huyssen from Gelderlandt,” scribbled Bastiaensz,
“a member of the Council of those Murderers, besought my Daughter in Holy Wedlock. But said he would make a Betrothal with her and marry her legally before all the World, [and] that he would do at the first opportunity; many words were said about this matter, too long to narrate, for Judick and I deliberated thus: that it was better to be kept legally by one Man, in such a time, than to be mis-used. Therefore he made a betrothal vow with her, and all that went with that.
“I begged that she should go and live with him the next day . . . but the other Murderers, coming in front of the Tent, said that it had to happen that night and immediately, otherwise they were ready to kill us . . . . She has been with him in that respect, but she has not been abused, as she has told me. What could one do against it?”
As her father had predicted, Judick’s relationship with Van Huyssen was enough to safeguard her from harm, but even if the mutineer’s feelings for the girl were genuine, she had no power to protect the other members of her family. For two weeks now Cornelisz had eased his boredom and sated his men’s increasing blood lust every second or third day. The general pattern was one of increasing violence. Drownings had given way to stabbings and cut throats, and the sheer scale of the murders had increased, too—from the 15 people killed on 9 July to the 23 dispatched on Seals’ Island nine days later. In the three days since the latter massacre, however, the one incident of note had been the under-merchant’s poisoning of Mayken Cardoes’s child. This was not enough for some of the mutineers. The daily routine of catching, preparing, and eating food held limited appeal for men who had come to enjoy the power of taking life, and by the end of the third week of the month Zevanck and the others were anxious to kill again. The largest (indeed the only real) target left to them was the family of Gijsbert Bastiaensz.
Judick was now inviolate, and Cornelisz had decided the predikant himself might also be worth sparing; though their theologies could not have been more different, Jeronimus could still see uses for a man of God. Maria Schepens and her six remaining children were a different matter. On the evening of 21 July, Bastiaensz and his eldest daughter were lured away from their quarters by an invitation to dine with Van Huyssen and Cornelisz in the jonker’s quarters. While they were being entertained with a meal of cask meat and red wine salvaged from the wreck, David Zevanck and Jacop Pietersz gathered seven of the principal mutineers. Together, they made their way to the minister’s tent. It would be “a pleasant outing,” the Stone-Cutter declared, to “put the predikant’s folk out of the way.”
By now they were well-practiced killers, and the murders had been carefully planned. Earlier in the evening a group of Cornelisz’s men had dug a grave pit, large enough to hold eight bodies, not far from the tents. Zevanck and Pietersz had also decided to kill the family in their tent, where there would be less chance of any of the children contriving to escape. To this end the men exchanged their swords for knives and hatchets, which were better tools for killing at close quarters.
Pietersz and Andries Jonas were the last to arrive in the survivors’ camp. They found Zevanck and Jan Hendricxsz waiting; with them were Lenert van Os, Mattys Beer, Cornelis Pietersz, Andries Liebent, and a Dutch soldier called