Batavia's Graveyard (43 page)

It is difficult to know what weight to give such purely anecdotal tales, and if
Bates and the other early observers were correct, the men they saw were more probably
descendants of men from the
Vergulde Draeck
or
Zuytdorp
than the offspring
of Loos and Pelgrom. Nevertheless, the accumulated evidence does suggest at least the
possibility that these ill-matched mutineers lived on in the South-Land’s interior.
The two men were thus, at least in a symbolic sense, every bit as much the founders of
modern Australia as were Captain Cook and the British convicts who settled there from
1787. And, if they did survive long enough to befriend the west coast Aborigines, they may
have taken local wives and outlived Pelsaert and Hayes, fathering sons whose
children’s children still live, unknowing, in Australia today.

For many years, the location of both the
Batavia
’s wreck site and
the islands where Cornelisz had established his short-lived kingdom remained almost as
mysterious as the fate of the Dutch sailors washed up on the South-Land. This was hardly
surprising. The Abrolhos were scarcely ever visited; the wreck itself had already all but
vanished beneath the waves by the time Pelsaert left the islands; and even in the
seventeenth century there would have been relatively little sign that the murderous events
described in the
commandeur
’s journals had ever taken place.

The
Batavia
’s story itself was too bloody and dramatic to be
forgotten quickly; it was kept alive, in the Dutch Republic at least, by books and
pamphlets in the seventeenth century, and in travel narratives and histories of the Indies
in the eighteenth. Ariaen Jacobsz’s feat in navigating the ship’s longboat all
the way to Java was remembered, too—though ironically the little boat’s progress
from the Abrolhos to the Sunda Strait was marked as the “Route de Pelsart” on
the world maps drawn by Guillaume de l’Isle between 1740 and 1775. Nevertheless, by
the early nineteenth century recollections of the events of 1629 had faded. Jeronimus
Cornelisz was little more than a half-forgotten nightmare, and the
Batavia
’s
wreck site had been completely lost.

It was not until 1840, when Houtman’s Abrolhos were finally charted by a
Royal Navy hydrographic survey, that public interest in the
Batavia
was rekindled.
The surveying work was conducted by Lieutenant Lort Stokes, RN, sailing in Charles
Darwin’s old ship HMS
Beagle,
and it was only at this late date that the
archipelago was definitely shown to fall into three distinct groups, stretching north to
south for a total of about 50 miles. Stokes had read accounts of the voyages of the Dutch
East India Company and was aware that both the
Batavia
and the
Zeewijk
had
been lost somewhere in the Abrolhos, so his interest was naturally piqued by the discovery
of ancient wreckage on a large island in the southernmost group. “On the south-west
part,” he wrote,

“the beams of a large vessel were discovered, and as the crew of the
Zeewyck
 . . .
reported having seen the wreck of a ship in these parts, there is little doubt
that the remains were those of the
Batavia . . . .
We, in consequence, named our
temporary anchorage Batavia Road and the whole group Pelsart Group.”

The island on which the ancient wreckage was discovered was given the name
Pelsart Island, and the spot at which the timber was discovered—the debris consisted
of “a heavy beam of timber with a large iron bolt through it, [which] on the
slightest touch soon dwindled down to a mere wire from corrosion,” together with
“a row of small glass demijohns
^*56
which, having stood there for the past 210 years,
were half buried in the soil that had been accumulated around them and filled to about the
same depth with the debris of insects and animals that had crawled in and
perished”—was called Wreck Point. Proceeding north, Stokes named the middle
islets the Easter Group, because he came upon them on Easter Sunday, 1840, and the most
northerly part of the archipelago the Wallabis, after the marsupials that were found only
on the two largest islands in the group.

Thus—at least so far as the public was concerned—the mystery of the
Batavia
’s
last resting place had been solved, and the identification of Pelsart Island as the place
where Cornelisz and the others had been wrecked was generally accepted for a further
century. It was only when full accounts of the mutiny began to appear in English—a
translation of one seventeenth-century pamphlet on the subject was published by a Perth
newspaper in 1897—that the first doubts arose, as the geography of the Pelsart Group
made it impossible to fix the positions of Seals’ Island, Wiebbe Hayes’s Island,
or the High Island at all satisfactorily if Pelsart Island was assumed to be
Batavia’s Graveyard. In 1938 a newspaper expedition led by a journalist named Malcolm
Uren attempted to tackle this conundrum by positing that Gun Island, the most northerly
island in the Pelsart Group, had actually been Jeronimus’s headquarters. Even this
explanation, however, seemed to stretch the facts set out in the
commandeur
’s
journals to breaking point, and Uren and his colleagues were forced to consider the
possibility that the wreckage seen by the
Zeewijk
’s men might not have come
from the
Batavia
at all. It could have been part of one of several Dutch
retourschepen
that had gone missing in the Indian Ocean over the preceding decades—perhaps the
Ridderschap
van Holland
^*57
(1694), the
Fortuyn
^*58
(1724), or the
Aagtekerke
^*59
(1726).

The confusion persisted until the early 1960s, when the
Batavia
’s
wreck site was finally rediscovered. The first person to recognize that the ship must lie
elsewhere in the Abrolhos was a novelist, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, whose thoughts on the
subject were published between 1955 and 1963. Drake-Brockman’s interest in
Batavia
stemmed from her early friendship with the Broadhurst family, which had long held
concessions allowing it to mine for guano on the Abrolhos. In the course of their
excavations, the Broadhursts had unearthed an extensive collection of Dutch artifacts in
the Pelsart Group of islands—old bottles, pots and cooking utensils, as well as a
pistol and two human skeletons—which they thought must have come from the
Batavia.
Cornelisz’s story had enthralled Drake-Brockman as a child, and when she grew up she
undertook her own research, corresponding with archives in the Netherlands and Java. It
was Drake-Brockman who was the first to point out that, since Francisco Pelsaert had
clearly seen and described wallabies during his time in the Abrolhos, the
Batavia
must have been wrecked in the Wallabi Group, almost 50 miles north of the position
suggested by Lort Stokes. The approaches to the group were guarded by three large coral
shoals, the Morning, Noon, and Evening Reefs. The novelist initially suggested that the
wreck of the
Batavia
would be found somewhere on Noon Reef, in the middle of the
group.

Drake-Brockman’s views, which were first advanced in an article published in
1955, were not widely accepted at first. But in the years following the Second World War,
the Abrolhos became an important crayfishery, and fishermen began to set up temporary
homes on the islands of the Wallabi Group. In 1960 one of them, O. “Pop” Marten,
was digging a posthole on Beacon Island, an islet two miles east of Noon Reef, when he
uncovered a human skeleton. A visiting doctor confirmed that the bones were human, and
before long two policemen had arrived from Geraldton, on the mainland, and taken the
remains away in a cardboard box for examination. At about the same time, Marten found a
“pewter utensil” lying near his posthole. It turned out to be the bell of a
trumpet made by Conrat Droschel, a seventeenth-century German instrument maker who had
lived in Nuremberg. The pewter bore an inscription that not only named Droschel, but also
gave the date that the trumpet had been made: MDCXXVIII, or 1628. It was the first clear
evidence that unexceptional Beacon Island was actually Batavia’s Graveyard.

Marten’s finds aroused a certain degree of interest. Hugh Edwards, a Perth
newspaperman who was also an experienced skin diver, mounted a small expedition to the
islands, searching unsuccessfully for evidence of the wreck along the reefs, and other
fishermen working in the Abrolhos were alerted to the possibility that the wreck of a
famous East Indiaman might be close nearby. But it was only three years later, in June
1963, that the wreck of the
Batavia
was positively identified.

The discoverers were Dave Johnson, another Abrolhos fisherman, and a diver from
Geraldton named Max Cramer. Johnson had actually stumbled across the wreck late in 1960,
while setting lobster pots. Over the next three years he returned to the site several
times and searched it from the surface using a water glass, locating a quantity of ballast
blocks and what looked like the remains of cannon scattered on the bottom. Digging a hole
one day near the asbestos-walled shack he had built on Beacon Island, he also found
another human skull. Johnson kept these discoveries to himself until Cramer and his
brother arrived in the Abrolhos to hunt for the wreck. Then he decided to share his
information and took the divers out to the wreck site in his boat. On 4 June 1963—334
years to the day since the
retourschip
had gone aground in the archipelago—Max
Cramer became the first man to dive on the
Batavia.

She lay on the southeastern end of Morning Reef, about two miles from the spot
suggested by Henrietta Drake-Brockman, in 20 feet of water. With the help of Johnson and
about 20 other Abrolhos crayfishermen, Cramer managed to salvage a large bronze cannon. It
bore the mark of the VOC and the letter “A,” indicating that it had once
belonged to the Company’s Amsterdam chamber. This discovery was enough to persuade
most people that the right ship had been found. Hugh Edwards organized another expedition,
this one with the backing of the Western Australian Museum and the Royal Australian Navy.
Soon Morning Reef began to yield its secrets.

The salvage divers found the
Batavia
lying in a shallow depression in the
reef. All of her upperworks had gone, and what remained of the hull was thickly covered by
coral concretion. “Over the years,” wrote Edwards,

“the sea had dug a grave for the old ship. It started with the gully
grooved when her keel ran up into the coral with the crash that threw Francisco Pelsaert
from his bunk on that June 4th morning before daylight. The sea had enlarged, scoured, and
eaten at the edges of the gash until, by the time that we arrived, there was hollowed a
hole in the shape of the ship, 200 feet long, and 12 feet deep. Now the main wash of the
waves passed with eddies and swirls and white, confused foam over the top of the hole, and
the skeletal
Batavia
lay partly protected from the main surges and the storms . . .
. In the bottom of this hollow lay the bronze cannon, the spiked, 12-foot anchors—she
had been carrying eight spares, as well as bow and stern anchors—and wonderful buried
things, which we would excavate from beneath the protecting crust of reef which covered
what remained of the crushed and flattened hull.”

It took more than a decade to complete the work of salvaging the wreck, but in
the end a huge quantity of material was recovered from the reef and the surrounding
islands. The most spectacular finds included a large portion of the stern, still almost
intact after more than three centuries in the sea; 15 more of the cannon that Jan Evertsz
and his men had tipped overboard on 4 June 1629; and the 137 giant sandstone blocks,
carried as ballast, that together made up a portico for the castle at Batavia. A wide
variety of other artifacts were also salvaged: apothecary’s jars and a surgeon’s
mortar, probably once the property of Frans Jansz; stinkpots, grenades, and shot for the
guns; the heel of a silk stocking; and coins from the money chests Pelsaert had left
behind. There were more personal items, too: a quantity of Ariaen Jacobsz’s
navigation instruments; some of the silverware the
commandeur
had ordered specially
to sell to the Emperor of India, including a triangular salt cellar and a set of silver
bedposts; and an engraved stamp that had once been used to seal correspondence. It bore
the initials “GB” and must once have belonged to the
predikant,
Gijsbert
Bastiaensz. Today, these pieces can be seen among the
Batavia
artifacts on display
in the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle. The centerpieces of the collection
are the
retourschip
’s stern—raised, carefully conserved, and
reconstructed—and the castle portico, reassembled for the first time in nearly 400
years into a gateway more than 25 feet high.