Batavia's Graveyard (24 page)

Jeronimus, who was growing rapidly in confidence, had sent no more than seven of
his men to tackle the people of Seals’ Island. Zevanck and Van Huyssen were to lead
the attack; with them went Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, Cornelis Pietersz, and a Swiss
cadet called Hans Jacob Heijlweck. The last member of the party was the surgeon, Jansz,
who had thus far played no part in any killings. It seems likely that Jeronimus ordered
him to go, and that Jansz felt it wise to demonstrate his loyalty by obeying.

Cornelisz had issued precise instructions—“Kill most of the
people,” he had said, “children as well as some men, and leave alive for the
time being only the women who are there”—and for once Zevanck showed no interest
in creating any pretext for his crimes. This time there were no accusations of treachery,
no mention of any stolen goods. The mutineers had been issued with swords, daggers, and
morning stars. They landed, drew their weapons, and attacked.

Van Os was among the first to leap ashore. “Lenert, immediately after he
arrived, has stabbed one boy right through the body, and another through his buttock, and
also Jacop de Vos, tailor, right through his side,” one account of this episode
explains, “and as soon as they have come there Jan Hendricxsz has stabbed to death
five cabin boys and two men.” The other mutineers split up, chasing and cutting down
their unarmed opponents throughout the camp. Some of the men, including the corporal, had
wives and families to protect, and they were probably among the first to die. The rest
made for the rafts or hid. Eight men, including Cornelis Jansz, reached the boats and
managed to escape, eventually finding their way to the High Land to the north. Several of
the surviving cabin boys hid themselves among bushes in the middle of the island. The rest
took to their heels and ran, heading north along the mile-long cay so nimbly that the
murderers could not keep up.

Zevanck tackled this problem with his usual brutality. The mutineers had captured
one of the cabin servants during their initial assault—he was Abraham Gerritsz of
Amsterdam, the young deserter whom Pelsaert had rescued from Sierra Leone. Now he was
dragged in front of the assistant. “Boy,” Zevanck explained, “you must help
lustily to kill, or be in a fix yourself.” Gerritsz proved “very willing”
to comply, though he perhaps obeyed more out of fear than real blood lust; in any case, he
soon managed to catch another child of about his age, 15. The fleeing youth was wrestled
to the ground, and, after a short struggle, Gerritsz pinned him down and killed him with a
knife. The remainder of the boys—15 in all—could not be found, and eventually
the mutineers gave up the search and turned their attention back to the camp.

The initial attack had left at least four men and six boys dead. Half a dozen
more were badly wounded and now lay sprawled on the coral, no longer able to defend
themselves. Zevanck and his friends dragged these men into the sea and held their heads
under the water until they drowned. Four pregnant women—one of them Laurentia Thomas,
the corporal’s wife—were found among the tents but spared in compliance with
Jeronimus’s orders; and once the under-merchant’s men had satisfied themselves
that there were no other rafts on which the few survivors could escape, the remaining
youths were also left to be dealt with another day. The mutineers returned to
Batavia’s Graveyard pleased with their day’s work, having reduced the population
of the nearby cay by nearly half. The boy Gerritsz went with them, another recruit to the
under-merchant’s cause.

Jeronimus wasted little time in resolving the problem of the fleeing cabin boys.
A few days later he dispatched a second party to Seals’ Island, on this occasion
waiting until after dark to be certain of catching the surviving members of the
corporal’s party in their tents. Once again the mutineers were led by David Zevanck,
but this time there were eight of them, including Mattys Beer, Gsbert van Welderen, and a
youth from the small town of Bommel named Jan Pelgrom. The killers landed close to the
camp without being seen and crept silently toward the tents, spreading out as they went so
as to be able to enter each of them simultaneously. Then, at the assistant’s signal,
they attacked.

One of Zevanck’s men that night was Andries Jonas, the old soldier from
Luyck:
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“On the 18 July, Andries Jonas has been ordered by Jeronimus
to go, together with David Zevanck and another [six] men, with the little yawl to
Seals’ Island, in order to kill there the remaining four women and about 15 boys who
had not been killed on the previous murder of 15 July.

“Therefore Zevanck has asked whether he had a knife; Andries
Jonas answered that he had a knife but it was not very sharp. Whereupon Zevanck handed him
his own knife, saying, ‘Cut the throats of the women.’

“So willingly, without objection, Andries has gone to Mayken
Soers, who was heavily pregnant, has taken her by the hand and led her a little to one
side and said to her, ‘Mayken, love, you must die,’ and thrown her underfoot and
cut her throat; that being done, he saw that Jan van Bommel was trying to kill Janneken
Gist (the wife of Jan Hendricx from The Hague); therefore he went to help  . . . and
stabbed Janneken to death with his knife; the other two women were killed by the
others.”

While this was going on, Van Welderen and Beer had crept into the tents with
three or four of the other mutineers and caught the surviving cabin boys asleep. The
mutineers set upon the youths with daggers and clubs, bludgeoning and stabbing them where
they lay. A dozen of the boys were killed outright, or mortally wounded and dragged down
to the sea to drown, but three managed to escape. Dodging their assailants’ blows,
they ran into the darkness and disappeared along the ridge.

These boys survived until 24 July, when they foolishly emerged within sight of
Batavia’s Graveyard. Cornelisz noticed them, and sent Stone-Cutter Pietersz with
three men to flush them from their hiding places. This time the youths did not escape; the
lance corporal captured them alive and herded them into his yawl. On the way back to
Batavia’s Graveyard, on the under-merchant’s orders, he and Isbrant Isbrantsz
forced one of the boys to throw his two companions overboard. The survivor, a child named
Claes Harmansz, was spared. Like Gerritsz, he became a mutineer.

Jeronimus’s actions in the latter half of July 1629 suggest a man driven to
commit ever more perverse atrocities by a burning need for novelty and stimulation. The
under-merchant apparently felt jaded by the endless murders he had ordered, and—like
some Roman tyrant—sought out fresh diversions to assuage his boredom. It was not as
if he really needed more followers; his position on Batavia’s Graveyard was by now
unassailable, and he was never to rely upon Andries De Vries or even Andries Liebent in
the way he trusted Jan Hendricxsz or Mattys Beer. Rather, he seems to have taken special
pleasure in exploiting weakness and corrupting youth.

De Vries, Liebent and the surgeon Jansz had already been forced to slaughter
companions and friends in order to save themselves. Now Jeronimus and his men had forced
Claes Harmansz, Isbrant Isbrantsz, and Abraham Gerritsz to become killers too. The
under-merchant was, perhaps, intrigued by the changes that came over his followers once he
had turned them into murderers; he seems to have found the conflicting emotions of guilt
and exultation a fascinating study. And though he had always distanced himself from the
violence that had engulfed the archipelago, he now seems to have become obsessed with the
idea of experiencing the same sensations for himself.

Evidence for this contention can be found in an incident that occurred a few days
after the first killings on Seals’ Island. For several nights Cornelisz and his
companions had had their sleep disturbed by the endless wailings of a baby, the child of a
girl from the lower deck named Mayken Cardoes. Mayken had saved her infant from the wreck
and nursed it devotedly, even breast-feeding when the water on the island had run out and
she herself was close to dying of thirst. But for all her frantic efforts the infant
proved impossible to quiet, and she was unable to prevent it from awakening the merchant
and his friends.

For Jeronimus, the crying baby seemed the perfect subject for his planned
experiment, and he resolved to murder it. It was typical of Cornelisz that he chose to
kill with poison—an apothecary’s weapon, and something he, alone of all the
people in the Abrolhos, was able to prepare—and equally telling that he preferred to
proceed by stealth. Mayken was brought before him and asked for details of the baby’s
illness. One can readily imagine her accepting the under-merchant’s offer to concoct
a medicine to soothe it.

The poison that Jeronimus produced, using materials that had been salvaged from
the wreck, was an old alchemical compound called
mercurium sublimatum
. Cornelisz
administered it on 20 July and watched with interest to observe its effect. He must have
been disappointed to discover that though the potion quickly silenced the child’s
crying, it failed to kill it altogether, merely inducing a sort of coma “so that it
could neither live nor die.”

This failure left the under-merchant in a difficult position. It would, of
course, have been easy enough for Jeronimus to have finished the helpless infant off, but
for some reason he retained his old aversion to killing with his bare hands. He chose,
instead, to blood another of the minor mutineers who had thus far evaded his
responsibilities.

Cornelisz’s chosen instrument on this occasion was another of the
island’s weaklings: Pelsaert’s trusted clerk, Salomon Deschamps of Amsterdam.
Deschamps, who was the most senior VOC officer in the Abrolhos after Jeronimus himself,
was a coward who had done nothing to prevent the under-merchant from seizing control of
the islands, “permitting the evil to take its course without saying anything against
it, shutting his eyes and dissimulating in order to prolong his own life.” Indeed, as
soon as Cornelisz had seemed securely established, he had transferred his allegiance to
the mutineers. Now the clerk was made to pay for this betrayal.

“On 20 July, at night, he was fetched out of his tent by Jacop Pietersz,
who took him into Mayken Cardoes’ tent, where David Zevanck, Jan Hendricxsz and
Cornelis Pietersz of Utrecht were, who said to him that they were not certain of his
faithfulness [and] therefore took a Young Suckling child from the lap of the foresaid
mother, Mayken Cardoes, and said to him, ‘Deschamps, 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 here
on the Island do not hear so much wailing.’ Then he, Deschamps, without protest, has
taken the child outside the tent and has strangled it, an act of very evil
Consequence.”

Mayken Cardoes’s baby was the first of the
Batavia
survivors that
Cornelisz attempted to murder himself, and it would also be the last. Yet by the time
Deschamps had squeezed its barely begun life from it, the infant had become the 105th
person to die at the under-merchant’s hands. By now fewer than 60 people were still
alive on Batavia’s Graveyard, and Jeronimus was close to doing what he had set out to
do: “to have murdered or destroyed all the people until the amount of 45 or
less.”

Of all the families on the island, by far the largest was the
predikant
’s.
Gijsbert Bastiaensz and Maria Schepens had been blessed with a total of eight children,
seven of whom had sailed with them on the
Batavia.
In an age in which half of all
the children born in Europe died before reaching adulthood, Bastiaensz had been
exceptionally fortunate to lose only one child in infancy. Even more remarkably, the
predikant
’s
wife, his servant girl, Wybrecht Claasen, and all seven of the children had survived the
many rigors of the voyage: running aground on the Walcheren Banks, the long journey to the
Abrolhos, the shipwreck, five waterless and agonizing days on Batavia’s Graveyard,
the maid’s struggle to fetch water from the hulk, and finally 20 days of terror at
the hands of Jeronimus Cornelisz.