Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [95]
They sighted the South-Land on the afternoon of 8 June, their first day at sea. The coast was bleak and utterly forbidding: flat; featureless; devoid of water, trees, or vegetation; and protected by an unbroken line of cliffs that stretched as far as could be seen in either direction. Huge breakers crashed endlessly against the rocks, churning the sea white with foam and making any approach to land extremely hazardous. By now night was only a few hours away, and Jacobsz did not dare remain inshore; instead, he steered back out to sea for several hours, turning east again at midnight and coming back upon the coast a few miles to the north at dawn. The sun rose to reveal an identically awe-inspiring cliffscape, and they sailed north along it for a whole day without finding anywhere to land.
Pelsaert and Jacobsz had, in fact, chanced upon the South-Land coast at its most desolate. From Houtman’s Abrolhos the shoreline remains almost unremittingly hostile all the way to what is now Shark Bay, 200 miles to the north. Along the way, the cliffs rise precipitately to heights of up to 750 feet. There are almost no safe landing places, and the hinterland is parched and almost uninhabited.
A few decades later, another Dutchman, Willem de Vlamingh, sailed along this stretch of coast and described it as “an evil place”:
“The land here appears very bleak, and so abrupt as if the coast had been chopped off with an axe, which makes it almost impossible to land. The waves break with so great a fury that one should say that everything around must shake and become dismembered, which appears to us a truly terrible sight.”
Pelsaert was of the same opinion. The cliffs, he noted gloomily, were “very steeply hewn, without any foreshore or inlets as have other countries.” Worse, the land behind them was uniformly unpromising: “a dry, cursed earth without foliage or grass.” There was no sign of any water.
To make matters worse, another storm blew up toward evening on 9 June, and the longboat was caught dangerously close to the coast. Jacobsz and Pelsaert had been searching for a landing place when the wind rose in the west, and they were driven steadily toward the cliffs. For a while it seemed they would all be tipped into the surf to drown, but eventually the skipper got them clear. Even then, however, it took continued effort from the steersmen to keep the boat clear of the shore, and they passed a miserable night and the whole of the next day battling the rising seas.
By the second evening, Jacobsz and his sailors were exhausted, soaked, and chilled, and still the gale showed no sign of abating. The wind started to gust out of the northwest, setting up a dangerous chop that slapped against the built-up sides and sometimes swilled into the longboat. The little yawl they had towed from the Abrolhos was taking on water too, and as it grew dark they were forced to cut the smaller boat adrift and bail their own craft frantically. They were so tightly packed there was little room for such energetic work, and before long the situation had become so desperate that Jacobsz ordered them to tip much of their food and spare equipment overboard. Two small barrels of fresh water in the bottom of the boat were spared.
With most of the supplies gone, the boat rode a little higher in the water and there was more room to bail. Gradually the danger of swamping receded, and on the morning of 11 June the storm blew itself out. But the swell remained as high as ever, and the current pushed them ever farther north.
For three more days they searched fruitlessly for a landing spot until, after a week at sea, they had reached latitude 24 degrees south. The longboat was now about 300 miles from the Abrolhos and one-sixth of the way to Java, and their own supply of water had nearly gone. Only strict rationing—half a pint per person per day—had made it last so long, but