Batavia's Graveyard (38 page)

Five more mutineers were hanged. The worst of them, Daniel Cornelissen, had his
right hand amputated before the sentence was carried out. Hans Jacob Heijlweck joined him
on the gallows, and so did Lucas Gellisz. Salomon Deschamps, the pathetic clerk who had
been forced to strangle Mayken Cardoes’s half-dead baby, died alongside them; the
commandeur
had protected him in the Abrolhos, but even Deschamps’s long acquaintance with
Pelsaert was not enough to save him from the vengeance of the Council of the
Indies.

The identity of the fifth man to hang has never been certain. When the time came
to pass sentence on the minor mutineers, Specx and his Council seem to have found
themselves torn between the urge to punish all of Jeronimus’s men and the feeling
that the youngest and most impressionable of them might deserve some mercy. Confronted
with Rogier Decker, who was 17, and Abraham Gerritsz, the 15-year-old runaway whom
Pelsaert had picked up in Sierra Leone, they ruled that only one should die. The manner in
which the matter was decided was a torment in itself. The boys were to

“draw lots which of the two shall be punished with the Cord, and he who
shall draw himself free from Death shall be severely flogged, with a Halter around his
neck.”

Andries Liebent, Hans Frederick, and Olivier van Welderen also received new
sentences. The three “delinquents” (Pelsaert’s word) were tied to a pole
and flogged severely, after which they were put in chains and sent away from Batavia to
endure three years of exile; Frederick—who had helped to kill three men—was made
to wear a heavy wooden halter around his neck as well. In the circumstances none is likely
to have survived their exile long enough to return a free man. The young sailor Cornelis
Janssen was flogged and branded as a looter and a mutineer. Claes Harmansz, who was just
15, was flogged as well. Isbrant Isbrantsz, who was an officer and the one mutineer to
consistently protest that he had acted under duress, was the only man treated with real
leniency. His sentence was to stand, “with a halter round his neck,” to watch
the execution of justice.

The worst punishment of all was reserved for Stone-Cutter Pietersz. Like
Jeronimus himself, the lance corporal had taken little active part in the killing on
Batavia’s Graveyard, though he had taken part in the massacre of the survivors on
Seals’ Island and helped to organize the murder of the
predikant
’s
family. He had, however, played an active part in plotting the mutiny on the
Batavia,
and as one of Cornelisz’s councillors he had helped to determine who should live and
who should die. Because Hayes and Pelsaert had, between them, denied the authorities in
Java the chance to punish David Zevanck and Coenraat van Huyssen, much less Jeronimus
himself, Pietersz was now made to pay for all their sins. For though he played a lesser
role in the mutiny than any of those men, his guilt could hardly be denied. On the last
day of January 1630, “Lieutenant-General” Pietersz was taken out to be
“broken from under upwards, and the body put upon a Wheel.”

Breaking on the wheel, as it was generally known, was the most painful and
barbaric method of execution practiced in the Dutch Republic and was, in effect, a form of
crucifixion. In Pietersz’s case the condemned man, stripped to a pair of linen
drawers, would have been led out to a scaffold on which had been assembled a huge cart
wheel—still fitted with an axle—a bench, some ropes, and a thick iron bar. He
would have been lashed, spread-eagled, to the bench and positioned so that the executioner
had easy access to his limbs. Taking up the heavy bar, and with great concentration, this
man would have proceeded to smash the bones in the prisoner’s arms and legs, starting
with the fingers and the toes and working slowly inward. The aim was to completely
pulverize each limb, so that when Pietersz was lifted from the bench onto the wheel, his
upper arms were broken in so many places that they could be twisted and bent to follow the
circumference of the wheel, while his legs were wrenched backward from the thighs, forced
right around the outer rim, and tied off with the heels touching the back of the head. The
latter operation was difficult to complete without allowing the broken femurs to protrude,
but a skilled executioner took pride not only in ensuring that his victim remained fully
conscious throughout the operation, but also in crushing his bones so thoroughly that the
skin remained intact. As a further refinement, it was common for the condemned man’s
ribs to be stoved in with several further blows, so that every breath became an
agony.

Once the grisly operation had been concluded, Pietersz’s wheel would have
been hoisted upright and the axle thrust deep into the ground close by the scaffold so
that the Stone-Cutter’s final moments could be witnessed by the assembled crowd.
Death—generally as the result of internal bleeding—might take hours; in a place
such as Batavia, the dying man’s pain and distress would have been exacerbated by the
cloying heat and the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that would have filled his eyes and
mouth. The strongest men sometimes survived into a second day, and Pietersz, a brawny army
veteran, may not have lapsed into unconsciousness until the early hours of February
1630.

The lance corporal thus lived to be the last of Jeronimus’s close
confederates from the island, and, when he died, the mutiny on Batavia’s Graveyard in
some respects died with him. It had cost the lives of two in every three of the people who
had sailed from Texel 15 months earlier—at least 216 men, women, and children from a
total complement of 332, which was a slightly higher proportion of deaths than that
suffered by the passengers and crew of the
Titanic
almost three centuries later.
Even today, the massacres on Houtman’s Abrolhos remain the bloodiest page in the
history of white Australia.

It only remains to trace the fate of the survivors.

1629 proved to be a disappointing year for the Gentlemen XVII. In addition to the
loss of the brand-new
Batavia,
with most of her cargo and two chests of silver
valued at 44,788 guilders, another ship from Pelsaert’s flotilla, the
’s
Gravenhage,
had been disabled by bad weather in the Channel and required costly and
extensive repairs. A third
retourschip,
the
Wapen van Enkhuizen,
^*50
had blown
up off the coast of Sierra Leone on 12 October when fire reached her powder magazine. The
survivors—there were only 57 of them, many terribly wounded—were picked up by
the
Leyden,
which herself lost her skipper and her upper-merchant in an attempt to
fight the fire, plus another 170 men—more than half her crew—from disease on the
outward voyage. The survivors were eventually forced to put in to the port of Sillebor, in
Sumatra, for a month to nurse the sick, which greatly irritated the Gentlemen and cost the
Leyden
’s remaining officers all chance of earning bonuses for the speed of
their voyage out.

Even so, none of these disasters put more than a dent in Jan Company’s
profits for the year, and thanks to Hayes and Pelsaert and the
Sardam
’s men,
even the loss of the
Batavia
could be viewed with some equanimity by Antonio van
Diemen. “The 5th of this month returns here to anchor from the Southland the yacht
Sardam,
”
Van Diemen wrote in December,

“bringing with them 74 souls from the wrecked ship
Batavia
together
with 10 chests of Cash, amongst them the chest No.33 with nine sacks of ducats. Item, the
Cash with Jewels to the value of 58,000 guilders and some wrought silverwork, three
barrels of Cochineal
^*51
and other baggage . . . . Thanks be to the Almighty for this, we
would not have expected it to come out so well.”

An attached list of the goods retrieved mentions 32 items, from money chests and
cannon to a “pack of old linen.” Toward the bottom of the page, one of the minor
pieces listed is “a small cask filled with vinegar,” of the sort that had cost
the lives of the five men in the
Sardam
’s boat. Its value was so insignificant
that Van Diemen did not bother to assess it.

Not many of those who outlived Jacop Pietersz and his fellow mutineers fared
well.

One of the few who did was Johannes van der Beeck. Torrentius, in whose name
Jeronimus had been accused of murdering some 115 men, women, and children, served only 2
years of his 20-year sentence for heresy. He was housed in relatively comfortable
surroundings, granted a good ration of wine, and was permitted to receive and entertain
visitors in his cell. His wife, Cornelia—from whom he had been separated for 14
years—was among those who called on him. She received permission to stay with him for
up to two weeks at a time.

Torrentius still had some powerful friends, both in the Netherlands and overseas.
They included the
stadholder,
or governor, of the Dutch Republic, Prince Frederik
Hendrik of Orange himself, who tried unsuccessfully to get the painter released soon after
he was sentenced. Another of Van der Beeck’s admirers was King Charles I of England,
who seems to have been untroubled by his heresies. In 1630 the King wrote to Holland to
inquire if Torrentius could be sent to England. Frederik Hendrik agreed to pardon him,
very much against the wishes of the burgomasters of Haarlem, and Charles, in turn,
promised that the painter “will not be allowed to exercise his godless tongue, but
only his art.” The English ambassador, Sir Dudley Carleton, sent to bring Van der
Beeck to the English court, formed a relatively favorable impression of the painter,
portraying him as “neither so Angelical as his friends proclaim him, nor yet so
Diabolical as his adversaries does publish him.” Torrentius’s pardon was signed
on 11 July 1630, four days after the first ships of the Indies fleet reached Rotterdam
with news of the
Batavia
disaster, and thus before his supposed role in inspiring
Cornelisz’s mutiny became generally known. Whether his release would have been agreed
had the ships arrived a few weeks earlier is an interesting question.

Van der Beeck was at the English court from 1630 until 1641 or 1642. He seems to
have given—in the words of Horace Walpole—“more scandal than
satisfaction.” He painted relatively little. Eventually, his royal pension cut off by
the Civil War, he crept back into Holland incognito. He had run out of money, but his
elderly mother helped to support him. The painter died in February 1644, either forgiven
or forgotten by the Calvinist authorities, for the great heretic of Haarlem was buried
within the walls of Amsterdam’s New Church, in consecrated ground.

Most of Torrentius’s paintings were confiscated and burned by the public
hangman during and after his trial, and the few that he produced in England were soon
lost. For many years it was thought that none of his works had survived, but just before
the outbreak of the First World War a single masterpiece was rediscovered. It is a still
life, showing a flagon and a jug flanking a wineglass and a bridle, which had once been
owned by Charles I. The painting had disappeared after the royal collection was auctioned
off in 1649, and somehow found its way back to the Netherlands. It was in the Dutch
Republic around 1850, its provenance long since forgotten, and eventually came into the
possession of a grocer named J. F. Sachse, of Enschede. It miraculously survived a great
fire that razed the city in 1862 and was finally recovered and identified in 1913—by
which time Sachse’s children were using it as the cover for a barrel of currants.
After that it was restored. The painting now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam.