Batavia's Graveyard (41 page)

Creesje’s motives for remaining in Batavia and remarrying can only now be
guessed at. Unlike Judick Gijsbertsdr, she had money—her own and that of her first
husband, whose arrears of pay, in a remote outpost such as Arakan, may well have totaled
several hundred guilders. She was still beautiful, had assets, and could certainly have
contracted a good marriage with a senior Company official. The man she had made her new
husband was, however, a soldier, and a mere sergeant at that. He had fought during the
Susuhunan’s siege but lacked the social status and the prospects Van der Mijlen had
enjoyed. Creesje’s choice therefore requires some explanation.

The answer appears to lie in the church records of Cuick’s hometown, Leyden,
where Creesje and her husband stood as godparents to no fewer than four children of Pieter
Willemsz Cuick and his wife Willempje Dircx between September 1637 and December 1641.
Reading between the lines, it seems likely that this Pieter Cuick was Jacob the
soldier’s brother, and at least possible that his wife, Willempje, was none other
than Lucretia’s stepsister—the same Weijntgen Dircx with whom she had lived in
the Herenstraat in Amsterdam almost 20 years before.

Once allowance has been made for the extravagant variations in the spelling of
proper names that were all too common at this time, therefore, it would appear that
Creesje’s second husband may have been her own stepbrother-in-law. This discovery may
well explain Creesje’s willingness to marry, as it were, beneath herself. Alone and
friendless in an unknown town far from everything she knew, it would have been natural to
seek out any familiar face. Jacob Cuick, whom Creesje may perhaps have known and liked in
Holland, could well have seemed a better choice than a stranger who could not begin to
understand her extraordinary tribulations.

Lucretia Jans and her new husband disappear from sight after 1641. They do not
seem to have dwelled in Leyden, where no further trace of their existence can be found,
and perhaps went to live in Amsterdam, where the surviving records are so enormous and so
poorly organized that it is difficult to search for them. It can be said with some
confidence that no Jacob Cornelisz Cuick was ever interred there, but one tantalizing clue
can still be found to his wife’s fate: at the beginning of September 1681, a
Lucreseija van Kuijck died in Amsterdam and was buried there on the sixth day of the
month. If this Van Kuijck was really Creesje of the
Batavia,
she had survived into
her late seventies and outlived her suitors and her persecutors alike—some small
recompense, perhaps, for the suffering she had endured.

While Creesje Jans tried to make a new life in the Indies, Ariaen Jacobsz
remained rotting in the dungeons of Castle Batavia. The skipper had been confined there
since the middle of July 1629, arrested on the strength of Pelsaert’s accusations,
and held—along with Zwaantie Hendricx—on suspicion of plotting
mutiny.

From the beginning, Jacobsz resisted all attempts to make him talk. His physical
stamina must have been immense; that he survived not only the sea voyage to Batavia in an
open boat but a long spell in a squalid prison, doubtlessly interspersed with
none-too-gentle questioning, was a remarkable achievement. Zwaantie, too, was interrogated
about her actions on the ship, but little progress seems to have been made during the time
that Pelsaert was absent in the Abrolhos.

Even the problem of exactly who had arranged for Evertsz and his men to attack
Lucretia Jans was never resolved to the Company’s entire satisfaction. “The
skipper,” Specx conceded in a note to the Gentlemen XVII,

“was very much suspected that [this] had happened with his knowledge, yea,
even with his aid and at his instigation; about this he, and a certain other female who
had been the servant of Lucretia have been examined by the
fiscaal
and brought
before the Council of Justice, but through the obscurity of the case no verdict has yet
been given.”

From these comments, it appears that Ariaen had consistently proclaimed his
innocence, and that Antonij van den Heuvel had failed to extract anything resembling a
confession even after the
commandeur
’s return from Batavia’s Graveyard
with fresh evidence and accusations. “We do not think that [Jacobsz] is wholly
free,” the governor-general concluded cautiously,

“being certain that if he had publicly maintained authority and justice as
well as he secretly undermined both, many of the committed insolences would not have
happened aboard the ship, nor would the previous actions have remained
unpunished.”

But without some sort of confession, the true extent of the skipper’s
involvement in the mutiny could never be known.

The problem confronting the Councillors of the Indies was thus a simple one. They
certainly believed Jacobsz to be guilty, at least to some degree, of the charges ranged
against him. But they also felt that Pelsaert shared the blame for what had happened on
Batavia
and afterward, not least for his lax handling of the skipper. All that was certain, Van
Diemen concluded, was that “a completely Godless and evil life has been conducted on
the mentioned ship, of which both the skipper and Pelsaert are greatly guilty, may the
Almighty forgive their sin.” Because of this, the Councillors clearly thought that it
would be unwise to take the
commandeur
’s allegations entirely at face value;
and since the only other evidence against Jacobsz came from the mouths of now-dead
mutineers, only a full confession could establish Ariaen’s guilt. In the absence of
any such admission, the existing stalemate could endure indefinitely.

The case against the skipper was thus reduced to a simple test of will, and to
everyone’s frustration, Ariaen remained in prison as late as June 1631, the charges
still unproven despite the belated application of torture. “Jacobsz,” Van Diemen
noted in frustration, “skipper of the wrecked ship
Batavia,
is still
imprisoned, although [he] has several times requested a relaxation and a return to the
fatherland; on the strong indictment of having had the intention to run off with the ship
[he] has been condemned to more acute examination.” In the meantime, the Councillor
suggested, the Gentlemen XVII might wish to examine the papers pertaining to the case and
“give an order in this matter.”

What happened to Ariaen when he was tortured again (for that is what Van
Diemen’s comments meant) remains a mystery. No further reference to the skipper has
been found in the records of the VOC, and, frustratingly, all the transcripts of his
interrogation—which might have shed a good deal of light on events on the
Batavia—
have
vanished, too. It seems unlikely that Jacobsz was released, and if he had been executed
one might expect to find some reference to the fact in the record. More probably he died
of injury or illness in his cell. The skipper had already survived two years in the
malarial dungeons under Castle Batavia—an achievement equal in its own way to his
voyage in the longboat—but it would be almost two years more before a reply could be
expected from the Gentlemen XVII, and that was more than even he was likely to
endure.

Zwaantie Hendricx, Creesje’s loose-moraled servant, likewise disappears from
the records of Jan Company. The likelihood is that she, too, perished in the fortress,
dying some time between December 1629, when she was definitely in custody, and June 1631,
by which time Jacobsz was being held alone. Just possibly, however, she walked free for
lack of evidence, to make her own way in the Indies.

If so, the girl would soon have found herself in an uncomfortable position. She
had no employment; there was little demand for expensive European maids in a settlement
supplied with abundant native labor; and her marriage prospects were far worse than those
of Judick and Lucretia. With Ariaen locked up and likely to remain so, though, Zwaantie
would have had little option but to wed; had she then remained in Batavia she, like every
other emigrant, would have had a less than even chance of seeing the Netherlands again.
Imprisoned, she could hardly have survived—but even free the odds are that she died
in Java, a wife but not, perhaps, a much-changed woman.

Half a world away from the squalid dungeons of Castle Batavia, off one of the
cramped and crowded streets that twisted their way through Haarlem’s poorer quarters,
ran a narrow little alleyway called the Cornelissteeg. The houses there were small and
poorly appointed, and the people who dwelled in them were mostly artisans—water
carriers, carpenters, singers, and the like. It was to this wretched accommodation, far
from the luxuries of the Grote Houtstraat, that Belijtgen Jacobsdr came to live after her
husband sailed on the
Batavia.

Jeronimus’s wife had fallen a long way. Only a few months earlier she had
been a respectable and—to all appearances—prosperous member of Haarlem’s
upper middle class. Now she had lost her home, her business, and her husband. VOC officers
could have a portion of their wages paid to their next of kin, so Jacobsdr would not have
starved; nevertheless, she would hardly have been human had she had not resented the
abrupt change in her circumstances.

Matters were made worse by Heyltgen Jansdr. Belijtgen’s former wet nurse
continued to harass her long after Jeronimus was gone. As late as the summer of 1630
Heyltgen and her husband, Moyses Starlingh, came down to the Cornelissteeg one afternoon
while Belijtgen was out and began to hurl torrents of abuse at her front door in front of
her astonished neighbors. In the course of this tirade, Heyltgen was heard screaming her
familiar insults; Jeronimus’s wife, the nurse called out, was a pig and a whore
riddled with syphilis, and if she dared to leave her home Heyltgen would “cut her
face and trample on it.” Receiving no response from the empty house, the wet nurse
and her husband returned that same evening. Belijtgen was still not home, and Moyses tried
to break down her door, loudly announcing he would wait for her inside. According to the
neighbors, whose testimonies were recorded the next day, Starlingh was in a violent mood,
and they feared that he would loot the property if he got in.

Heyltgen’s tirade must imply that the old dispute over Cornelisz’s son
had still not been resolved, though it was now almost 18 months since Jeronimus had buried
the boy. Whether or not Belijtgen Jacobsdr had taken legal action over her dead child
cannot be said for certain, since Haarlem’s judicial archives are very incomplete.
The one trace of what may be the same dispute occurs in the city burgomasters’
records, which often concern themselves with the resolution of petty quarrels between
members of the lower classes. The relevant
memorial,
issued on 6 July 1629,
concerns a wet nurse and a mother—neither, unfortunately, is named—who were told
to make their peace in a dispute over a child. Both women were bound over, and the nurse
was ordered to pay to the mother seven shillings’ compensation. If the parties
concerned were indeed Belijtgen and her tormentor, it must be assumed that the
burgomasters’ attempts at arbitration had no lasting effect—and observed that
the compensation paid seems minimal in the extraordinary circumstances. But such, perhaps,
was the price of an infant’s life in the early seventeenth century.

What happened next remains unknown; the fracas in the Cornelissteeg is the last
sign of Belijtgen’s life in Haarlem. Three weeks later, on 7 July 1630, news of the
Batavia
tragedy reached the Dutch Republic on the ship
Wapen van Rotterdam,
^*52
and within
days the details of the mutiny were circulating in pamphlets and printed laments.
Cornelisz’s bloody role in the affair thus became notorious, and one can imagine that
his wife found it impossible to remain in Haarlem.

Did Belijtgen return to wherever she called home? There is no way to know for
certain. The meager remains of her unfortunate existence provide no resolution for her
story; like her enigmatic husband, she lived and died in history’s penumbra—a
shadow figure whose origins and motives remain unknown, and whose real character and
hopes, and loves and fears, can now only be guessed at.