Batavia (41 page)

It is to be a very easy murder indeed for old Andries Jonas. Staying closely behind Zevanck, he carefully walks towards the fire, and they only go to ground when there is a chance that the fire’s glow will illuminate them. Then, when Zevanck is satisfied that everyone is in position, he points out to Andries who his mark is: the heavily pregnant Mayken Soers – so pregnant, she will be incapable of running far if she tries it. Andries grips his knife tightly and steels himself. This is what has to be done if he is to survive. He is neither a bad man nor a good man, particularly. He is just a man preparing himself to do what has to be done. He
has
to do this.

Then, Zevanck suddenly steps forward into the light, as Mattys Beer appears from the other side. Two of the women start to scream, but Mayken Soers is not one of them. To Andries, she seems to simply look up resignedly, as if this is no more than what she has been expecting all along.

Gently, thus, even as the other women wail all around, Andries takes her by the hand and says to her, ‘Mayken, love, you must die.’ And then he throws her down, puts his knees upon her chest – as opposed to her bulging stomach, because that somehow doesn’t seem right – and then cuts her throat. She appears to be dead within seconds, so heavily does his knife penetrate her neck, to the point that
it nearly severs her head
.

Jan Pelgrom, meantime, is struggling with another of the wives, who is putting up such a furious fight that he can’t easily get his knife to her throat. But, in the end, it is exactly as Jeronimus says: once you are a murderer, the next one is easy. For Andries Jonas now takes his knife, wipes Mayken’s blood on his trousers, walks over and helps Jan Pelgrom. Two stabs of his knife into this woman and she ceases her struggle entirely. She, too, is soon dead. Not that there is quiet, for all that.

Instead, there is screaming and swearing coming in equal measure from the cabin boys, whom van Welderen, Mattys Beer and the others are laying into with daggers, morning stars and clubs, exacting a fearful toll. In such close quarters, the Mutineers must be careful not to hurt each other, but, by standing far enough apart, that is easily accomplishable, just as by swinging their weapons violently they can’t fail to hit one of the screaming cabin boys.

When it is all over, four women and eight boys have been killed, while, unbeknown to them, three of the cabin boys have managed to escape into the night and have now secreted themselves elsewhere on the island. It has been a good night’s work, and the
Kapitein-Generaal
will be pleased.

The only downside is speculation that the eight men really have got away and are now in all likelihood with Wiebbe Hayes and his band. That problem will have to be resolved.

20 July 1629, Batavia’s Graveyard

Strange, how rain on one day can make a baby lustily cry for the following three. In the first few days on Batavia’s Graveyard after the wreck, the once bouncing baby of Mayken Cardoes was so weak, so very near death, that it simply had no energy to make a lot of noise. In recent weeks, though, a pattern has developed whereby the rain falls and the baby’s strength briefly improves, as increased sustenance comes from Mayken’s replenished breasts. The usual ration of two pannikins of water per day is not enough for Mayken to make both herself
and
her baby flourish, though, meaning that in dry times the baby tends to be quiet once more. When a good rain falls again, as it did two days earlier, her milk flows freely again, so the baby is strong enough to wail to her heart’s content.

And it drives Jeronimus
mad
. For an entire day and night, the baby has been wailing, surely catching up on the shrieks it has missed out on, and now the
Kapitein-Generaal
decides he can stand it no more. He has just the solution.
Mercurium sublimatum
, this solution is called, and he knows all about it from his days as an apothecary in the Dutch Republic. Fortunately, he has just enough ingredients with him in his bag to enable him to mix it up in a jar, and then he calls for Mayken and her baby to be brought to him.

Mayken feels such a relief when the
Kapitein-Generaal
kindly asks her why her baby is wailing so! For a mad moment, she had feared he would be angry at her and her baby for the noise the little one was making, but in fact Jeronimus simply could not be nicer.

As the wind softly moans outside the tent, she tells him that her baby daughter simply has a little bit of intestinal trouble and she thinks she should be fine by the morrow. Beaming, Jeronimus replies he
thought
that might be the problem and quietly directs Mayken to hand the baby to him, as he has mixed up some medicine for her that should soon see her right.

Taking the baby gently in his arms, he personally administers the medicine, the poison slipping down the throat of the
junger
Cardoes, before handing the baby back. And, sure enough, the crying does almost immediately stop! Her baby is . . . is . . . is now finding it difficult to breathe, and even changing colour before her eyes to a very sickly grey, as Jeronimus continues to watch intently,
his eyes strangely glazed
.

Before long, the baby is comatose, limp as a rag doll. And yet, as her mother futilely flutters around her – now realising that what the
Kapitein-Generaal
gave her baby was not medicine at all – her baby daughter still clings grimly to life, little more than a useless shell of a being at her withered right teat, with no longer the strength to suck upon it. After ten minutes, when it seems likely that the baby will not die immediately, as he has hoped, Jeronimus peremptorily dismisses Mayken and sends for his most faithful killers three, to wit David Zevanck, Jan Hendricxsz and Stonecutter, so he can have a few words with them.

Ten minutes later, these three send a messenger to get Salomon Deschamps. This worthy – nominally the second-highest-ranking VOC official on the island after Jeronimus – is awoken and taken to Mayken Cardoes’s tent. There, he finds that devastated woman holding her stricken baby and furiously rocking her as if her love alone could heal her, while Stonecutter, Zevanck and Jan Hendricxsz stare balefully on. When Deschamps arrives, it is time for Zevanck to take the matter in hand. Roughly grabbing the baby from her mother’s arms, he hands her to Deschamps, together with a piece of rope. His words are brutal and hit the VOC official like so many slaps.

‘Deschamps,’ he says, ‘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 on the island do not hear so much wailing.’

What does it do to a man to hear such an instruction? Deschamps is a good and fundamentally decent, if also weak, man. And here he is being told to go and kill an almost lifeless child that will soon die anyway. And, though it is unsaid, it is understood – he must do as he is bid or be quickly murdered himself.

For ten seconds, there is no movement among the men, no sound apart from the anguished sobbing of Mayken and the near-death rattles of the baby, as all await his decision. Now, Mayken gathers herself and, having given up on the Mutineers showing any mercy, falls to the ground and puts one arm around Deschamps’s knees, begging piteously for the life of her child.

He must make a decision.

Finally, Deschamps gently extricates himself from Mayken, takes the child, and the rope, and walks outside as Zevanck holds the now prostrate Mayken under his right foot. She, too, now subsides a little, almost as if the last solace left to her is to hear the last sounds of her baby’s life. Twenty seconds later again, there is a quick gurgling, coughing sound and then . . . nothing.

20 July 1629, Batavia

And so, the end.

In Batavia, public hangings are held on public land to the left of the citadel that allows the always large crowd to get a good view of proceedings. The abject Evertsz, followed by an eager procession of townsfolk, is
marched to the permanent gallows,
situated by the main road in full view of the harbour. For the authorities, it is useful in giving the people an example of what happens to those who flout either Dutch law or VOC regulations, or both. And, for the people, there is something strangely alluring about seeing a man die, particularly when he has done something notorious, and this one is particularly interesting. They say his name is Jan Evertsz and he was the bosun on the ship
Batavia
, which foundered on the Abrolhos Islands. It has been the talk of the town ever since Commandeur Pelsaert and the others completed their extraordinary journey and arrived in this port over a week ago.

Anyway, before the ship hit the reef, it turns out, Evertsz led an assault on a passenger, a woman by the name of Lucretia, and she was able to identify him by his voice. The reason he wasn’t punished at the time was that Pelsaert was not in complete control of the ship and feared it would rouse the crew against him – imagine! – but there is no such problem now. And here he is!

Dressed in stinking rags, Evertsz is dragged into the public square, blinking at the shimmering bright light, trying to steel himself for what he knows is coming. His arms are bound behind him and his legs manacled together, meaning he can only just walk, but with two burly guards on either side he is brought to the scaffold and made to climb the stairs as the crowd murmurs and surges forward a little, the better to get a good look at him. Like most in his position, he has clearly been tortured to the point that the hanging might almost come as sweet relief, but his face betrays little emotion one way or another. Not fear. Not anger. He is not casting his eyes to heaven as if he expects to go to a better place. There is no muttering of prayers, as is so often the case before such hangings, as the criminals frantically try to find the right words to help them overcome a lifetime of sin and be spared harsh judgement from the Lord.
No, none of that.

With this fellow Evertsz, practically the only sign that he is conscious at all is that he remains standing, swaying, as the guards guide him to the top of the ladder, where another guard waits to put the noose around his neck. With no ceremony, then, the ladder on which Evertsz is standing is kicked away from beneath his feet, suddenly hurtling him into space. His still manacled feet momentarily scramble in a desperate search for solid ground beneath – of which there is none.

In an instant, the rope snaps taut and a strangled grunt emerges from the condemned, as his legs appear to shake uncontrollably. Apart from that, there is very little to see, bar a stain emerging on both sides of his trousers as his bladder and bowels are voided. Within minutes, it is clear that wherever it is he was going to, he has indeed gone.

However, the body that remains is not cut down. Over the decades, it has become clear to the Dutch authorities that there is nothing better for discipline than to make a memorable example of the nation’s malefactors. As far as the authorities are concerned, Evertsz can stay hanging there until the birds pluck out his eyes, his body shrivels and then bursts, and he is little more than a swinging skeleton in rags.

Meanwhile, deep within the bowels of the citadel, Ariaen Jacobsz simply lies there, slowly rotting away. He is in all but total darkness, both his legs and his hands are manacled, and just once a day, in the evening, some slop is put before him that he must eat in the manner of a dog getting food from a bowl.

He knows that Jan Evertsz has swung on this day. He also knows that, despite Evertsz’s having confessed to the assault on Lucretia, the bosun did not implicate the skipper in the affair. Thus, for the moment, Jacobsz must answer only for his grave error of judgement that saw the
Batavia
, the flagship of the VOC, sunk. It is a serious charge, but it is possible, just possible, that he will survive it.

Above all, he misses his sweet Zwaantje.

21 July 1629, Seals’ Island

As errors go, it is a grievous one. For nearly a week since the second massacre on Seals’ Island, the three terrified cabin boys have survived, just, by shivering in the bushes, eating whatever molluscs they can find and drinking from the brackish pools of water still to be found on the southern shores of the island. But, on this morning, one of them, Claas Harmensz of Campen, starving and in an extreme state of dehydration, steals out from the bushes to briefly try his luck hunting for shell life and fresh water around the rocks on the eastern shore, meaning
he is visible to those on Batavia’s Graveyard
. . .

21 July 1629, Batavia’s Graveyard

At this very moment, Jeronimus is promenading along the shoreline with the ever reluctant and always quiet Lucretia. The
Kapitein-Generaal
is just pointing out to her a glorious white-faced heron running with open wings across the shore before it captures and kills a dwarf skink when something catches his eye, over on Seals’ Island. Why, it is a young boy, rooting around the rocks! To this point, in all the confusion, no one is aware that there are still survivors on Seals’ Island. Jeronimus notes it but does not move on it immediately. For the moment, he has some more important projects to get underway . . .

Returning to his tent, he sends for Coenraat van Huyssen. ‘Tonight,’ he tells his key henchman, ‘I wish you and Judick to invite me, together with the
Predikant
, for dinner. It should be a good, long dinner, and I have here some food from the supplies to make it a good one.
You may also take some
wijn
, wine,
so that we may properly enjoy the evening.’

Van Huyssen nods his assent, greedily takes his allotted food and wine, and leaves. No sooner has he departed, however, than Jeronimus sends for Lenart van Os, Jacop Pietersz, Jan Hendricxsz, Wouter Loos, Andries Jonas and Andries Liebent, the last of whom has shown great promise as a killer since pleading for his own life on the raft on their first good day of killings. He tells them that the
Predikant
and his daughter will be dining with him that evening in Coenraat van Huyssen’s tent. While they are there, he says, he has a very particular task for the men. He tells them precisely how it should be accomplished and the preparations they should make immediately to see that it is done properly. The six men nod their enthusiastic assent.