Batavia's Graveyard (10 page)

Each type was built according to the Dutch “shell-first” method, a
revolutionary construction technique that called for a ship’s external planking to be
assembled and nailed together before the internal ribs and frames were added. As soon as
this phase of the building work was finished, the half-finished East Indiaman would be
floated and towed out to a “cage” of wooden palisades 40 or 50 yards out in the
waters of the River IJ, where she would be fitted out. The Peperwerf’s slips were
thus freed for work to begin on yet another vessel. In this way the VOC’s yards
completed 1,500 merchantmen in the seventeenth century alone.

The
Batavia
herself was no ordinary ship, but one of the greatest vessels
of her day. The ship was named after the Javan town of Batavia, which was the capital of
all the Dutch possessions in the Indies, and she displaced 1,200 tons and measured 160
feet from stem to stern—the very largest size permitted under Company regulations.
She had four decks, three masts, and 30 guns, and her designer—the famous naval
architect Jan Rijksen, still active and alert at the tremendous age of 66—had given
her not only a strong double hull (two three-inch thicknesses of oak, with a waterproof
layer of tarred horsehair in between them) but an outer skin of deal or pine as well. This
softwood sheathing protected the hull from attack by shipworm—the animals preferred
burrowing from stem to stern through the soft planking to attacking the harder oak
beneath—and as an added prophylactic her outer skin was studded with thick iron nails
and coated with a noxious mix of resin, sulphur, oil, and lime. Finally, the sheathing
itself was protected all along the waterline by the hides of several hundred roughly
butchered cattle, which were tacked onto the pine. So long as the unladen
Batavia
rode high in the waters of the IJ, these skins gave the lower part of her hull the
appearance of a mangy patchwork quilt. They would remain in place until they rotted and
dropped off in the course of the vessel’s maiden voyage.

Thankfully the cattle hides did not obscure
Batavia
’s brightly
painted upperworks, which had been trimmed in green and gold, nor her richly decorated
stern—an ostentatious refinement that the normally parsimonius Gentlemen XVII had
authorized in an effort to overawe the peoples of the East. But all this attention to
detail did not come cheap. As completed, and without supplies,
Batavia
would have
cost the Company almost 100,000 guilders, a fortune at the time.

This considerable expense was necessary because—once built—the VOC
flogged its ships until they were on the verge of falling apart. The stresses and strains
that the
Batavia
would be exposed to in the course of a single passage to the
Indies were enough to destroy a normal ship, and even with her triple hull a
retourschip
would rarely be expected to make more than half a dozen round trips to the East. Having
served the Gentlemen XVII for somewhere between 10 and 20 years, she would then be
returned to the Zuyder Zee and broken up to provide timber for new housing. It is a
testament to the immense profitability of the spice trade that by the time an East
Indiaman had been turned back into lumber, the profit on her cargoes would have repaid her
building costs several times over.

A
retourschip
of the
Batavia
’s size could load around 600 tons
of supplies and trade goods when new (and newness made a difference; after a year or two
in service, when the hull became saturated with seawater, cargo capacity could fall by 20
percent). But the holds of an East Indiaman were only ever full when she sailed home so
loaded down with spices that her gunports were sometimes only two feet from the sea. There
was virtually no demand for European goods in the Indies, and although merchantmen
departing from the Netherlands did carry boxes of psalm books, hand grenades, cooking
pots, and barrel hoops destined for the Dutch garrisons of the East, the only bulky cargo
shipped to Java was stone for the Company factories in the East. Each year the Dutch
authorities in the Indies placed orders for further huge quantities of house bricks, which
were sent out as ballast. Occasionally the
eysch—
the governor-general’s
annual order for supplies—included more exotic requests. This was the case in the
autumn of 1628; down in
Batavia
’s airless bilges, sweating workmen were
already busy stowing an entire 25-foot-high prefabricated gateway, made up of 137 huge
sandstone blocks weighing 37 tons in all, destined for Castle Batavia itself.

Fortunately for the Gentlemen XVII, there was one commodity that the people of
the Spiceries were willing to trade for cloves and nutmeg. The local population might have
little use for the Dutch linens and thick English cloth that were northern Europe’s
major exports at this time, but they did have an insatiable desire for
bullion—preferably silver coin, which was the common currency of the East.
Retourschepen
therefore set out for the East carrying not trade goods but box after box of
silver.

Gigantic sums of money—up to 250,000 guilders for each vessel, equivalent to
about $19 million today—were supplied to the
retourschepen
in massive wooden
chests. Each 500-pound case contained 8,000 coins, and the specie in a strongbox totaled
about 20,000 guilders. This was enough to be a real temptation, and the risk of theft was
such that the money chests were kept separate from the remainder of the cargo. The bullion
was brought aboard no more than an hour or two before the crew weighed anchor and arrived
under the watchful eye of no less than one of the Gentlemen XVII, who would demand an
appropriate receipt signed by the skipper and the upper-merchant. Once aboard, the chests
were stored not in the hold but in the Great Cabin in the stern, where only the most
senior merchants had access to them. Then they were watched all the way to Java.

By the last months of 1626, Francisco Pelsaert’s existing three-year
contract with the VOC was almost up. As one of the most experienced Company men in India,
and the leader of a mission to Agra that had been a considerable success in commercial
terms, the upper-merchant could normally have expected to be reemployed with a substantial
increase in his monthly pay. On this occasion, however, there was no sign of a new
contract, and when Pelsaert asked his superiors to resolve the matter, the VOC proved
unexpectedly reticent.

The chief difficulty, it appears, concerned the Antwerp merchant’s failings
as a diplomat. One of the main goals of Pelsaert’s mission had been to establish a
Dutch presence at the Mogul court and secure favorable treatment for the VOC from the
Emperor Jahangir.
^*11
This he had conspicuously failed to do. There were mitigating
circumstances, it is true; in 1624 Jahangir had removed himself from Agra to Lahore,
limiting Dutch access to the Mogul court. Nevertheless, Pieter van den Broecke, at Surat,
soon concluded that the upper-merchant’s diplomatic gifts were limited, and in 1625
he decided to send a second mission to Lahore. This embassy was led by a certain Hendrick
Vapoer, who proved to have a real talent for dealing with the Mogul government.
Vapoer’s reward was Pelsaert’s job in Agra.

Pelsaert was naturally incensed by this decision, more so when he learned that
Vapoer would be paid twice what he had earned. But there was little he could do about it,
and when his contract expired in March 1627 he returned overland to Surat. He arrived on
the coast in May and there quarreled with the generally easygoing Van den Broecke, whom he
no doubt blamed for Vapoer’s appointment. Van den Broecke did what he could to mend
the damage, begging his old friend to stay in India, but Pelsaert was too proud to let
that happen. He insisted on returning to the Netherlands instead.

Still smarting from his treatment at the hands of the VOC, the merchant took ship
in Surat 10 days before Christmas. He was given a cabin in the old
Dordrecht,
sailing as a guest of the fleet president,
commandeur
Grijph. Pelsaert passed the
time while he waited for the ship to sail in the company of Grijph; a fellow
upper-merchant, Wollebrand Geleynssen de Jongh
^*12
; and the recently appointed skipper
of the
Dordrecht.
The skipper’s name was Ariaen Jacobsz.

The
Dordrecht
was Ariaen’s first major command after a decade spent
working in the inter-island trade. He ought to have been anxious to make a good
impression, but the heat and the humidity of Surat brought out the worst in Jacobsz. For
whatever reason, Pelsaert irritated him—perhaps it was the upper-merchant’s
self-importance. Within days the two had fallen out to a dangerous degree.

The dispute that was to cause so much trouble on the
Batavia
had a most
mundane beginning. Ten years in the draining climate of the Indies had given Jacobsz an
unhealthy love of alcohol, and he refused to moderate his habits in the presence of three
senior officers of the VOC. One night in Surat harbor the skipper became drunk and
grievously insulted Pelsaert before the other merchants. Next day
commandeur
Grijph
was forced to rebuke him, “saying that that was not the manner to sail in peace to
the Fatherland, and that he must behave himself differently.” Jacobsz blamed Pelsaert
for this public dressing-down. Henceforth, as the skipper was later to explain, he always
hated Pelsaert.

Grijph’s presence prevented matters from going any further on the journey to
the United Provinces, and Pelsaert arrived home in June 1628. The merchant spent July and
August engaged in a successful campaign to win back the favor of the Gentlemen XVII. He
had already composed two special reports—a chronicle and a
remonstrantie,
or
dissertation, concerning trade in the subcontinent—in an effort to establish himself
as an expert on Indian affairs; now he made a new suggestion for finding favor with the
Mogul emperors. Jahangir, he pointed out, had never shown much interest in the gifts of
Western emissaries. But he did seem to like jewels and silver.

Pelsaert’s plan was to send large quantities of special silver plate to
India. These goods, which he called “toys,” would be carefully commissioned to
suit the local tastes identified in his
remonstrantie
and could be relied upon to
impress the Moguls with the power of the VOC. Items of silverware could be given as gifts,
sold at the imperial court, or exchanged for spice. The toys would make a memorable
impression and might also win favor and new trading privileges for the Dutch.

Impressed by Pelsaert’s detailed knowledge of Indian affairs, the Gentlemen
XVII agreed to commission plate to the upper-merchant’s specifications. In doing so
they took a considerable risk, for the final cost of the consignment of silver was almost
60,000 guilders. But so great was the VOC’s new confidence in Pelsaert that he now
received not just a new and better contract, but instructions to accompany his toys back
to India.

By late summer, then, Pelsaert found himself restored to favor. He would sail to
Surat with his silver plate, the Gentlemen XVII decreed, traveling via the East Indies.
The main autumn fleet was due to leave home waters late in October 1628 under the command
of Jacques Specx of the
Hollandia—
a member of the Council of the Indies and
one of the most senior and experienced traders in the VOC. It was expected to include
several
retourschepen
of the largest kind, including the brand-new
Batavia.

Though still being completed at the Peperwerf,
Batavia
already had a
skipper. Ariaen Jacobsz’s safe handling of the
Dordrecht
had so impressed the
directors of Jan Company that they had chosen him, of all their sailors, to command the
new ship on her maiden voyage. She had an under-merchant, too, in the untried, untested
Jeronimus Cornelisz. All that she now required was an upper-merchant of ability and wide
experience. One candidate seemed particularly suitable.

Francisco Pelsaert joined them just before they sailed.

3

The Tavern of the Ocean

“Now and then persons of strange opinion come here.”

JACQUES SPECX

A
GREAT FLEET WAS ASSEMBLING NEAR THE ISLAND OF TEXEL. Nearly a dozen huge East
Indiamen lay at anchor in the Moscovian Roads while the sea around them swarmed with small
boats full of sailors and barges packed with ballast for the holds. The
Batavia
was
there, with several other large
retourschepen
moored close by—the
Dordrecht,
’s Gravenhage,
^*13
Nieuw Hoorn,
and
Hollandia.
A group of smaller
vessels,
fluyten
and
jachten,
had anchored close inshore. The whole fleet
was alive with preparations for the long voyage east.

It was now late October 1628. Autumn was the busiest time of year for the VOC;
weather conditions in the Atlantic favored a fast passage to the Indies for ships that
left the Netherlands before Christmas, recruitment became easier as Holland’s summer
sailors became desperate for work, and ships reached the Indies at the perfect time to
load fresh crops of spices. Before they could depart, however, each vessel had to take on
board not only a cargo and a crew, but all the supplies required to sustain her for up to
a year at sea. Into her 160-foot length the
Batavia
now had to pack 340 people with
all their personal possessions, many tons of equipment, and materiel for the garrisons of
the East.

Up from the barges came several thousand barrels of supplies, then sailors’
sea chests by the hundred. Wood for the galley stove and ammunition for the guns were
stowed below, and the deck was festooned with coils of rope and cable. Over the sides
swarmed a multitude of ill-dressed sailors, whom Jan Evertsz and his men drove to work
with curses and knotted lengths of rope. Next came the soldiers—a handful of young
company cadets and noncommissioned officers leading a hundred undernourished men off to
five years of garrison duty in the Indies—and finally, when the work of loading had
been done, Jeronimus Cornelisz and the merchants of the VOC.

In all probability, the Frisian apothecary had never before stepped aboard a ship
the size of the
Batavia.
Like most landsmen, his initial impressions of an East
Indiaman were most likely wonder at her great size and alarm at the apparent frenzy up on
deck. There are accounts, written by awestruck German soldiers, that testify to the
remarkable impression a fully rigged
retourschip
made on those who came alongside
her for the first time; “true castles,” they were sometimes called, which seemed
enormous when approached from sea level in a boat. Looking up as they came alongside, many
merchants felt quite dwarfed by the sheer wooden walls that towered out of the water all
around them and by the massive masts and yards soaring almost 200 feet into the air above
their heads.

The chaos up on deck must have been even more disconcerting—the planking
strewn with a disordered mass of gear, and ragged sailors rushing to and fro in response
to orders the landsmen did not even understand. The constant motion of the anchored
ship—which rolled incessantly in the choppy autumn sea—was very far from
pleasant, but, dimly through their discomfort, Cornelisz and his colleagues would have
been aware they were now committed to the voyage, and to whatever consequences might flow
from it.

In the midst of all this bustle and confusion, the chief comfort to the novice
tradesmen would undoubtedly have been the thought that they would not be expected to share
quarters with the rabble milling around them. The most luxurious berths in the
Batavia
’s
stern were always given over to the merchants of the VOC, and the area abaft the mainmast
would become the exclusive preserve of the ship’s officers, the merchants, and their
servants. This arrangement at least ensured them some privacy and reduced the prospect of
discomfort, since the ship pitched and yawed less violently by the stern. In the course of
a nine-month voyage, such incidental mercies came to mean a lot.

The best quarters of all went to the most senior men aboard. Francisco Pelsaert
and Ariaen Jacobsz shared the privilege of using what was known as the Great Cabin on the
level of the upper deck. It was by far the largest room on the ship and easily the best
lit, as it alone was fitted with lattice windows rather than portholes. Its centerpiece
was a long table capable of seating 15 or 20 people, and it was here that Pelsaert and his
clerks transacted their daily business while at sea and the senior officers and merchants
ate their meals. The rest of the officers’ quarters were located elsewhere in the
stern. Jeronimus and half a dozen other distinguished passengers were shown to a warren of
little cabins on the deck above, where the quarters were smaller and more spartan; the
more junior officers and the Company clerks shared a large communal cabin just below the
steersman’s station. When it came to accommodation, the VOC had spared considerable
expense. The private quarters were quite unheated, only marginally better ventilated than
the rest of the ship, and less than the span of a woman’s arms in breadth—but at
least they offered the luxury of bunks instead of sleeping mats, sufficient room to put a
writing desk and chair, and cabin boys to fetch and carry meals and empty chamber
pots.

The allocation of these cabins was determined by rank and precedence. The best
would have gone to Jeronimus, the under-merchant, who was after Pelsaert the most senior
representative of Jan Company on board. Ariaen Jacobsz’s second-in-command, the
upper-steersman Claes Gerritsz, would have had another, and in normal circumstances the
Batavia
’s
two under-steersmen (whose rank was roughly equivalent to a modern-day lieutenant’s),
the provost (who was responsible for discipline on board), and the most senior of the VOC
assistants might also have expected cabins of their own.

On this voyage, however, the
Batavia
was carrying two high-ranking
passengers whose presence upset the normal rules of precedence. One was a Calvinist
predikant,
or minister, named Gijsbert Bastiaensz, a citizen of the ancient town of Dordrecht who was
sailing to the Indies with his wife, a maid, and seven children. The other was Lucretia
Jansdochter, an unusually beautiful and highborn woman who came from Amsterdam and was
traveling to join her husband in the East. Both would have been allocated cabins near
Jeronimus’s. In the close confines of the stern, the three of them could hardly help
but become acquainted.

It is not difficult to guess whose company Cornelisz would have most enjoyed.
Creesje (she was generally known by her diminutive) was not only youthful and attractive;
she came from a family of merchants and thus commanded a social status equal to
Jeronimus’s own. Gijsbert Bastiaensz, on the other hand, was in many ways
Cornelisz’s opposite. He came from the most southern part of the province of Holland;
he was 52 years old; and he was a strict, straightforward Calvinist with very little
formal education. His scant surviving writings betray no hint of wit or intellectual
curiosity; there was no room in his theology for the exotic speculations that the
under-merchant entertained, and had Jeronimus dared to explain his true beliefs, the
predikant
would certainly have been scandalized by them. As it was, Cornelisz kept his own counsel
on the subject and wisely chose to charm the preacher rather than confront him.

Gijsbert Bastiaensz was later to confess that he had entirely failed to recognize
the undertows that lurked beneath Jeronimus’s superficial decency. This failure was
hardly surprising. The
predikant
was an honest and straightforward sort, of little
intuition and less experience, whose horizons had until quite recently been limited to his
calling and his church. Dordrecht was noted for its uncomplicated orthodoxy. A minister
from such a town would hardly have encountered a creature quite like Cornelisz
before.

Bastiaensz, it seems, was a typical example of the Indies
predikant.
Because the Reformed Church was quite devoid of missionary zeal—the doctrine of
predestination implied there was little point in converting heathens—it was never
easy to persuade ministers to serve in the east. The few who went were seldom members of
the Calvinist elite. They were, rather, “hedge-preachers”: artisans whose
religious views were frequently naive, and who, while preaching economy and restraint,
were often in financial difficulties themselves.

The
predikant
of the
Batavia
was all these things and more.
Gijsbert Bastiaensz was a member of the working classes of the Dutch Republic, who made a
living with his hands and attended to church business when he could. He had little formal
education. But—like Jeronimus Cornelisz—he was a man on the verge of ruin,
forced by the threat of bankruptcy to seek redemption in the east.

The minister’s early life had been comfortable enough. His father, Bastiaen
Gijsbrechtsz, had been a miller, and Gijsbert followed him into what appears to have been
a well-established family business. In February 1604 he was married to Maria Schepens, the
daughter of a Dordrecht wine merchant, and—as was common at the time—the couple
produced a large family. There were eight children in all, four boys and four girls, and
no fewer than seven survived infancy. The fact that so many of the children lived, and
that their father was able to provide for them, suggests that—for the first two
decades of the century at least—Bastiaensz controlled a profitable mill.

By the time that he was 30, the miller had become an elder of the Reformed Church
of Dordrecht. Between 1607 and 1629, Gijsbert Bastiaensz served no fewer than five
two-year terms on the town’s church council, a proud record that suggests he was
among the best-respected (and most strictly orthodox) churchmen in the town. Further proof
of this contention can be found in the voluminous legal records of Dordrecht, where the
predikant
appears as an arbitrator, an executor, and a witness who stood surety in a number of legal
cases. All of these were solemn duties assumed only by those whom the public
trusted—men of unimpeachable integrity.

For all that, the mill that the
predikant
owned and ran for a quarter of a
century was not a very grand one. He relied for his living on a
rosmolen
(a
horse-powered mill) rather than one of the newer and more efficient windmills then
becoming widespread in the Netherlands. During the severe depression of the 1620s, the
owners of
rosmolens
often struggled to make a living, while millers who ground corn
more quickly and more cheaply using windmills prospered. Gijsbert Bastiaensz was one of
many who could not compete. Between 1618—when he appears in the town records as a
landowner with his own mill and 12 rented acres of grazing for his horses—and 1628,
the
predikant
’s financial position disintegrated. At around the time that
Jeronimus was transferring all his worldly goods to the merchant Vogel, Bastiaensz was
signing his home and mill over to his own creditors.

His good name and his faith were of no help now, and there were no church livings
to be had in Dordrecht. With eight mouths to feed, the
predikant
applied to be a
preacher in the Indies. He was in Amsterdam by the second week of September, became an
employee of the VOC at the beginning of the following month, and found himself on board
Batavia
a few weeks later. His wife and children, who had lived in Dordrecht all their lives, had
been uprooted with him. The eldest boy was 22 years old and the youngest only 7; too
young, no doubt, to understand how little chance there was the whole family would return
alive.

In another cabin in the stern, Creesje Jans sat amid the handful of personal
possessions she had been permitted to bring on board. She was 27 years old and had been
married to a VOC under-merchant named Boudewijn van der Mijlen for nearly a decade, but
her decision to join him in the Indies requires some explanation. Van der Mijlen had
sailed for the East without her, apparently in 1625 or 1626, and it was most unusual for
an under-merchant’s wife to follow later and alone. In Lucretia Jans’s case,
however, the archives of her native Amsterdam provide a ready explanation for her presence
on board the
Batavia.
Creesje was an orphan whose three infant children had all
died, one by one. By 1628 she had no reason to stay in the United Provinces. Boudewijn,
wherever he might be, was all that she had left.

Creesje had never known her father, a cloth merchant who died before she was
born. When she was two years old, her mother Steffanie had remarried and her stepfather, a
naval captain named Dirk Krijnen, had moved the family first to the Leliestraat, in a
fashionable and wealthy quarter of Amsterdam, and eventually to the Herenstraat—then,
as now, one of the more expensive and prestigious addresses in the city. Creesje’s
mother died in 1613, when her daughter was only 11 years old, and the girl became a ward
of the Orphan’s Court, while continuing, it seems, to live with her stepfather;
sister, Sara; and a stepsister, Weijntgen Dircx. Within a few years, however, Krijnen too
was dead, a loss that may have helped to propel Lucretia into her early union with
Boudewijn van der Mijlen.

The bride was 18 on her wedding day. According to the marriage register,
Creesje’s husband was a diamond polisher who lived in Amsterdam but came from the
town of Woerden. The couple’s three children—a boy named Hans and two girls,
Lijsbet and Stefani—were born between 1622 and 1625, but none lived to reach the age
of six. Such misfortune was exceptional, for even in the seventeenth century child
mortality generally ran at no more than one infant in every two, and it is possible that
the children may have succumbed to some epidemic. There is, however, no evidence of this;
nor is much known of Boudewijn’s business affairs. All that can be said is that he,
too, most likely suffered badly in the recession of the 1620s. Certainly no successful
diamond merchant would voluntarily join the VOC only to be sent, as Van der Mijlen was, to
Arakan—a stinking, disease-ridden river port in Burma—to deal in slaves for the
greater glory of Jan Company.