Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [93]
Jonas tugged hard at the haft, but the knife was stuck fast and he could not remove it. He could feel the unfortunate girl still thrashing about beneath him, attempting to free herself with her one good hand, so he let go of the knife and tried to strangle her instead. Even then he could not subdue her, but the sound of their struggles had alerted Wouter Loos, and he ran to Jonas’s aid. Exhausted, wounded, and pinned against the coral, Cardoes had no chance against two soldiers. Loos stoved her skull in with an axe and they hurled the corpse into the pit that had been dug for the bodies of the minister’s family. It was little more than a day since they had murdered the girl’s child.
Still David Zevanck had not had enough. Back in the mutineers’ camp he summoned Allert Janssen, who like Jonas had taken no part in the killing of the predikant’s family, and ordered him to kill the under-barber, Aris Jansz of Hoorn. Like Andries Jonas, Janssen employed a pretext to get the surgeon out of his tent and away from the camp, saying, “Aris, come outside, we have to go and catch four small birds for the merchant.” It was by now well after dark, and Jansz can hardly have believed that this was true, but like Mayken Cardoes he was too scared to refuse. The barber-surgeon and his murderer walked down to the beach, Aris slightly ahead of Allert, and just as they reached it Janssen drew his sword and stuck his victim a sudden blow across the shoulder. At this signal a second mutineer, Cornelis Pietersz, loomed out of the darkness; he had been hiding close by, and now joined in the attack, swinging at Jansz’s head. Remarkably, both men’s swords were so blunt that the surgeon was hardly wounded by their blows. Instead of falling to the ground as they had expected, Jansz took to his heels and vanished into the night, splashing away into the shallows to the east of the island. Janssen and Pietersz went after him, calling one to the other as they searched and no doubt cursing their luck, but their victim had the sense to drop down and let the water hide him, and they could not find him in the darkness. After a few minutes’ fruitless wading to and fro, the two mutineers managed to persuade themselves that Jansz had been critically wounded and was sure to die. “So they said to one another, turning back, ‘Hij heves al wel’ ”—“He’s had it”—and set off together, dripping, to report to Zevanck.
Bleeding somewhat, but otherwise not badly hurt, Aris kept himself hidden until he was quite certain that the mutineers were gone. Then, slowly and with great care, he worked his way around the island to the beach where Cornelisz’s men kept their skiffs. The boats were poorly guarded—probably Zevanck and the others had not imagined that someone might come at them out of the sea rather than along the island paths—and no one saw him as he untethered a little homemade raft and dragged it silently into the water. When he was well clear of the island, Aris clambered aboard, and began to pull for Hayes’s Island to the north.
Thus, by the end of the third week of July, the situation in the Abrolhos was relatively clear. Jeronimus and his gang of mutineers had secured absolute control over Batavia’s Graveyard. Nevertheless, their base, the island itself, was so devoid of natural resources that their position in the longer term was not absolutely assured. They remained dependent on the rain for water and on salvaged, and thus limited, supplied for everything else, from clothing to weaponry.
Meanwhile, Wiebbe Hayes and his original party of 20 men had somehow contrived to survive on the two largest islands in the archipelago. There had been no direct contact between the under-merchant