Batavia's Graveyard (34 page)

The
commandeur
must have encountered Lucretia Jans during this short stay
on Batavia’s Graveyard, but he makes no mention of their meeting in his account of
the mutiny. Creesje had spent the last two weeks sequestered with Wouter Loos and had been
treated comparatively decently since Jeronimus’s capture, but having lived through
shipwreck, extreme thirst, and repeated rape, she was a different woman from the lady
Pelsaert had known aboard the
Batavia.
There must also have been other reunions at
about this time—Jan Carstensz, one of Hayes’s men, with his wife Anneken
Bosschieters; Claes Jansz the trumpeter with his Tryntgien; the
predikant
with his
daughter Judick—but the awkwardness, and what was said, and how they explained
themselves one to the other, are likewise passed over without comment in the journals;
they can only be imagined.

That evening, with the search complete, Pelsaert rowed over to the wreck. It was
unusually calm, and the
Sardam
’s boat was able to approach the site without
much danger. There was little enough to see:

“We found that the ship was lying in many pieces, [and that] all above
water had been washed away except a small piece of bulwark . . . . A piece of the front of
the ship was broken off and thrown half on the shallow; there were also lying 2 Pieces of
Cannon, one of brass and one of iron, fallen from the mounts.—By the foreship was
lying also one side of the poop, broken off at the starboard port of the gunners’
room. Then there were several pieces of a greater or lesser size that had drifted apart to
various places, so there did not look to be much hope of salvaging much of the money or
the goods.”

The upper-merchant nevertheless drew comfort from a statement made by Reyndert
Hendricxsz, the
Batavia
’s steward and one of the unwilling mutineers. He had
been employed as a fisherman and, venturing out to the wreck one day, had seen several of
the money chests lying on the bottom. These, it seemed, should still be there, and
Pelsaert resolved to search for them on the next calm day.

In the meantime, the
commandeur
continued his interrogation of the
prisoners. Pelsaert was legally bound, under Dutch law, to administer justice as quickly
as possible, and to that end he assembled the
Sardam
’s council and then
enlarged it with two men from the
Batavia
in order to form a Broad Council, which
alone had the power to try criminal cases. The members of the
Sardam
’s
raad
were the
commandeur
himself, the
jacht
’s skipper, Jacob Jacobsz
Houtenman,
^*46
Sijmon Yopzoon, the high boatswain, and Jan Willemsz Visch, who was probably
the
Sardam
’s provost. The
Batavia
’s representatives were Claes
Gerritsz, the upper-steersman, and his deputy, Jacob Jansz Hollert; on at least one
occasion Gijsbert Bastiaensz was drafted onto the council, too, to take the place of
someone unavoidably detained. Rather more remarkably, the clerk tasked with recording the
proceedings was none other than Salomon Deschamps, who was both a mutineer and a murderer.
Nor did Deschamps merely write up the interrogations and the sentences as they were made;
he himself signed many of the council’s resolutions and thus helped to pass judgment
on his former comrades. It is possible that Pelsaert remained unaware of the
assistant’s guilt until late on in the proceedings—certainly the clerk would
have glossed over his involvement in the killings, but it is hard to believe that the
mutineers themselves were so discreet. Perhaps the
commandeur
had an unreasoning
trust in his old colleague; more probably, however, Deschamps was the best scribe
available, and the appointment was simply a matter of necessity.

Once the proceedings were under way, the prisoners were kept together on
Seals’ Island, where they were less likely to cause trouble than on board the
Sardam,
and the interrogations took place largely on Batavia’s Graveyard itself. The
commandeur
dealt with the mutineers one by one—asking questions, noting answers, and often
calling witnesses to confirm the truth of what he had been told. Most of Jeronimus’s
men were examined several times, over several days, so that the information they provided
could be used to question others. It would appear, from the summaries prepared by Salomon
Deschamps, that statements were also taken from some of the survivors from the island, as
well as the Defenders, but very little of this evidence found its way into the record.
Practically all of the surviving accounts come from the mouths of mutineers.

The proceedings on the island were conducted in accordance with Dutch law, but
they were not trials in the modern sense and the mutineers did not have lawyers, nor any
right to call witnesses in their own defense. Pelsaert’s chief difficulty lay in
securing reliable testimony from the accused, for the statutes of the United Provinces
were quite specific on the question of what constituted evidence: a man could only be
condemned to death on the basis of his own freely given confession. Since few men would
openly admit to capital crimes, however, the Broad Council did have the right to resort to
torture when a prisoner refused to answer questions or there was good reason to doubt the
veracity of his evidence. As we have seen, confessions extracted under torture were not in
themselves admissible as evidence of guilt, and any statements given in this way had to be
put to the prisoner again, to be confirmed “of freewill,” within a day of being
made. Some men recanted all that they had said when this was done. But since the denial of
evidence given under duress led only to further interrogation, it was not unusual for
testimony obtained in the torture chamber to be confirmed later in the day by men who
would say anything to avoid further pain and suffering.

Jeronimus himself was the first man to be bound for torture. The under-merchant
had indignantly denied his guilt when he had been brought before Pelsaert on the
Sardam,
but his testimony had been so undermined by the freewill confession of Jan Hendricxsz that
the
commandeur
had little compunction in examining him more closely as soon as the
Broad Council had been assembled on Batavia’s Graveyard, “in order,” as he
said, “to learn from him the straight truth, as he tries to exonerate himself with
flowery talk, shoving dirt onto persons who are dead and cannot answer for
themselves.”

Had Cornelisz been imprisoned in the Netherlands, he would probably have been
stretched on the rack, just as Torrentius the painter had been a little less than two
years earlier. But racks were cumbersome and expensive pieces of equipment, and throughout
the Dutch dominions in the East the preferred method of interrogation was the water
torture, which was almost equally effective and far easier to apply. Water torture
required neither specialized equipment nor expert torturers; at its most basic, all that
was needed was a funnel, which was forced into the prisoner’s mouth. Where time and
resources permitted, however, it was more usual for the man in question to be stripped to
the waist and strapped, spread-eagled, into an upright frame—a door frame was
sometimes used. An outsized canvas collar, which extended from his neck up to his eyes or
a little higher, was then slipped over his head and fastened under his chin in such a way
that liquids poured into it had nowhere to escape. The torturer then climbed a ladder by
the frame, carrying a large jug, and the interrogation began.

Water was poured slowly over the prisoner’s head, trickling down into the
collar until it formed a pool around his chin. Failure to answer questions satisfactorily
led to more liquid being added, until the man’s mouth and finally his nostrils were
submerged. From then on, he had to drink in order to breathe; but each time he reduced the
level of the water the torturer would add more from the jug, so that the interrogation
proceeded with the prisoner alternately gulping down the water and gasping for
breath.

If the man persisted in his denials, and the torture became protracted, the sheer
quantities of water that he consumed would bloat him hideously, “forcing all his
inward partes [and] coming out of his nose, eares and eyes,” as a contemporary
English writer observed, and “at length taking his breath away and bringing him to a
swoone or fainting.” When this happened, the prisoner would be cut down and forced to
vomit so that the torment could begin again. After three or four applications of the
torture, the man’s body would be “swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his
cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his
forehead,” and he would generally be ready to confess to anything that he was asked
to.

Few men endured the water torture for this long, and Cornelisz was not one of
them. It took some days, and several applications of the torment, but gradually the
under-merchant was driven to confess not only to his plot to seize the rescue
jacht,
but also to the part that he had played in planning mutiny on the
Batavia
herself.
Yet still he wriggled like a worm on a hook. Where there was little chance of misleading
anyone, Jeronimus confessed freely to his crimes. He knew that Pelsaert had found copies
of the oaths the mutineers had sworn to him, and he made no effort to deny that they
existed. But where he could—where no other evidence existed—Cornelisz continued
to blame Ariaen Jacobsz or David Zevanck for decisions that had actually been his own. Jan
Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, and Allert Janssen were brought in to confront him, at which he
belatedly confessed to ordering the murders of three dozen people; but at no point did the
apothecary admit to any involvement in the deaths of men killed by Zevanck, Van Huyssen,
or Gsbert van Welderen. Then, on 28 September, when his interrogation was finally
concluded, he suddenly recanted everything—“saying they [the witnesses] are
lying, also that all he has confessed he has confessed because he has been threatened with
torture; also that he knew nothing of the seizing of the ship
Batavia
”—and
Pelsaert found himself confronted with the possibility that he would have to start the
whole procedure once again.

“Therefore,” noted the
commandeur,

“on account of his unsteady and variable confessions, practising crooked
means—though by all people accused in his own presence in order to prove the same to
be lies—have again and for the last time threatened him with torture and asked why he
mocked us, because he has confessed and told everything freely several
times.”

Cornelisz replied with a further lie: he had wished, he said, to delay matters
sufficiently to be taken to Batavia “in order to speak again to his
wife”—although he knew, as Pelsaert perhaps did not, that she was still in the
Dutch Republic. Then, when the
commandeur
read out his statements and confessions
“before all the people on the Island,” Jeronimus complained that a small detail
was still incorrect: “Something was in it of which Assendelft,
^*47
Jan Hendricxsz and
others accused him wrongly.” It was yet another delaying tactic; the law compelled
Pelsaert to recall both witnesses to double-check their stories, which in turn meant a
respite of perhaps an hour while the men were brought over from Seals’
Island.

At last, when the men concerned had been fetched and reconfirmed their testimony,
the exasperated
commandeur
confronted Cornelisz directly, demanding to know why he
“mocked the Council through his intolerable desperation, saying one time that they
spoke the truth, another time that they all lied.” From Pelsaert’s voice, or
manner, the under-merchant finally understood that he was now beaten. Further evasion, he
could see, would only result in vigorous torture; and so a truth of sorts emerged.
“Confesses at last,” noted Deschamps at this point in his summary, in his best
Italian hand, “that he did it to lengthen his life.”

Rather than endure any further torment, Jeronimus now agreed of free will that
all his testimony was true, and late in the afternoon of 28 September he signed his
statements and confessions. “He well knows that all he has done is evil enough,”
Pelsaert observed in conclusion, “and he desires no grace.”

Cornelisz’s fellow mutineers were more easily entrapped. A few, such as Jan
Hendricxsz, largely spared themselves the agonies of the water torture by confessing
freely to their sins. Others, including Rutger Fredricx and Mattys Beer, tried to conceal
at least some of their crimes, in the hope of lessening their punishment. They were put to
the torture in an attempt to get at the truth. Andries Jonas suffered more than most for
his blind insistence that he had remained outside the
predikant
’s tent on the
night the family were murdered; the
commandeur
suspected that Jonas was concealing
his role in the affair, and the soldier was half-drowned twice before his persistent
denials were believed. But none of the captain-general’s gang escaped without
enduring at least a little pain. Even Hendricxsz was tortured once, when he tried to
pretend that he knew nothing of his leader’s plan to seize the
jacht.