Batavia's Graveyard (25 page)

Bastiaensz enjoyed a certain status, it was true—one that had guaranteed him
and his family good rations on the ship, and some protection on the island, too—but
under the circumstances, the fact that he still had all his family around him must have
seemed perfectly miraculous to the rest of the
Batavia
survivors: proof, if any
were required, that the
predikant
truly was a man of God.

Of the minister’s children, four were boys. The eldest, who had been given
his grandfather’s name, was called Bastiaen Gijsbertsz; he was 23 years old, and
since he was sufficiently well educated and mature to do useful work, he had been given
the rank of VOC assistant and spent the voyage helping Pelsaert with his clerical work.
His brother Pieter Gijsbertsz was four years younger, but though certainly old enough to
join Jan Company he had not done so; it is possible that—since Bastiaen was evidently
unsuited to life as a
predikant—
Gijsbert’s second son was destined for
the clergy. The other boys were still of school age: Johannes was 13 and Roelant, the
youngest child of all, was only 8.

The minister’s daughters were Judick, Willemijntgie, and Agnete. Judick was
the second child; she was 21 and thus of marriageable age. In so large a family she must
have spent a good deal of her time helping her mother with the younger children, although
Willemijntgie, at 14, was also nearly grown-up. The youngest girl, Agnete, had celebrated
her 11th birthday shortly before they had reached the Cape.

On an island where women were outnumbered 9 or 10 to 1 by men, Judick could not
help but attract attention, the more so because there were no more than three unmarried
women on Batavia’s Graveyard. Soon she was being courted by Coenraat van Huyssen, the
young cadet who was by now the murderer of half a dozen people. Being good-looking and a
minor member of the nobility, as well as a leading member of Cornelisz’s blood
council, Van Huyssen had some claim to be the most eligible of the island’s many
bachelors, and unwelcome though his attentions were in most respects, they at least saved
the girl from being molested by the other mutineers. She did not discourage him. Matters
moved swiftly, and within a month of their arrival in the Abrolhos Van Huyssen was
proposing matrimony—but with an ugly caveat. Since the couple could not legally be
married in the islands (the consent of the groom’s parents, at home in the Dutch
Republic, would be required to make the match binding), Coenraat agreed to be content with
a mere engagement—so long, that is, as Judick consummate their betrothal on the
spot.

The preacher and his daughter now found themselves in an impossible position.
“Coenraat van Huyssen from Gelderlandt,” scribbled Bastiaensz,

“a member of the Council of those Murderers, besought my Daughter in Holy
Wedlock. But said he would make a Betrothal with her and marry her legally before all the
World, [and] that he would do at the first opportunity; many words were said about this
matter, too long to narrate, for Judick and I deliberated thus: that it was better to be
kept legally by one Man, in such a time, than to be mis-used. Therefore he made a
betrothal vow with her, and all that went with that.

“I begged that she should go and live with him the next day  . . . but the
other Murderers, coming in front of the Tent, said that it had to happen that night and
immediately, otherwise they were ready to kill us . . . . She has been with him in that
respect, but she has not been abused, as she has told me. What could one do against
it?”

As her father had predicted, Judick’s relationship with Van Huyssen was
enough to safeguard her from harm, but even if the mutineer’s feelings for the girl
were genuine, she had no power to protect the other members of her family. For two weeks
now Cornelisz had eased his boredom and sated his men’s increasing blood lust every
second or third day. The general pattern was one of increasing violence. Drownings had
given way to stabbings and cut throats, and the sheer scale of the murders had increased,
too—from the 15 people killed on 9 July to the 23 dispatched on Seals’ Island
nine days later. In the three days since the latter massacre, however, the one incident of
note had been the under-merchant’s poisoning of Mayken Cardoes’s child. This was
not enough for some of the mutineers. The daily routine of catching, preparing, and eating
food held limited appeal for men who had come to enjoy the power of taking life, and by
the end of the third week of the month Zevanck and the others were anxious to kill again.
The largest (indeed the only real) target left to them was the family of Gijsbert
Bastiaensz.

Judick was now inviolate, and Cornelisz had decided the
predikant
himself
might also be worth sparing; though their theologies could not have been more different,
Jeronimus could still see uses for a man of God. Maria Schepens and her six remaining
children were a different matter. On the evening of 21 July, Bastiaensz and his eldest
daughter were lured away from their quarters by an invitation to dine with Van Huyssen and
Cornelisz in the
jonker
’s quarters. While they were being entertained with a
meal of cask meat and red wine salvaged from the wreck, David Zevanck and Jacop Pietersz
gathered seven of the principal mutineers. Together, they made their way to the
minister’s tent. It would be “a pleasant outing,” the Stone-Cutter
declared, to “put the
predikant
’s folk out of the way.”

By now they were well-practiced killers, and the murders had been carefully
planned. Earlier in the evening a group of Cornelisz’s men had dug a grave pit, large
enough to hold eight bodies, not far from the tents. Zevanck and Pietersz had also decided
to kill the family in their tent, where there would be less chance of any of the children
contriving to escape. To this end the men exchanged their swords for knives and hatchets,
which were better tools for killing at close quarters.

Pietersz and Andries Jonas were the last to arrive in the survivors’ camp.
They found Zevanck and Jan Hendricxsz waiting; with them were Lenert van Os, Mattys Beer,
Cornelis Pietersz, Andries Liebent, and a Dutch soldier called Wouter Loos. Inside the
tent, the preacher’s family was cooking dinner. A kettle full of sea lion’s meat
hung boiling over the fire.

The first men to approach were Zevanck and Hendricxsz, the most brutal of the
mutineers. Zevanck crept to the entrance of the tent and called for Wybrecht Claasen. In a
second or two the servant girl emerged, walking almost straight onto Hendricxsz’s
dagger. The German soldier stabbed her once and left her dying on the shingle. Meanwhile
Zevanck forced his way into the tent with the main body of the mutineers. It was so
crowded that Pietersz and Jonas, the late arrivals, had to wait outside.

Maria Schepens and her children must have known they were dead the moment they
saw the axe in David Zevanck’s hand, but once again the young assistant felt the need
to justify his actions. There was an oil lamp hanging in the tent; he took it, lifted it
above his head and called out, “Here has been reported hidden goods of the Company
that we will search for.” He paused, then added ominously: “And we will get
them.” At this, the other mutineers began to hunt through the few possessions in the
tent until, after a moment or two, the lamp blew out—Zevanck no doubt extinguished it
himself—and in the pitch-black crush the murdering began.

There were 14 people in the tent: 7 of Jeronimus’s men and 7 members of the
preacher’s family, one victim to each man. The mutineers laid about themselves with
hatchets. Lenert van Os caved in Maria’s skull with several blows, while Mattys Beer
bludgeoned Willemijntgie. Wouter Loos pushed Bastiaen to the ground “and has beaten
the eldest son underfoot with an adze, until he was dead,” while Zevanck, Van Os, and
Beer between them accounted for Pieter, Johannes, and Agnete. The only child not killed or
wounded in the initial flurry of blows was the youngest; eight-year-old Roelant was so
small that he ducked through the legs of his attacker, Beer, and fled in terror, searching
desperately for a way out of the tent. He almost got away; Beer dared not turn and swing
at the boy for fear of striking one of his companions. But Zevanck and Cornelis Pietersz
were standing close behind him, and one or other of them brought his hatchet down hard
upon the child and killed him.

In only a few moments the killing ceased. Then the murderers became aware that
one of their victims was still alive, and moaning in pain. It was Maria Schepens,
“who was not then quite dead.” Mattys Beer bent over her as she lay prostrate on
the ground and finished her off with several more blows to the head. The groans stopped.
It was over.

They cleared the tent. Andries Liebent made off with the meat from the dead
family’s kettle and took it back to his own quarters. The other murderers dragged the
bodies to the pit that had been prepared and hurled them in, so that they lay huddled
together in a single bloodstained mass.

It was still only midevening and the mutineers’ blood was up. The group
split up and went in search of other prey. Jan Hendricxsz went to the tent of Hendrick
Denys, one of the Company bookkeepers, ordered him out onto the shingle, and, when he
showed himself, “battered in [his] head, with an adze, in front of his tent, so that
he died immediately.” Meanwhile, Zevanck summoned Andries Jonas, who had not yet
killed that night. “Go and call Mayken Cardoes out of her tent and cut her
throat,” he told him.

Cardoes guessed well enough what was happening when Andries arrived outside her
quarters. “Mayken,” Jonas said, “are you asleep? Come, we’ll go for a
walk.” It was not a request but an order, and the girl had little choice but to obey.
She emerged hesitantly from her tent. “Andries,” she begged him, “will you
do me evil?” “No, not at all,” he said, but they had only walked a little
way along the shore when he seized her without warning and forced her backward onto the
coral. Fumbling for his knife, Jonas crouched over her; he reached down and tried to cut
her throat, but she was struggling so violently beneath him that he could not manage it.
After a few seconds he abandoned the attempt and instead leaned back, pinning her down
with one hand while he tried to stab her with the knife held in the other. Desperately,
Cardoes thrust out an arm and tried to seize the blade as it descended. She caught the tip
of it, but the knife was traveling with such force that the blade sliced straight through
the palm and emerged from the back of her hand, wedging itself firmly between the
bones.

Jonas tugged hard at the haft, but the knife was stuck fast and he could not
remove it. He could feel the unfortunate girl still thrashing about beneath him,
attempting to free herself with her one good hand, so he let go of the knife and tried to
strangle her instead. Even then he could not subdue her, but the sound of their struggles
had alerted Wouter Loos, and he ran to Jonas’s aid. Exhausted, wounded, and pinned
against the coral, Cardoes had no chance against two soldiers. Loos stoved her skull in
with an axe and they hurled the corpse into the pit that had been dug for the bodies of
the minister’s family. It was little more than a day since they had murdered the
girl’s child.

Still David Zevanck had not had enough. Back in the mutineers’ camp he
summoned Allert Janssen, who like Jonas had taken no part in the killing of the
predikant
’s
family, and ordered him to kill the under-barber, Aris Jansz of Hoorn. Like Andries Jonas,
Janssen employed a pretext to get the surgeon out of his tent and away from the camp,
saying, “Aris, come outside, we have to go and catch four small birds for the
merchant.” It was by now well after dark, and Jansz can hardly have believed that
this was true, but like Mayken Cardoes he was too scared to refuse. The barber-surgeon and
his murderer walked down to the beach, Aris slightly ahead of Allert, and just as they
reached it Janssen drew his sword and stuck his victim a sudden blow across the shoulder.
At this signal a second mutineer, Cornelis Pietersz, loomed out of the darkness; he had
been hiding close by, and now joined in the attack, swinging at Jansz’s head.
Remarkably, both men’s swords were so blunt that the surgeon was hardly wounded by
their blows. Instead of falling to the ground as they had expected, Jansz took to his
heels and vanished into the night, splashing away into the shallows to the east of the
island. Janssen and Pietersz went after him, calling one to the other as they searched and
no doubt cursing their luck, but their victim had the sense to drop down and let the water
hide him, and they could not find him in the darkness. After a few minutes’ fruitless
wading to and fro, the two mutineers managed to persuade themselves that Jansz had been
critically wounded and was sure to die. “So they said to one another, turning back,
‘Hij
heves al wel’ ”—
“He’s had it”—and set off together,
dripping, to report to Zevanck.

Bleeding somewhat, but otherwise not badly hurt, Aris kept himself hidden until
he was quite certain that the mutineers were gone. Then, slowly and with great care, he
worked his way around the island to the beach where Cornelisz’s men kept their
skiffs. The boats were poorly guarded—probably Zevanck and the others had not
imagined that someone might come at them out of the sea rather than along the island
paths—and no one saw him as he untethered a little homemade raft and dragged it
silently into the water. When he was well clear of the island, Aris clambered aboard, and
began to pull for Hayes’s Island to the north.