Batavia (11 page)

Meanwhile, down in the galley, the cooks are nearly always preparing for, or cleaning up from, a meal, while the cabin boys, some of whom are as young as ten and 12 years old, are scurrying every which way – both up and down and around and around – on errands of fetching, cleaning, shining, emptying chamber pots and taking messages.

None are busier than young Rogier Decker, the cabin boy whose province of operations includes caring for the needs of the
Onderkoopman
, Jeronimus Cornelisz. Despite the wide chasm separating master and servant, in terms of age as well as status, something of a bond has been established between the two in these early days of the voyage. This does not extend to sodomy – a common enough occurrence between high officers and cabin boys, despite the extreme penalties for being caught – but is more a meeting of the minds.

In conversations, Jeronimus has detected in the young man a certain naivety, a lack of gravitas, which attracts him greatly. It has been his experience that lads like this are a fairly blank canvas upon which he can work, ideally to steer him towards becoming a man of whom Torrentius himself might be proud. Behind closed doors in Jeronimus’s tight cabin, thus, the two often sit on the
Onderkoopman’s
cot together, the older man sharing with the lad the broad outline of his Rosicrucian philosophy. Flattered by the attention and fascinated by the idea of ‘no heaven, no hell, no consequences’, young Decker soaks it all up like a sponge. Day by day, Jeronimus is amused to see a new confidence growing in him, a certain contempt for others being expressed, a loss of respect for authority simply for authority’s sake. It all is very promising.

The key punctuation points of the day, apart from changing watches, are mealtimes. For the common herd below decks, salted beef and pork, dried fish, apples and prunes, beans, buckwheat and peas, and the hardtack biscuits manufactured in bakeries north of Amsterdam – all of them prepared to last a long time – make up the basic diet. Early in the voyage, it is not bad. But, while the ship’s hull has been fiercely protected against the shipworm and other parasites, the same cannot be said of the food. Put simply, although the bread-room, where they store bread and cheese, is lined with a thin layer of tin, there is little protection against maggots, weevils and beetles, and as the voyage goes on, just as bedbugs and cockroaches abound in the bedding, a constant part of eating is clearing as much of these vermin away from the food before consuming each mouthful. (It is for this reason that sailors in the city are always recognisable to the rest of the population for their notorious habit of automatically tapping their bread on the table, to make as many worms and weevils as possible fall out before eating it.)

Breakfast for those below decks usually consists of bread and porridge washed down by servings of low-alcohol beer (
het Engels
, the English, otherwise referred to as ‘small beer’). The porridge is served out in enormous wooden bowls, to be shared between six or seven mess-mates holding large wooden spoons, who go at it like ravenous dogs on a small piece of meat, each eager to get at least their share. ‘When the sailors are done feeding like animals,’ a roughly contemporary account runs, ‘for they don’t eat like people, they say: “There,
he who can’t fart
has to clean out the bowl.”’

And so he does, while the rest take their place ahead of him in the queue to get their beer. Each man is allowed half a quart from the barrels kept near the mainmast, and each serving into his individual cup is strictly marked off against his name. Those with the rank of bosun and above are allowed double this ration. While the supplies hold out – usually for the first six weeks of the voyage – the beer is safer to drink than the water. (Even the beer deteriorates, however, and begins to stink after a month. Water is even worse. The VOC buys its supply from an orphanage on the island of Texel, which boasts many freshwater wells with a high iron content. The iron helps stop the water from becoming slimy too quickly, but still, after some months, sailors are obliged to suck their portion between their teeth to filter from it both algae and a variety of tiny beasties that delight in making such slimy water their home.)

As to lunch, served at noon, it varies between half a pound of ham with beans on Sundays and such things as fish or pork with beans on the other days – also washed down with beer.

At the sound of four bells signalling the beginning of dog watch at 6 pm, dinner is generally a much lighter meal, usually consisting of leftovers and followed, too, by beer.

Among the elite of the ship in the Great Cabin, meals could not be more different to the fare served below decks. This is partly because the soldiers on the orlop deck are eating in near darkness, whereas those privileged to eat in the Great Cabin are in the only chamber on the whole ship that has genuine lattice windows, throwing an ethereal light on proceedings. It is also partly because those eating there don’t have to fight for food from a common bowl like those below.

But mainly it is because, here in the Great Cabin, there is full table service, with polished silver cutlery, crystal decanters and all crockery embossed with the official seal of the VOC, all of it served by cabin servants. The meals are without rationing of any kind, and during lunch and dinner particularly there may be as many as a dozen courses. These rely on meat from the freshly slaughtered chickens, pigs and lambs, or perhaps the fish caught that day, together with salads and vegetables grown on the upper poop deck, leavened with spices, cheeses, dried fruit and the like, followed by fine wines drunk from crystal glasses.

Most meals begin with the
Predikant
saying something that is meant to be merely grace but often turns into something close to a full-blown sermon, as the religious man meticulously ticks off all those parts of their voyage that the Lord might help them with, pausing only to regularly mop his brow as the perspiration simply
pours
from his jowly face, like water from Moses’s struck stone . . .

Of course, as the
Predikant
intones, his two hands lift high towards the heavens, as if to funnel his voice to the very ear of the Lord. In response, nearly all those gathered around the table – the likes of Commandeur Pelsaert, with his favourite notary beside him, Salomon Deschamps, the particularly pious
opperstuurman
Claas Gerritsz, and so on – have their own hands clasped as tightly together as their eyes are shut, with their heads bowed, their yawns stifled. But there are always two exceptions to this demonstration of piety.

Jeronimus has long ago come to believe that all such invocations to the God above are a complete waste of time. Though, under the circumstances, he feels obliged to follow form well enough to clasp his hands and roughly bow his head, it is sometimes beyond him to resist slyly glancing around with amused contempt at all this holiness gathered so tightly together. Frequently, thus, his eyes lock with those of Skipper Jacobsz, who has himself not a scrap of religion left in him. The little religious instruction in his upbringing has been knocked out of him in his travels through bars and bordellos across the seven seas in the company of sailors more familiar with filth than faith.

It is a rare grace from the
Predikant
in which a shared glance and smirk do not pass between Jeronimus and Skipper Jacobsz . . . and when their eyes move off each other, they always settle on a common point.

Lucretia.

For it is at such meals that both men are able to gain precious close-up looks at Lucretia Jans. She is a beauty, and, no doubt about it, a
lady
. Superbly coiffed, fine-featured, with stylish clothes that nevertheless don’t quite succeed in hiding the bountiful curves beneath, Lucretia is no less than breathtaking in her beauty – an opinion shared by every man aboard who has been blessed enough to get close to her.

A different kind of skipper than Jacobsz, a more proper gentleman, would keep a very respectful distance from this very virtuous Dutchwoman, who is married, to boot. But not Jacobsz. For, however much puritanical rectitude is a trademark of the VOC, it is not one immediately apparent in the captain of its leading ship, the
Batavia
.

Notwithstanding the fact that he has a wife back in the Dutch Republic, Skipper Jacobsz has long been in the practice of trying his luck with any attractive female who comes his way, and – given that he is not without either a roguish charm or rank – he has met with at least his fair share of success in this regard. And while Jacobsz is fully aware of Lucretia’s marital status and elevated position in society, he sees no reason why that should be an impediment to their enjoying each other’s charms to the full. With that in mind, he continues to insinuate himself into her company and engage her in conversation, trying to warm her up a little.

He gets no further than a gnarled old turkey might in trying to mate with a gorgeous young swan – it is certainly good for lots of laughs for everyone watching but that is the only tangible result.

While Lucretia remains formally polite, she is still able to make it quite clear that she has no interest in having anything other than crisply proper conversations with him, and even that is a stretch. There is about her a bearing of ‘I am a beautiful
lady
of high breeding, while you are an old sea dog of an indeterminate father and an all-too-familiar mother’. Or something like that . . .

A different man than Jacobsz would have tempered his attentions at this point. And yet still he tries, meal after meal, striving to impress the beauty with tales of his voyages across the globe, the places he has seen, the storms he has survived, using seduction techniques he has employed to great and unsurprising effect in dozens of brothels across the globe, from Bremen to Batavia itself. In response, Lucretia doesn’t so much listen as sit there stony-faced, as if she is silently willing him to stop, while certainly not uttering a single word that might encourage him. When even this position can no longer be sustained, she asks him to desist forthwith . . . before outright
insisting
that Skipper Jacobsz not address one more word to her. Not
one
more word! And she means it, too.

For his part, Jeronimus Cornelisz watches the daily interaction between Lucretia and Jacobsz with acid amusement, sometimes dabbing his lips with his still scented handkerchief to hide the smile he simply cannot repress. At one point, when a twinkling Jeronimus playfully chides Jacobsz for pursuing a lady so far above his rank, the skipper replies that he cares not; this particular lady is
so
fine he desires to tempt her to his will, and if she will not be tempted by himself alone, then he will tempt her with
gold
!

Jeronimus likes Jacobsz but is under no illusions as to where the skipper’s talents lie. For all his great abilities as a mariner, he is clearly a buffoon in matters of seduction, and in the person of Lucretia he is continually crashing upon a shore that bears him no welcoming harbour between two friendly outreaching peninsulas, and never will.

Personally, meanwhile, Jeronimus puts himself not only at the top of the list of those who want Lucretia but, more importantly, of those who
deserve
her. Is he not a sensualist almost by profession, who knows better than any man not so much how to please a woman – for who cares about that? – but how to please
himself
with a woman? And no matter that, to this point, he has himself fared no better than Jacobsz in his own careful advances towards her – she is as cold as a frozen Amsterdam canal to him, too – it is still only early days.

Jeronimus has long ago learned in his amorous career that, when pursuing a woman, even a seemingly unattainable one, it is amazing how opportunities sometimes present themselves, once circumstances have changed. Quite how the circumstances might change on this journey, he knows not, but there remains a good six months until they are due to arrive in Batavia, and anything could happen . . .

In the meantime, however, there is something that galls both Jacobsz and Jeronimus about Lucretia. While she has been fully resistant to their own charms, she soon becomes quite taken with those of that endlessly irritating cur, Pelsaert!

Oh, how gaily she laughs at the
Commandeur’s
stories, how deferential she is to his views, how
interested
she is in everything that being a long-time official of the VOC entails, as Pelsaert expounds at great length a broad range of subjects: his dealings with the Moguls at court in Surat; his rapid rise within the VOC while previously in the Indies; the intricacies of the indigo industry; the seductive properties of certain spices and scents; what they can expect when they arrive in Batavia; and so forth. And even
helping
him in his wretched spiels is his infernal notary, Salomon Deschamps, who was with him in India for nigh on eight years. He is sitting to his right now, knows all the best stories by heart and is constantly steering the
Commandeur
to his advantage, to make him look and sound even more impressive.

Glowering, Jacobsz tries to disguise his irritation the best he can, yet he only partially succeeds. He simply cannot believe that it has come to this, that this delectable Dutchwoman can see
anything
in Pelsaert. And yet it is true.

Either by way of refuge or out of simple compassion, Lucretia is progressively more drawn to Commandeur Pelsaert as the journey continues. He is a refuge to her because he is one of the few men on the ship who does not overtly leer at her, and she feels compassion for him because his illness has now developed to the point that he frequently has to retreat to his cabin for days at a time, and Lucretia has adopted the role of a quasi-nurse.

Just as Pelsaert is isolated from the men on the ship by his ill health, and also by his exalted rank, Lucretia is rather isolated from the women, and not nearly as isolated from the men as she would wish . . . so, like Jeronimus and Jacobsz, she and Pelsaert fit well together.