Batavia's Graveyard (42 page)

Upon the coral islets of the Abrolhos, all sign of the
Batavia
and her
crew soon disappeared.

The wooden hulk of the
retourschip,
already battered almost beyond
recognition by the sea, did not take long to vanish beneath the waves. Caught between the
ceaseless pounding of the breakers and the reef, Pelsaert’s flagship disintegrated
plank by plank until her upperworks had been reduced to so much flotsam and the remaining
contents of the hold were scattered all across the ocean bed. Within a year or two, the
only indication she had ever been there was the broken wreckage of her masts and spars,
washed up on the rocky beaches of the archipelago.

The islands of the Abrolhos bore witness for a little longer to the Dutchmen who
had lived and died there. In their frantic search for anything of value to the VOC,
Pelsaert and his men had picked Batavia’s Graveyard almost clean of debris. But on
Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, a few scraps of sailcloth fluttered on the scrub, and the
remains of the Defenders’ dwellings still testified to their stubborn refusal to
surrender.

There were less tangible signs of human intrusion, too. Beneath the surface of
the island, the freshwater lenses that had floated in the waterholes and saved the lives
of Hayes’s men had been drained off by thirsty Dutchmen, leaving the water in a
number of ancient wells so brackish it was all but undrinkable. The animal population had
been substantially reduced, and several colonies of tammars and sea lions—which had
survived in unchanging balance for several thousand generations—had been hunted
almost to extinction during the Defenders’ three-month war with Cornelisz’s
band.

Then there were the seven bodies on Seals’ Island. The dead mutineers had
been left to dangle from the makeshift gallows that the
Sardam
’s carpenters
had thrown up for them, and by the time the ropes—rotted by salt-laced gales of
rain—finally sagged and snapped, the island birds would have all but picked the
corpses clean. Before long the gallows would have toppled and fallen too, leaving little
more than piles of bones and wood to bleach and crumble slowly on the strand.

Across the deep-water passage between the islands, on the deserted and infertile
skeleton of Batavia’s Graveyard itself, an altogether stranger change occurred. When
the survivors of the wreck had landed, they had found the isle a barren place. Its sandy
soil was too poor to support much life, and, scoured clean by the wind, it had long been
all but devoid of vegetation. In the early 1630s, however, new patches of undergrowth
sprang up among the coral outcrops, establishing themselves where the soil was deep and
clear of birds’ nests and debris. For a decade or more, the northern portion of the
island bloomed.

The explanation for this unexpected fertility lay a foot or two beneath the
surface, where the bodies of Jeronimus’s victims rested in their shallow graves. As
they decomposed, the remains of Hendrick Denys, Mayken Cardoes, the
predikant
’s
family, and all the rest released their nutrients into the earth, providing freshly
fertile ground for the spores of tea-tree scrub and dandelion, and the site of each burial
pit was soon marked by a little wreath of stubborn greenery. Slowly, over many years, the
plants consumed the cadavers, enveloping them in a dense black mass of probing roots. They
fed off them until they were quite gone, and—in doing so—transformed death into
life, and burial into rebirth.

Epilogue

On the Shores of the Great South-Land

“They shall be put ashore as scoundrels and death-deserving
delinquents, in order to know once, for certain, what happens in this
Land.”

FRANCISCO PELSAERT

W
OUTER LOOS AND JAN PELGROM, the two mutineers whom Pelsaert had marooned on 16
November 1629, were never heard from again.

Their immediate prospects of survival were fair. Wittecarra Gully, at the
southern end of Gantheaume Bay, is one of the few places on the Western Australian coast
where water can always be found. In the southern winter a small stream flows down the
gully into salt marshes along the shore, and though the water in the gully is brackish and
unpalatable by the coast, and dries up altogether in the summer, a spring about two miles
upstream would have provided a steady supply of fresh water—even during the dry
season—for anyone prepared to venture inland. The more substantial Murchison River is
only a few miles to the north, and though food is not abundant in the region, the
availability of water attracted many Aborigines to the area. The local people belonged to
the Nanda culture and were cultivators, growing yams and living in huts grouped into
permanent villages. Had they had wished to, they could have helped Loos and Pelgrom and
kept them alive.

The exact fate of the two mutineers would have been decided by their first and
most important decision: whether to stay where they were, or take their boat and attempt
to sail north along the coast. It would have been pointless for them to make for the
Indies; the Dutch colonies were too far away to be reached in so small a craft, and in any
case they would have been executed the moment they stepped ashore. Their only real
alternative was to head for a point on the coast, at about latitude 24 degrees south,
where the
commandeur
had seen men on the shore on 14 June. That spot was almost 200
miles away to the north. Neither Loos nor Pelgrom could navigate or were in any way
accomplished sailors, and their boat (which Pelsaert described as a
champan
) would
appear to have been one of the jerry-built small craft constructed on Batavia’s
Graveyard from driftwood. An ocean voyage—had they attempted it—would almost
certainly have killed them.

Had the mutineers remained where they were, however, they could not have avoided
making contact with the local people for long. Pelsaert had foreseen this eventuality and
had taken care to provide the men with beads and “some Nurembergen”—the
cheap wooden toys that the German town of Nuremberg was famous for even then—“as
well as knives, bells and small mirrors” made of iron and copper, which the Dutch
knew, from their experience with the Bushmen of the Cape, were highly prized by
“savages.” Loos and Pelgrom were advised not to be too ready with their limited
supplies of gifts—“give to the Blacks only a few until they have grown familiar
with them”—but to treat the local people with trust and consideration. “If
they will then take you into their Villages,” the
commandeur
’s
instructions went on,

“to their chief men, have courage to go with them willingly. Man’s
luck is found in strange places; if God guards you, you will not suffer any damage from
them, but on the contrary, because they have never seen any white men, they will offer all
friendship.”

Whether or not the two mutineers took Pelsaert’s advice is a matter for
conjecture. Loos, who had shown in the Abrolhos that he possessed both courage and the
skill of leadership, was perhaps intelligent and mature enough to have stood some chance
among the Nanda. The hotheaded Pelgrom, on the other hand, was younger and considerably
less stable and may well have proved a liability. The two men had been marooned without
weapons of any sort and would have been easy prey for the Aborigines, whom they would have
needed in order to find food. Without the goodwill of the local people they would surely
have died shortly after they were put ashore, either violently or of slow
starvation.

The portents for friendly cooperation between Dutchmen and Aborigines were not
good. A
jacht
named
Duyfken,
which was the first Dutch ship to land men in
Australia—and probably the first Western vessel to sight the continent, so far as can
be ascertained—had explored the east coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the summer
of 1606 and lost half her crew to an attack by natives. Her successors, the
Arnhem
and the
Pera
of 1623, provoked open hostility among the people of the Cape York
peninsula by repeatedly attempting to seize some of the local hunters and carry them off
on board the ships. The
Arnhem
lost 10 men to a surprise attack during this
reconnaissance, including her skipper and an assistant who was “torn to pieces”
by the Aborigines.

The northern coast was so removed, both geographically and culturally, from the
western seaboard that it is extremely unlikely that the Nanda had any direct knowledge of
these earlier encounters, but the early history of mistrust and hostility between Dutch
sailors and native Australians was such that Loos and Pelgrom were unlikely to receive a
warm reception. The European tendency, which the two mutineers would almost certainly have
shared, was to view the Aborigines as violent, primitive, and treacherous; the Australian
view (at least in the northeast of the country, where early traditions survived long
enough to be recorded) was that the whites were
munpitch—
mischief spirits
associated with the bodily remains of the recently deceased. It would be hard to imagine a
less promising basis for mutual trust.

Nevertheless, Pelsaert had given Loos and Pelgrom some hope of eventual salvation
by clearly stating in their instructions that they should “look out keenly”
between the months of April and July, “the time that the ships make the South-Land
there” in the hope of rescue, and later Dutch ships were occasionally instructed to
watch out for signs of the mutineers and to take them on board them if the men themselves
desired it. In 1636 a certain Gerrit Thomasz Pool was given command of two
jachten,
the
Cleen Amsterdam
and the
Wesel,
and a commission to explore the whole
known coast of Australia; his sailing instructions reminded him that “Francisco
Pelsaert having AD 1629 put ashore two Dutch delinquents, who had in due form of justice
been sentenced to forfeit their lives, you will grant passage to the said persons, if they
should be alive to show themselves.” Pool was killed in New Guinea, however, long
before he could reach the Western Australian coast, and although Abel Tasman—sent to
circumnavigate the continent
^*53
in 1644—was also furnished with specific instructions
regarding the wreck of the
Batavia,
the two mutineers, and the VOC’s missing
chests of money, he too turned back before reaching the Abrolhos.

Tasman’s orders made it clear that the Company’s main interest in the
Batavia
mutineers was the hope that they would have acquired valuable information about the
interior resources of the red continent; the old tales of Beach and its limitless reserves
of gold had not yet been relegated to the realms of legend. It is interesting to speculate
on what the great navigator might actually have found had he ever reached the spot where
the two men had been put ashore. Pelgrom and Loos would have been no more than 33 and 39
years old in 1644—assuming they had survived at all—and in 1697 the Dutch
explorer Willem de Vlamingh found a well-made clay hut, with sloping roofs, by Wittecarra
spring. It had been built in quite a different style to those usually found in the area,
and it has since been suggested (on no sure evidence) that it must have been built by
Dutchmen. If that is the case, it was almost certainly constructed by the two
Batavia
mutineers, and a landing party seeking water might conceivably have encountered
Cornelisz’s men.

In the event, no real attempt was ever made—by Jan Company or anyone
else—to discover what had become of the two mutineers, but Loos and Pelgrom did not
remain alone in Australia for long. During its 200-year history, the VOC lost 1 in 50 of
its ships outward bound, and nearly 1 in 20 on the return voyage, a total of 246 vessels.
At least 3 of these ships, and possibly as many as 8 or 10, were wrecked along the western
coast. A minimum of 75 more Dutchmen, and perhaps as many as 200, are known to have been
cast up on the South-Land as a result.

The first of these disasters occurred in 1656, when the
Vergulde Draeck,
^*54
a
retourschip
from Amsterdam, ran aground on a reef three miles off the coast and
about 50 miles north of the present-day city of Perth. Sixty-eight members of the crew
reached land, and three men from a rescue ship were subsequently abandoned in the same
area when they ventured into the bush in search of them and became lost. At least a few of
these men probably survived for some time, for a variety of apparently Dutch
artifacts—from ship’s planking to an incense urn with a Chinese dragon entwined
around its stem—have turned up inland from the wreck site since the ship ran
aground.

The
Vergulde Draeck
was followed by the
Zuytdorp,
^*55
which
vanished in 1712 with all 200 of her crew. Her fate only became clear in the 1920s, when a
wreck site was discovered between Kalbarri and Shark Bay, a little to the north of the
Abrolhos. The ship had been forced against the same unbroken line of cliffs that had
defeated Pelsaert’s attempts to find a landing spot almost 80 years earlier; she was
swept onto the rocks stern first, heeled over, and quickly broke into three sections. With
her bottom torn out, heavy guns and cargo wrenched loose and rolling about inside the
hull, and her masts either snapped or felled, the majority of the crew were most likely
crushed to death before she finally came to rest, or drowned in the heavy surf trying to
get ashore. Nevertheless, about 30 men appear to have survived to make their way onto the
cliffs, some of them crawling along the stumps of masts or tangles of rigging to reach
land, and a few may have found their way to Wale Well, an Aboriginal encampment about 30
miles north of the wreck site with a permanent population of 200. In 1990 a team exploring
the vicinity of the well with metal detectors recovered an old Dutch tobacco box lid, made
of brass and engraved with a drawing of the town of Leyden, which could have belonged to a
survivor from this ship.

The third and last
retourschip
known to have been lost in Australian
waters was the
Zeewijk,
which went aground in the far south of Houtman’s
Abrolhos in June 1727. About two-thirds of the crew of 158 survived to set up camp in the
islands while a dozen men, led by the upper-steersman, attempted to sail to Java in the
Zeewijk
’s
longboat. The longboat never arrived, and though the remainder of the crew eventually
built themselves a sloop from the wreckage of their ship and successfully sailed to Java,
the mystery of what had become of the longboat’s men still remains. It is just
possible that they too were blown onto the South-Land.

By 1728, then, sailors from at least four
retourschepen
had been cast up
on the Australian coast. These men found themselves stranded in an utterly alien
environment, distant from everything they knew and held dear, and with absolutely no
prospect of ever seeing Batavia, let alone the Netherlands, again. Few of them would have
had any understanding of exactly where they were; the sheer extent of the unknown land,
its harshness, its people, and its unique wildlife were all quite unknown in this period,
and few of the survivors would have had any good idea of just how far away they were from
safety, or of the enormous physical barriers separating them from their destination. The
majority of them probably died close to the spot where they had come ashore, running out
of food or water, or murdered by the local people while awaiting a rescue ship that never
came. Some no doubt came to grief trying to make their way north—in the 1790s,
escaping prisoners from the English penal colonies near Sydney believed that it was
possible to walk from New South Wales to China in only a few weeks, and rank-and-file
Dutch seamen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would seldom have been any better
informed than that. But perhaps the most intriguing possibility of all is that a few of
the survivors swallowed up in the heart of the great red continent found acceptance with
the Aborigines, married into their tribes, and lived out long, undreamed-of lives
somewhere inland—15,000 miles from the windmills and canals of Holland.

Hints that at least some of the men cast ashore did survive in the Australian
interior have surfaced from time to time during the last 200 years. In the early days of
the Swan River colony—the first permanent British settlement in Western Australia,
established in 1829—reports were received of tribes of light-skinned Aborigines
living along the coast. These stories resemble those of the “white Indians”
often said to have been encountered in the American interior, which are generally written
off as travelers’ tales. Still, in a handful of cases the evidence is at least
intriguing. The explorer A. C. Gregory reported meeting, in 1848, a tribe in the Murchison
River area “whose characteristics differed considerably from the average Australian.
Their colour was neither black nor copper, but that peculiar yellow which prevails with a
mixture of European blood.” Gregory was disappointed to discover no evidence that
they possessed technology unknown to other Aborigines. Thirteen years later the
Perth
Gazette
reported encounters with “fair complexioned” natives with “long
light coloured hair flowing down their shoulders.” Men of this sort could be met with
along the Gascoyne, Murchison, and Ashburton Rivers, according to a station hand named
Edward Cornally; and other nineteenth-century writers also suggested that fair hair was
commonplace among the Nanda peoples. Daisy Bates, a controversial Australian writer who
actually lived for four decades among various Aboriginal tribes in Western and Southern
Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made similar observations
of the people of the Gascoyne and Murchison valleys. “There is no mistaking the heavy
Dutch face, curly fair hair and heavy stocky build,” she believed. Other supposedly
European characteristics, such as blue eyes, great height, and a propensity to baldness,
have also been attributed to the people of the same tribes.