Batavia's Graveyard (32 page)

False diplomacy had failed. Now Jeronimus tried violence. Two or three days after
Daniel Cornelissen’s disappearance, during the last week of July, Zevanck and Van
Huyssen gathered 20 men and attempted to subdue Wiebbe by force. As Hayes had calculated,
the mutineers’ boats were spotted while they were still well out to sea, and their
crews had to slip and stumble their way across seaweed-strewn mudflats to reach the shore.
The Defenders came to meet them with their homemade weapons, and there was some sort of
encounter on the beach. Exactly what occurred was not recorded, but it appears that the
mutineers’ reconnaissance was unsuccessful. Zevanck and Van Huyssen may have been
surprised to meet with concerted resistance from a group of well-fed, well-armed men; in
any case, they withdrew before either side could inflict casualties on the other, and
scrambled back to their own camp to gather reinforcements. Taken by surprise themselves,
they needed new ideas and a fresh approach. Unfortunately, they had neither.

Zevanck and Van Huyssen returned to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island on 5 August. On
this occasion they brought with them their entire gang, but they had not improved their
tactics. Once again the men from Batavia’s Graveyard made a long drawn-out approach
across the mud; once again the Defenders were prepared for them. Hayes’s troops met
the mutineers in the shallows, “up to their knees in water,” and prevented them
from reaching land. The mutineers showed no more stomach for a fight than they had the
previous week; again there were no casualties on either side. The second assault on
Hayes’s Island was as unsuccessful as the first.

After that the captain-general made no more attacks on the Defenders for a while,
and the civil war in the Abrolhos lapsed into an uneasy truce, which lasted for the best
part of a month. A few of the Defenders had family on Batavia’s Graveyard, but Wiebbe
Hayes showed no inclination to counterattack Cornelisz’s men, and in retrospect his
caution seems perfectly justified; secure though they were in their well-prepared
positions, Hayes’s troops would have been badly exposed to Jeronimus’s swords
and pikes in more open fighting. For their part, the mutineers now knew that they could
not inflict serious casualties on Wiebbe’s men without taking greater risks
themselves. Some sort of new plan was evidently required.

The problem became urgent at the end of August, for time had turned against the
mutineers. Each passing day increased the risk of the long-awaited rescue ship appearing,
and as the wet season in the Abrolhos neared its end, their supplies of water dwindled.
The more impulsive members of the captain-general’s gang—Van Huyssen and Andries
Liebent among them—grumbled at the strict rationing they were expected to endure;
they knew by now that the Defenders had abundant food and drink and declared that they
would rather fight to take Wiebbe’s island than live in increasing misery on their
own.

Under pressure to take action, Jeronimus himself began to plan a third attempt to
ambush Hayes. Manipulative by nature, the captain-general greatly preferred deceit to
frontal assaults. Rather than launch a third attack, he conceived the idea of a bogus
offer of peace—“to come to an accord with them, in order, under the cloak of
friendship, to surprise them by treason at an opportune time.” He would go, he said,
to Wiebbe’s island bearing gifts.

Cornelisz’s scheme was more subtle than those of Van Huyssen and Zevanck,
but hardly well thought out. He knew that Hayes’s troops required blankets and fresh
clothing—after three months in the islands, their shirts and breeches were torn and
dirty, and their shoes, which had been cut to pieces on the coral, had been replaced with
rough clogs carved from planks of driftwood—while his men needed fresh water. There
was cloth to spare on Batavia’s Graveyard, and he hoped that Wiebbe might exchange
fresh meat and water for clothing and red wine. A parlay on the beach would give his men
the chance to talk to the Defenders, sow seeds of dissension, and then, perhaps, persuade
some of them to come over to the mutineers, “under cover, as friends, in order to
help murder the others”; but Jeronimus never explained how the mutineers were to
bribe their counterparts, or arrange a betrayal without Wiebbe realizing what was going
on. Cornelisz’s cunning had once been an asset to the mutineers but now his inability
to think things through, coupled with an invincible belief in his own rightness, would
cost them dearly.

The parlay took place on 2 September. The day before, Gijsbert Bastiaensz had
been sent to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with proposals for a peace treaty. The Defenders
had received him kindly and expressed guarded interest in the plan; a time had been agreed
for negotiations to take place. Now Jeronimus assembled his entire company—37 men and
all their women—on a small islet opposite the Defenders’ main position and about
400 yards away across the mudflats. That done, he crossed to Hayes’s Island with only
a small group of his most trusted lieutenants, leaving the remainder of the mutineers
behind him.

What persuaded Cornelisz to take such an insane risk? The overtures that had been
made on 1 September seemed to have been positively received, and the captain-general was
confident that Wiebbe and his men were genuinely desperate for the clothing. He had
returned from the reconnaissance of the previous day “saying joyfully to his folk
that they now quite certainly had those [people] surely in his hands.” Possibly he
was also convinced, by the ragged appearance of Hayes’s troops, that the Defenders
were not much of a threat. But knowing Jeronimus, it seems likely that he was also fatally
overconfident. The captain-general had complete faith in his own powers of persuasion and
perhaps did not understand that the loyalists mistrusted every word he said. Having seen
Zevanck and Van Huyssen fail to overwhelm Hayes by force, it may have seemed to him that
he was teaching his companions a lesson in how to handle malcontents. And, of course, he
retained the absolute conviction that his God was protecting him.

Cornelisz arrived on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with a bodyguard of five: David
Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, Gsbert van Welderen, Wouter Loos, and Cornelis Pietersz.
His men struck the Defenders as “very skinny of hunger and thirst,” but, even in
this diminished condition they were still dangerous, having committed 25 or 30 murders
between them. They bore the promised supplies of
laken
and red wine. A party of
Defenders came to meet them, and the bales of cloth were opened on the beach. While the
men drank wine and passed samples of the cloth about, Wiebbe and Jeronimus conversed. The
captain-general monopolized the negotiations, “deceiving [him] with many lies, saying
he would harm none, that it had only been on account of the Water that he had fought
against them, [and] that there was no need to distrust him because some had been
killed.” While Hayes was thus occupied, however, Zevanck and the other mutineers were
“walking hither and thither,” trying to strike up conversations with individual
Defenders. As Cornelisz had instructed, they attempted to suborn Wiebbe’s men,
promising them 6,000 guilders a man, and a share in the salvaged jewels, if they would
change sides.

It proved to be a fatal mistake. The Defenders had anticipated treachery, and
they were ready for it. Rather than listening to Zevanck and his companions, they fell
upon them suddenly, and Jeronimus paid dearly for setting foot on Hayes’s Island
without adequate protection. Hopelessly outnumbered, his bodyguard surrendered with hardly
a fight. Cornelisz was taken prisoner and bound. Only Wouter Loos escaped, tearing himself
free from his captors and making off in the mutineers’ skiff before he could be
recaptured.

David Zevanck and his companions now had less than two minutes to live. A quarter
of a mile away across a muddy channel, the remaining mutineers had realized too late what
was happening. They seized their arms and made ready to attempt a rescue, but Hayes and
his men saw them coming and backed away, dragging their new prisoners with them. As the
Defenders reached their positions and turned to face another attack, Wiebbe took rapid
stock of his situation. The advantage he had enjoyed in numbers had probably all but
evaporated, for it must have required at least two men to guard each of the struggling
mutineers and prevent their fleeing after Loos. Moreover, his enemies’ blood was up,
and it would probably remain so while there was a chance for them to save their leaders.
The logic was inescapable: he gave the order to kill the prisoners.

Jeronimus alone was spared; he was too important, both as a ringleader and a
potential hostage, to be dispatched. But Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and Gsbert van
Welderen were slaughtered where they stood, along with the unfortunate Cornelis Pietersz.
The executions occurred in plain view of the other mutineers as they swarmed down to the
beach of their little islet, and they had the desired effect. It was plain that the
Defenders were well prepared to meet an attack, and any assault would only result in the
death of Cornelisz himself. Shocked and demoralized by the unexpected turn of events, the
remaining mutineers pulled back instead and retired in some confusion to Batavia’s
Graveyard.

In the space of perhaps five minutes, the balance of power in the Abrolhos had
shifted for good. The mutineers had lost their leader and his principal lieutenants, while
Hayes had won the first real victory in the indecisive island civil war, immeasurably
strengthening his men’s morale. The Defenders had secured the wine and clothing they
had coveted, for the mutineers’ supplies had been abandoned on the beach when they
were captured. Individual survivors were also affected by what had happened; Judick
Gijsbertsdr, for instance, had lost both of her protectors; her father, left by chance
among the loyalists by the swift collapse of his diplomacy, remained on Hayes’s
Island, while her husband-
manqué
Coenraat, run through by Wiebbe Hayes’s
nail-tipped pikes, lay dead on the beach.

Of all the
Batavia
’s people, none experienced a more dramatic
reversal of fortune than Jeronimus Cornelisz. When he stepped ashore that day, the
captain-general was the undisputed master of the survivors, gleefully wielding the power
of life and death. His absurd costume of gold-trimmed
laken
had marked him as a man
of great self-regard and consequence, compared with whom the ragged Defenders seemed to be
no more than a rabble. Half an hour later, though, Cornelisz had at last experienced for
himself something of the terror he had inflicted on Batavia’s Graveyard. He had been
deposed, deprived of his authority, tightly bound, and no doubt harshly treated, too;
worse, the aura of invincibility that had once surrounded him—and in which he himself
certainly believed—had been unceremoniously stripped away.

The captain-general’s humiliation was compounded by the quarters that the
Defenders found for him. For three months Jeronimus had dwelled in a large tent packed
with looted clothes and treasure, taking his pick of the salvaged food and drink. Now he
was hurled into a limestone pit some way inland and made to help feed Hayes’s men.
Into the hole the Defenders tossed the birds they caught, for their prisoner to pluck for
them, and at the bottom lived Cornelisz, spattered with guts and feathers. For every nine
birds that rained down on him, eight had to be surrendered to Wiebbe Hayes. The ninth he
was allowed to keep, as “salary.”

Still smarting from the disastrous setback of 2 September, the remaining
mutineers regrouped on Batavia’s Graveyard and elected a new leader. The only
remaining member of Cornelisz’s council—Stone-Cutter Pietersz, the ineffectual
and unpopular lance corporal—was passed over. In his place, the 32 survivors of the
under-merchant’s band elected Wouter Loos.

Loos was a professional soldier who came from the southern Dutch town of
Maastricht. He was considerably younger than Jeronimus, being about 24 years old, but
unlike Cornelisz and his cohorts he did possess some military ability; this, in the
aftermath of a devastating defeat, no doubt helps to explain his election. He had long
been one of Cornelisz’s favorites and had participated in several murders, but unlike
the captain-general he took no great pleasure in killing for its own sake. Under his
command, the massacres on Batavia’s Graveyard ceased, and the remaining people on the
island
^*44
ceased to live in constant terror of their lives.

Nevertheless, in most respects Wouter’s regime differed little from
Jeronimus’s. Strict rationing remained in force. The women from the lower deck were
still “kept for common service,” and Loos himself shared Creesje’s tent,
though he would always insist that he had neither touched nor slept with her. Judick
Gijsbertsdr was also treated well after her lover Coenraat’s death; that is, she was
left alone, and no other mutineer was permitted to rape her.