Batavia (58 page)

His reputation suffered greatly in death, as the VOC pursued the question of whether or not he had illicitly dealt in jewels while
Commandeur
, an activity that was in serious violation of their regulations. Yes, they had sanctioned the trading of the Great Cameo of Gaspar Boudaen, from which they were expecting a 25 per cent cut of the profits, but the jewels were another matter.

While it was never actually proved that Pelsaert engaged in this nefarious trade, strong suspicion was aroused when unexplained gems and other treasures, including a second Gaspar Boudaen cameo, to the tune of 13,500 guilders were discovered among his personal belongings following his death.
All these goods were duly confiscated
by the VOC on the grounds that they were the result of, or intended for, trade for Pelsaert’s own gain.

When the VOC reviewed all decisions made by Pelsaert on the Abrolhos, for the most part they came to the conclusion he had got it wrong. To begin with, in the case of Wiebbe Hayes, their strong view was that Pelsaert had not been generous enough. In the original document recording his decisions, the
Commandeur
had written down that Hayes’s monthly salary would be increased to 28 guilders, before
scribbling it out and writing 18 guilders
. Now, the VOC increased it to 40 guilders and made him an officer and standard bearer of the VOC Army. He returned to Amsterdam, thus, in triumph – virtually the only hero of the whole sorry saga – but then disappears from history’s pages.
No further trace is recorded of him
.

And then there were the decisions Pelsaert had made about the Mutineers. For most of those spared execution in the Abrolhos, it would prove to be a temporary respite only. When the
Sardam
reached Batavia on 5 December 1629, the more rigorous examination of these remaining Mutineers immediately began. The new Governor-General, Jacques Specx, launched an entirely fresh investigation at the hands of Batavia’s Council of Justice. The conclusion of this council was that
Pelsaert and his Broad Council had been far too lenient
, and in late January 1630 they handed down their own sentences.

Daniel Cornelisz, the young cadet who was captured by the Defenders while trying to get a letter from Jeronimus to the French soldiers, was hanged after first
having his right hand cut off
.

Rogier Decker and Abraham Gerritsz were put at the mercy of fate, the judge deciding who should be executed by the drawing of lots.
The unlucky Decker
, who had thrust a dagger into the heart of Hendrick Jansz, was first lashed and then executed.

Salomon Deschamps, Pelsaert’s favourite clerk, who had been forced to strangle the child of Mayken Cardoes before rehabilitating himself enough, in Pelsaert’s eyes, to sit with the ship’s council in judgement on his fellow Mutineers, had a strange fate.
Despite having survived being keel-hauled
three times and given 100 lashes before leaving the Abrolhos, it was only so that he could finally be hanged back in Batavia.

As to Stonecutter Pietersz, for his trouble he was broken from ‘under and upwards’ on the wheel. This involved him being first strapped on a bench, before the executioner took a heavy iron bar to . . . carefully . . . break . . . all the principal bones in his body – toes, fingers, thighs, hips, ribs, arms, wrists, elbows, shoulders – without killing him or even making him lose consciousness. After this, Stonecutter’s now extraordinarily pliable body was strapped to a horizontally placed wagon wheel with his belly upwards and his broken limbs folded and tied below the wheel. Then the wheel was raised some yards above the scaffold, where the man could well be seen, dying hours later after suffering incredible pain. Still not satisfied, the executioner then cut Stonecutter’s body open, and his remains were displayed in the Batavia citadel for weeks thereafter.

The more minor Mutineers – who it was again judged had been forced into it –
were merely flogged, branded
or assigned to forced labour and exile.

Whether those Mutineers who had been thrown into the dungeon awaiting their trials came across Skipper Ariaen Jacobsz is not known. One imagines it likely. In any event, Jacobsz’s case was finally put before the
Heeren XVII
in March 1631. For all that time in custody, Jacobsz had not broken under the ministrations of the torturer and resolutely denied being a part of any mutiny. Though the
Heeren
decided against releasing him, his ultimate fate is not known – but the great likelihood is that he died in that cesspit of a dungeon shortly afterwards, largely unlamented, with the exception of one heart that still beat for him in one of the Batavia taverns, that of Zwaantje.
As to what happened to her
, there is no further trace in the records.

The records of Zwaantje’s erstwhile mistress, Lucretia, are more complete. She arrived in Batavia only to find that, even before her departure from the Dutch Republic, her husband, Boudewijn van der Mijlen, had been posted to a pestilent trading port in Burma called Arakan, where he had died shortly afterwards of a disease unknown.

Despite it all, Lucretia lived to make old bones. Only a short time later, in late 1630, she married someone well beneath her social class, a lowly soldier by the name of Jacob Cornelisz Cuick of Leyden.
The couple returned to the Netherlands
in June 1635. Though Lucretia remained childless, she was deeply loved by many families and became the godmother of no fewer than six children. The author Henrietta Drake-Brockman found a record of death in Amsterdam of a Lucreseija van Kuijick on 6 September 1681, which, if it is the same person, would mean that Lucretia survived to the extraordinary age for the time of 71 –
an old, old woman
with the most unspeakable memories of what happened one time when she was young and fair . . .

The
Predikant
, Gijsbert Bastiaensz, wanted to return to the Netherlands as soon as possible, but the council of the Indies managed to pressure him into staying. In 1631, he married Maria Cnijf and was appointed as minister on Banda, dying there shortly after of an extreme case of dysentery in March 1633. His daughter, Judick, also married in 1631. Her husband was a minister and was posted to the growing flock of Dutch settlers on the island of Ambon. He died in 1634. With the deaths of their husbands, Judick and her stepmother, Maria, were given permission to return to the Netherlands. They sailed from Batavia in the final months of 1634 on the vessel
Zutphen
and . . . wouldn’t you know it? . . . there was soon trouble brewing on board.

A small boy from the marriage of the
Predikant
to his second wife was travelling with his mother, and a constant point of heated discussion was whether the women and the boy should be allowed to stay and eat in the main cabin with the officers. None other than the
Batavia
’s former chief trumpeter, Jan Carstenz, insisted that they and the child not be allowed. He was especially hostile towards the widow of the
Predikant
.

At one point, far out on the Indian Ocean, Jan – who had never been quite right in his head from the moment he had discovered the extent of what his wife Anneken Bosschieters was put through – even became violent and turned on the young lad. The boy was wearing a linen shawl to protect him from the cold. Jan Carstenz grabbed the cloth and smacked the boy down onto the deck, hit him in the face and then kicked him, before chasing after his mother, who fled into the cabin.

Jan was severely punished: he was ‘
dropped from the yardarm
’ three times and given 100 lashes.

The women were only really safe when they arrived back in the Netherlands, which, for Judick, was nearly six years after she left. One can only imagine the emotion with which she saw the tall spires of Amsterdam once more, reflecting on the things that had occurred in that time, the family members she had lost. As the widows of ministers, Judick and her stepmother were entitled to 300 guilders a year each as a base rate from the VOC. Judick, however, received double that amount from the
Heeren XVII
because of all the trouble she had suffered
after the shipwreck of the
Batavia
.

The cause of the death of Governor-General Coen was never finally established. It is only known that he died in late 1629 at the age of 42, likely from typhus contracted during the second uprising from all the corpses rotting in the river that ran through the middle of Batavia, or perhaps dysentery or cholera – maybe even an excess of bile? Another theory, however, floated by Charles Corn in his outstanding book
The Scents of Eden
, has it that ‘another less plausible source suggests that Coen died of sheer terror over the impending confrontation with his successor, Governor-General Specx’. Specx happened to be the father of a young girl whom Coen had had flogged for making love to a 15-year-old soldier, whom he had subsequently executed.
Corn suggests that perhaps he was poisoned
, though concurs with most that the cause of death was more than likely fatal illness. Whatever it was, for a man who had been the cause of the deaths of so many, he was
singularly fortunate to die in his bed
and not at the point of a sword or an arrow.

When Specx retired, he was
replaced by none other than Hendrick Brouwer
, who had so famously pioneered Brouwer’s Route straight across the Indian Ocean in 1611.

And what, then, of the two men dropped on the Australian continent? Nothing is known of the fate of Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom, and neither man was ever seen again, at least not by European eyes. Against that, the famed ‘Bush Tucker Man’, Les Hiddins – a man with a deep knowledge of both the Australian bush and its history – claims that a camel trader some 200 years later came back with a story about an all-white Aboriginal woman he had met there, maybe a sign that Dutch blood had entered the Indigenous gene pool.

In addition, the Dutch-born Australian historian Rupert Gerritsen makes a strong case in his book
And Their Ghosts May Be Heard
that Aboriginal dialects in the area where the two Dutchmen were dropped contain words that were originally Dutch. Gerritsen also maintains that the first British explorer in the area, Augustus Gregory, noted that some Aboriginal people around what are today Shark Bay and Murchison had strikingly European features. Gerritsen says that no less than Daisy Bates – the famed latter-nineteenth-century welfare worker and student of Aboriginal tribes – was of the belief that this resemblance could be traced back to their Dutch forebears.

His final piece of evidence for their survival is a curious fact. In all the world, the second-highest incidence of polydactylism (extra fingers and toes) is to be found among north-western Aboriginal people. The highest – are you way ahead of me? – is among an insular
Dutch religious sect known as the Mennonites
.

Despite the move by the Dutch in 1624 to eradicate all the clove trees on the islands of Ternate and Tidore, one such tree actually survived high on Ternate’s impenetrable volcanic slopes. In 1770, it was from that tree that a Frenchman by the name of Poivre managed to secure some tiny seedlings and then replant them in the Seychelles, Réunion and Zanzibar.
When those seedlings began to grow
, and then flourish, and then produce, it was the beginning of the end for the monopoly of the Spice Islands on the production of spices.

In 1654, after long and arduous negotiations, it was none other than England’s ‘Lord Protector’ Oliver Cromwell who successfully negotiated with the Dutch Republic to pay 300,000 guilders as compensation to the descendants of those who had been killed in the Ambon Massacre, but that was only a beginning of the Dutch making good for what had happened long before.

The issue of the island of Run – for so long occupied by the English until they were overrun by the Dutch in 1621 – had long festered too and needed to be resolved. As detailed in Giles Milton’s wonderful book,
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg
, the bitter resentment of the English at what had transpired was only resolved in 1667 when the Dutch and British Governments finally achieved a settlement of sorts. In return for the British relinquishing to the Dutch all claims to the island of Run, the Dutch would relinquish all of their own claims to another small island, which lay at the mouth of the Hudson River in the Americas, a place they had named New Amsterdam, though previously occupied by the Manhatta Indian tribe, hence the name it would take in modern times . . . Manhattan. (For the Dutch, this would
not prove to be one of the more astute trades
in the history of the world.)

The VOC came to a bad end. Though it survived right up until the end of the eighteenth century, and in that time had delivered an average annual 20 per cent return to its investors, by the 1790s it was frequently maintained, mockingly by the Dutch, that VOC now stood for
Vergaan Onder Corruptie
, Perished by Corruption. It finally collapsed in 1800, with all of its positions – geographical and financial, including debt – taken over by the government of the Dutch Batavian Republic. All of its former territories, thus, formally became a part of the Dutch East Indies territory that grew through the course of the 1800s to take in
all of the Indonesian archipelago
.

The Dutch East Indies survived right up until 1942, when the invading Japanese crushed it. Afterwards, of course, the Republic of Indonesia was declared.