Batavia's Graveyard (36 page)

By morning on 30 September, a Sunday, Cornelisz was sufficiently recovered to be
called from his tent to hear the preacher’s sermon with the other prisoners. He
alone, however, refused to join the party, vowing to have nothing at all to do with the
minister. This refusal to seek solace in religion less than a day before the scheduled
executions struck the
commandeur
as remarkable, and it was only now, at the end of
the whole story, that Pelsaert finally began to comprehend the true significance of the
under-merchant’s heresy. Jeronimus’s strange ideas had cropped up from time to
time during his interrogation, particularly in connection with the suppression of
Bastiaensz’s preaching on the island, but they had become so bound up with his litany
of lies, half-truths, and self-deception that the members of the Broad Council seem to
have largely disregarded them, seeing the captain-general’s theology as little more
than another of the devices that he used to control his men. The other councillors were
bluntly practical men, of strictly orthodox religious views. Confronted with the reality
of the murder, rape, and pillage that had gone on in the archipelago they did not feel
compelled to explore a merely ideological charge of heresy.

The
commandeur,
who had a better education than the rest and at least some
imagination, was perhaps the only man in the Abrolhos who—at this late
remove—finally understood not only how Cornelisz’s beliefs had helped to mold
the shape and nature of the mutiny, but also that these views were in themselves only a
part of a larger and more complex personality—a personality he plainly believed was
evil. In his journals, Pelsaert recoils almost visibly from this recognition, just as a
snail that has been prodded by a twig retreats into its shell. And, like the snail, the
commandeur
had no more than an incomplete understanding of what it was that had touched him. It was
as though he had just seen a truth that had lain masked by the easy denunciations of the
official record: “Godless,” “evil-minded,” “innately
corrupt.” “See how miraculously God the Lord reveals godlessness before all the
people,” the
commandeur
had written piously of Jeronimus’s refusal to
come to church; but what he really meant was that he had caught a glimpse—as it were
from the corner of his eye—of someone living far beyond the bounds of conventional
morality and godliness.

Time was now fast running out for all the mutineers. The first day of October
dawned so grimly stormy that the planned executions had to be postponed; the seas were so
high that it was dangerous to make the generally easy voyage across the deep-water channel
to Seals’ Island. But this respite was only temporary; the next day it was calmer,
and a group of carpenters went over to begin building the gallows. Seals’ Island is
the only place in the vicinity of Batavia’s Graveyard where the soil is deep enough
to support such structures; there is a good landing place on the west side of the channel,
toward the southern end of the islet, and a ridge just inland with enough sand and
guano-encrusted earth on it to sink the posts. The carpenters used spare lumber from the
Sardam,
and perhaps the
Batavia
’s driftwood, too, and when they had finished they had
put up two or three large scaffolds, with room enough for seven men.

Once that work was done, the prisoners were summoned. Pelsaert was there to
supervise the execution of justice, and Bastiaensz to console the men and save their
souls, if that were possible. There, too, was Creesje Jans, who had not talked to
Jeronimus since his capture nearly a month earlier. An hour before the executions were due
to begin, and in the hearing of some of the Defenders, she at last came close enough to
the captain-general to catch his eye. Pelsaert was not present to record this last brief
encounter; but Wiebbe Hayes was there, and he listened while Creesje reproached her former
captor in the strongest terms. “She bitterly lamented to the said Jerome,” the
newly promoted sergeant noted later, “over the sins he had committed with her against
her will, and forcing her thereto. To which Jerome replied: ‘It is true, you are not
to blame, for you were in my tent 12 days before I could succeed.’ ”

Creesje was not the only person on Seals’ Island anxious to confront
Cornelisz before he died. The other condemned mutineers, who had once been the
captain-general’s creatures, had greatly resented his betrayal of them under
interrogation, and they now loudly demanded that Jeronimus be strung up first, “so
that their eyes could see that the seducer of men [had] died.” This request reflected
their desire for revenge, of course, but also a real fear that if they died first the
apothecary might yet talk his way out of punishment. They crowded round the under-merchant
as he was dragged toward his execution—Hendricxsz and Van Os, Jonas and Allert
Janssen, Fredricx and Beer—and they hooted and hissed at him. They saw him kneel
before the hangman so that his hands could be removed (a contemporary print suggests that
the amputations were crudely performed, with a hammer and a chisel). And at the very end,
they gathered beneath the gallows to watch as he ascended.

The assembled people on the island saw one last drama played out on the scaffold.
“They all shouted at each other,” Pelsaert recalled. “Some evil-doers
shouted ‘Revenge!’ at Jeronimus, and Jeronimus shouted at them. At last he
challenged them, as well as the council, before God’s Judgement Seat, that he wanted
to seek justice there with them, because he had not been able to get it here on
Earth.”

The
predikant
witnessed the same bizarre exchange. “If ever there has
been a Godless Man,” he wrote,

“in his utmost need, it was he; [for] he had done nothing wrong, according
to his statement. Yes, saying even at the end, as he mounted the gallows: ‘Revenge!
Revenge!’ So that to the end of his life he was an evil Man.”

Then Gijsbert Bastiaensz, who had more cause than most to hate Cornelisz, added
a last thought. “The justice and vengeance of God has been made manifest in
him,” he scrawled, “for he had been a too-atrocious murderer.”

9

“To Be Broken on the Wheel”

“And so he died stubborn.”

FRANCISCO PELSAERT

J
ERONIMUS TOOK QUITE SOME TIME TO DIE.

A gallows, in the seventeenth century,
consisted of little more than two braced uprights, 10 to 15 feet high, joined by a thick
horizontal beam from which men were strangled slowly at the end of a short rope. Two
hundred years before the invention of the trapdoor and the drop, the only other piece of
equipment that an executioner required was a ladder to prop against one of the uprights.
The prisoner was driven up the ladder, arms tied, legs free, the noose already around his
neck. The hangman tied the other end of the rope securely to the beam and then, with
little ceremony, thrust one knee into the small of the condemned man’s back and
launched him into space. The fortunate few died quickly of a broken neck, but in most
cases the fall was not enough to guarantee an instant death and the man was strangled by
the noose instead. This could be a lengthy process, lasting for up to 20 minutes, and most
prisoners remained conscious for a good part of the time. The convulsive kicks and
struggles of the dying man were reckoned good sport by the crowds who attended the public
executions popular in Europe. Those lucky enough to secure a spot close to the scaffold
could also witness the unpleasant aftermath of a slow hanging: uncontrolled voiding of
bladder and bowels and, in some cases, involuntary erection at the moment of
death.

Attempts were sometimes made to hasten the condemned man’s end; friends
might be allowed to tighten the noose by pulling at his legs, while, in France, the
executioner was required to swing out onto the crossbeam “and, placing his feet in
the loop formed by the bound hands of the patient, by dint of repeated vigorous shocking
terminate his sufferings.” It seems unlikely that such interventions were allowed in
Jeronimus’s case, but unless tourniquets had been applied, the amputation of his
hands would have led to loss of consciousness and death before the noose could do its
work. The maximum allowable blood loss for a man of normal weight—around 160
pounds—is roughly two and a half pints. Cornelisz, who had lived on the sparse island
diet for the best part of three months, almost certainly weighed a good deal less than
that. He would have lost consciousness quite quickly, and died after losing around two
pints of blood.

As was the custom, the
predikant
accompanied the condemned men to the
scaffold in the hope that some, at least, would confess their sins. Jeronimus refused to
talk to him and went to his death without the least show of remorse. “He could not
reconcile himself to dying,” Pelsaert noted grimly, “or to penitence, neither to
pray to God nor to show any face of repentance over his sins . . . . And so he died
stubborn.” Cornelis Jansz, who witnessed the execution, was likewise shocked by
Cornelisz’s refusal to admit his guilt, even as he stood bleeding by the gallows.
Only a confession—and genuine contrition—could even begin to atone for the
captain-general’s many sins, and Jeronimus’s resolve, the Defender thought, must
have been rooted in his heretical beliefs. “He died,” Jansz wrote, “as he
had lived, not believing there exists Devil or Hell, God or Angel—the Torrentian
feeling had spread thus far.”

The other mutineers had less faith and were not so brave. Both Mattys Beer and
Andries Jonas found that their courage failed them on their way to the scaffold, and each
made a stumbling confession to cleanse their consciences and buy a few moments more of
life. Beer admitted to the murder of another four men and a boy, killed one night “in
the presence of Jeronimus” with such anonymous efficiency that he did not even know
their names. Jonas, whose victims had almost all been women and children, dredged up the
memory of one further killing—that of “still another Boy” who had died more
or less by chance during one of the periodic massacres on Batavia’s Graveyard. It had
been a particularly merciless crime:

“On a certain night when some other Men were murdered, the Boy, out of fear
and because he was ill, came creeping on his hands and feet into their tent, which Jacop
Pietersz Cosyn
^*48
had seen, [and said], ‘Andries, you must help to put the boy out of
the way.’ Whereon he had gone outside, dragged the Boy out of the tent, and cut his
throat with his knife.”

The other condemned mutineers—Jan Hendricxsz, Lenert van Os, Allert
Janssen, and Rutger Fredricx, who had between them bludgeoned, drowned, or stabbed almost
40 of the
Batavia
survivors—went to their deaths more quietly, though all, in
Pelsaert’s view, “died also very Godless and unrepentant.” The one
exception was Jan Pelgrom, the half-mad cabin boy, who was only 18 years old and could not
reconcile himself to death. On his way to the scaffold he succumbed to hysteria,
“weeping and wailing and begging for grace, and that one should put him on an Island
and let him live a little longer.” Remarkably, given the boy’s awful record, the
commandeur
gave way to Pelgrom’s pleas, agreeing to spare him on account of
his age. At the foot of the gallows Jan’s death sentence was commuted to marooning
“on an island or the continent, according to occasion occurring,” and he was
returned to the temporary prison.

Nothing is said in the
Batavia
journals as to what happened to the corpses
of the other prisoners, but it was usual, in the Netherlands, for the bodies of executed
prisoners to remain on view as a warning to others. In Haarlem condemned men from
throughout North Holland were hung just outside the city walls and their remains were not
cut down until the scaffold was required again. Even then the corpses would be strapped to
wooden poles arranged nearby so that they remained on display. In the Abrolhos, therefore,
the bodies of Cornelisz and his men were in all likelihood left dangling from the gallows
when the execution party rowed back to the
Sardam.

The next day there was a violent gale. By this time it was spring in the
archipelago; thousands of mutton birds had returned to the islands to fill the night with
their unearthly wailing, and high winds frequently interfered with Pelsaert’s salvage
operations. The storm persisted until 4 October; then there was one day of fair weather,
during which a brass cannon on the wreck was brought back to Batavia’s Graveyard.
After that the weather closed in with a vengeance, and for two weeks the monsoons
prevented much work being done out on the reef. Even after that, the weather was only good
enough for salvage “one day in 15 to 20,” in the opinion of the
Sardam
’s
council.

In the circumstances, Pelsaert’s Dutch and Gujerati divers did well to
salvage as much as they did. Working without any protective gear in intensely dangerous
waters, and with the ever-present danger of being dashed to pieces against the reef, the
six men brought up seven of the Company’s lost money chests, quantities of loose
coin, and a good deal of Pelsaert’s silverware, together with some boxes of tinsel.
Three more chests were recovered later, but the other two had to be left in the Abrolhos
“with heart’s regret.” One was located, sitting on the bottom, but it could
not be salvaged because one of the heavy guns had fallen onto it and pinned it to the
reef.

While this salvage work was under way, the
commandeur
set parties of
sailors and Defenders to work on the islands of the archipelago, scouring the ground for
anything of value to the VOC. Cornelisz’s stores of purloined jewels and clothing
were recovered, together with the remaining rations and some trade goods, but
Pelsaert—acutely conscious of what the wreck of the
Batavia
had already cost
the Company—insisted that even the most insignificant detritus be recovered. The men
sent to pick over the islands of the archipelago dutifully salvaged every single item they
could find, from sea-soiled linens to rusted old barrel hoops and nails.

It was hardly necessary work, and on 12 October the merchant’s determination
to retrieve every piece of VOC property resulted in a pointless accident that cost the
lives of five more men. Jacob Jacobsz, the
Sardam
’s skipper, had been ordered
to sail a small boat out to the reef to recover any flotsam that had become stranded
there. The main object of the expedition was the recovery of a small barrel of vinegar
that had been spotted on the coral on the preceding day, after which the boat was to carry
on and search some of the outlying islets in the archipelago for driftwood and other
objects from the wreck. Jacobsz took with him not only his quartermaster, Pieter Pietersz,
and one of the
Sardam
’s gunners, but also two men who had been on the
Batavia:
Ariaan Theuwissen, a gunner, and Cornelis Pieterszoon, the
retourschip
’s
under-trumpeter. The latter was almost certainly the same “Cornelis the fat
trumpeter” named in the letter sent by Jeronimus to the Defenders at the end of July,
who had survived both that attempt at betrayal and three attacks by the mutineers. The men
had orders to return to the
Sardam
that evening if possible, but to stay out all
night if that proved necessary. In the event, they did not come back, and on the afternoon
of 13 October Claes Gerritsz, on the
jacht,
caught a last glimpse of Jacobsz’s
yawl well out to sea, about nine miles from the ship. Soon afterward the wind began to
rise and banks of rain swept in. The curtain of sea mist quickly swallowed up the boat and
hid it from view.

That was the last anyone saw of Jacob Jacobsz and his men. Two days of storms
prevented Pelsaert from launching a search for the missing yawl until 16 October, when a
boat commanded by Jacob Jansz Hollert searched all the outlying islands without success;
and though several columns of smoke were seen rising from the mainland on 4 November,
giving rise to definite hopes that the men might have made a landfall there, a brief
search of the Australian coast revealed no sign of the crew. The five sailors had to be
given up for lost.

So obsessively did Pelsaert search for wreckage that his salvage work was not
completed until the middle of November, six weeks after Jeronimus’s execution. During
this time the hundred soldiers and sailors under his command had to guard the 30 survivors
of the group that had signed oaths of allegiance to Cornelisz. The most dangerous of the
surviving mutineers—they included Daniel Cornelissen and Hans Jacob Heijlweck, both
of whom had killed several men—were still kept, bound hand and foot, in isolation on
Seals’ Island. The remainder, though, were not confined, and since there were at
least a score of them the possibility of another uprising could not entirely be
discounted. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that Pelsaert decided to deal
with another six of the remaining mutineers before leaving the Abrolhos.

The men concerned were Wouter Loos, Lucas Gellisz, Rogier Decker, Abraham
Gerritsz, Claes Harmansz, and Salomon Deschamps, Pelsaert’s clerk, whose role in the
death of Mayken Cardoes’s child had finally emerged. Loos, who was the only major
figure in the group, was charged with allowing himself to be “made Captain of a troop
of Murderers” and attacking Wiebbe Hayes and his Defenders, but not, at first, with
any killings. The other five had all confessed to murder, but in each case Pelsaert and
the members of the Broad Council observed that there had been extenuating circumstances.
Deschamps, Gerritsz, and Harmansz, who had been forced to kill by Zevanck and his men,
were all found to have acted under duress, and each was spared the death sentence. Decker
and Gellisz were still more fortunate. Both had killed men in cold blood, “without
any protest,” as the
commandeur
noted in Decker’s case, and even “to
show good faith,” as he observed of Gellisz’s involvement in the bloody murder
of Frans Jansz. Yet Decker was spared on account of his youth, and Gellisz apparently for
no better reason than that the council wished to show him mercy. Instead of death, each of
the five mutineers was sentenced to be dropped from the yard or keelhauled, followed by
“100 strokes before the mast” and, in Lucas Gellisz’s case, the
confiscation of six months’ wages.

Compared with what Jeronimus had suffered, these punishments were merciful, and
Wouter Loos—who had, after all, succeeded Jeronimus in overall command of the
mutineers—was treated even more leniently. Rebellion against Jan Company in itself
meant an automatic death sentence at the time, but for some reason Pelsaert attached
comparatively little weight to Loos’s role as Cornelisz’s successor. In
addition, the
commandeur
noted only in passing that Loos had indeed been guilty of
“several murders,” though he had actually killed two people—Bastiaen
Gijsbertsz and Mayken Cardoes—tied up at least two others so that they could be
drowned, and bore a good deal of responsibility for the death of Jan Dircxsz, the
Defender, in the final assault on Hayes’s Island. Nor was any mention made of the
prominent part Loos had played in the plot to entice the
Sardam
’s crew ashore
and murder them. Pelsaert’s view was that Loos had actually “committed more with
his tongue, by means of advice, than with his hands,” and certain factors may have
weighed in the soldier’s favor: he had saved the life of Jan Willemsz Selyns, refused
to launch an attack on the
Sardam,
and no one had died on Batavia’s Graveyard
after he assumed command of the captain-general’s gang. On the whole, however, it is
hard to avoid the conclusion that Loos was treated with leniency simply because he was not
Jeronimus Cornelisz. The mutineers’ last leader was sentenced not to death but to be
marooned, with Jan Pelgrom the cabin boy, somewhere on the South-Land’s
coast.