Batavia's Graveyard (45 page)

The second victim was a girl aged 16 or 18 who had suffered severely from the
effects of malnutrition in her youth. She had been struck a glancing blow across the top
of her skull with a sharp, light-bladed instrument—possibly a cutlass. The attack
probably came from behind, and the blade sliced off a thin sliver of skull. The girl would
have been knocked unconscious but not killed; possibly she had been fleeing her assailant,
who was unable to get in a lethal blow, or perhaps the man trying to kill her hesitated
for some reason as he struck her. This interpretation of events might suggest that the
victim was Mayken Cardoes and the attacker Andries Jonas, but the
Batavia
journals
state that Cardoes was finished off by Wouter Loos, who caved her skull in with an axe,
and these remains bear no sign of such an assault. In the absence of any other obvious
wounds it is not possible to say how the girl, whoever she was, actually died; she may
have been strangled, stabbed, or drowned. All that can be said for certain is that, once
again, there are no signs she was able to protect herself.

The skull of the third victim, now on display in the maritime museum at
Geraldton, displays the most extensive wounds of all. It too was dug up close to
Johnson’s house—so close, in fact, that the remainder of the skeleton still lies
in the foundations. The skull appears to be that of a man in his late thirties who had
been hit a sweeping, horizontal blow across the back of his head with a small axe. The
blow cut right through the bone, forcing fragments into the brain, and this initial
assault could well have proved fatal in its own right, but as the victim fell
forward—or was pushed—his attackers had made certain he was dead by delivering
two more blows. Both were aimed at the middle of the occipital region, breaking through
the thickest part of the skull and exposing the brain membrane. Death would have followed
quickly, almost certainly as the result of heavy loss of blood.

The Geraldton skull has been tentatively identified as that of Hendrick Denys,
the assistant clubbed to death by Jan Hendricxsz on the same night that the
predikant
’s
wife and children were murdered; the wounds match those mentioned by Pelsaert in the
journals, and Denys could well have been in his late thirties, as was the owner of the
skull. In the autumn of 1999, Stephen Knott built up a clay approximation of the
victim’s face using established forensic techniques. The reconstruction shows the
heavyset, strong-jawed face of a once-handsome man, reduced somewhat in stature by
emaciation. The features have been deliberately made rather regular; modeling a dead
man’s nose, ears, and lips can only be a matter of guesswork, and since the Geraldton
skull lacks a jaw, another Beacon Island mandible has been substituted for it.
Nevertheless, Knott’s work had revealed, for the first time, the near likeness of a
man who sailed with Pelsaert and Cornelisz on the
Batavia.
Without his
seventeenth-century hair and clothing, Denys—or whoever he once was—has acquired
an oddly contemporary look. It is difficult to imagine him as he must have been on the
night of 21 July 1629: cold, hungry, scared, unarmed, and hiding in his tent from a man
wielding an axe.

Pelsaert gave conflicting accounts of the final death toll in Houtman’s
Abrolhos. In his report to the Gentlemen XVII, written midway through December 1629, he
suggested that Jeronimus and his followers had killed 124 men, women, and children, and in
another letter “more than 120.” A more detailed but undated note, preserved in
the VOC archives, reduces this figure to 115: 96 men and boys who were “employees of
the VOC,” 12 women, and 7 children.

The latter total is probably more correct, but it is horrifying enough.
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The dead
were often those least able to defend themselves—all but two of the children from the
Batavia
were killed, and almost two-thirds of the women—and the protracted
slaughter in the Abrolhos was without parallel in the history of the VOC. Worst of all,
perhaps, the victims were mostly dispatched by people whom they knew, acting on the orders
of men whose reasons, even today, seem almost impossible to comprehend.

Pelsaert was inclined to blame the skipper for a good deal of what took place in
the archipelago. He saw Jacobsz as the main instigator of the planned mutiny on the
Batavia
and Cornelisz as the man who edited Jacobsz’s thoughts and deeds, and “moulded
their similar intelligences and feelings into one.” Nevertheless, the skipper could
hardly be held personally responsible for what took place in his absence, and even the
commandeur
had to agree that it was Jeronimus who had organized and led the slaughter in the
Abrolhos. Pelsaert seems to have been tormented by his inability to understand what drove
Cornelisz to such a course of action, and in his journals he several times refers to the
under-merchant as a “Torrentian” or an “Epicurean,” as though this
explained his actions. It would be interesting to know exactly what the
commandeur
meant by these terms, since he does not define them, but the writer seems to employ the
two words interchangeably to indicate a man who thinks that self-gratification is the
highest good and indulges his impulses and whims irrespective of the rights of others.
Because the journals contain no transcripts of the interrogations, it is impossible to
know whether Cornelisz himself ever claimed to be a disciple of Torrentius, and the words
Torren-tian
and
Epicurean
may simply have been vague labels applied by Pelsaert—a sort of
shorthand that conveyed more in 1629 than it does now. On the other hand, Antonio van
Diemen also thought that Jeronimus had been “following the beliefs of
Torrentius” in the archipelago, and though the councillor could have picked up this
opinion from the
commandeur,
an anonymous sailor from the
Batavia
did
observe that Cornelisz was “claimed to have been a follower of Torrentius” while
he was still on Batavia’s Graveyard.

If Jeronimus did indeed attempt to live by Torrentius’s philosophy, all that
can be said with any certainty is that he badly misrepresented his friend’s opinions.
Not much is really known of Torrentius’s clearly heterodox views, though—as we
have seen—he was, perhaps, an Epicurean himself, and probably a Gnostic. It would
certainly be wrong to identify the painter with the Rosicrucians or the Libertines;
Torrentius may not have believed literally in the stories in the Bible, and denied (as did
Cornelisz) the reality of hell, but there is no evidence that he shared Jeronimus’s
belief that everything that a man did, including murder, might be ordained by God. It
would be unfair to place the blame for what happened in the Abrolhos at his feet. Indeed,
all attempts to explain the
Batavia
mutiny in terms of philosophy are doomed to
failure, for they fail to explain why the under-merchant was so indifferent to the
suffering of others. The answer to that question seems to lie within Jeronimus’s mind
itself.

We know far too little about the Haarlem apothecary to reconstruct his character
completely. Nothing at all has survived concerning Jeronimus’s childhood; his adult
years in Haarlem are illuminated only by his infrequent dealings with solicitors; and the
records of the voyage of the
Batavia,
though far more detailed, are inherently
unreliable. The Cornelisz of Pelsaert’s journals is undoubtedly a monster, but his
personality, as revealed to us, is filtered through Deschamps’s summaries of
Pelsaert’s questioning. Much of what the under-merchant had to say in his own defense
was not recorded, and some of the testimony was extracted under torture. Jeronimus,
moreover, had every reason to mislead his interrogators when he could, and it would be
unwise to take anything that he said at face value. In most respects, therefore, Jeronimus
Cornelisz remains a mystery today, just as he was in 1629.

Little is definitely known, for instance, about his personality. He was obviously
intelligent; he could not have qualified as an apothecary if he did not have a good memory
and a sharp mind. He was well educated, and his languages were good—he must have
spoken not only Dutch but Latin, and perhaps Frisian, too. He had a quick tongue, and he
could often be good company: “Well spoken,” Pelsaert called him, and skilled at
getting on with people; the sort of man who would make a good companion on a long ocean
voyage.

But Cornelisz used his superficial charm to ingratiate himself with others and
then to manipulate them. Gijsbert Bastiaensz’s account of the under-merchant’s
execution agrees with Pelsaert’s in stating that the other mutineers condemned their
former leader as a “seducer of men,” and there can be no question that Jeronimus
was adept at using others to achieve his aims. Yet he was also weak and thoroughly
incompetent in key respects. He shrank from the prospect of physical violence—his
only victim on Batavia’s Graveyard was a defenseless baby—and he put up no
resistance when he himself was captured. He was a poor judge of other people’s
character; at home in Haarlem he had hired an insane midwife and a diseased wet nurse for
his wife, and in the Abrolhos he badly underestimated Wiebbe Hayes. Moreover, Cornelisz
showed little enthusiasm for making detailed plans and rarely thought ahead in any but the
most general terms. It may be that this weakness first manifested itself in his
mismanagement of his failed apothecary’s shop, but it was certainly in evidence on
Batavia’s Graveyard, where the mutineers neglected to guard their boats, gave
Hayes’s Defenders more than two weeks to prepare for an attack, and failed to bring
their superior weaponry to bear on them with decisive effect. Jeronimus’s strategy
was disastrous, yet he displayed such a bloated sense of his own self-worth that he
promoted himself to the post of captain-general, dressed in outlandish uniforms, tried to
seduce Creesje Jans, and ventured—fatally—onto Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with
such a tiny bodyguard that he was captured without difficulty.

Other facets of the under-merchant’s personality are not mentioned in the
journals but may be inferred nonetheless. Cornelisz appears to have been impulsive and
easily bored; many of the murders that took place in the Abrolhos, particularly the later
ones, were ordered on a whim. The sufferings of others had no apparent effect on him; he
stood and watched as people died, ignoring all their pleas for mercy. Freed of normal
constraints by the wreck and the departure of the ship’s officers, Jeronimus took to
living by his own moral code. It may well be that he adopted the tenets of the Libertines
not out of any religious conviction, but because they mirrored the feelings he already
had.

Seen from this perspective, Jeronimus Cornelisz was almost certainly a
psychopath: a man devoid of conscience and remorse, living his life free from the shackles
of normal self-restraint. Though years of casual usage have stripped the word of much of
its meaning—so that any violent criminal now tends to acquire the label—true
psychopaths are not evil men incapable of self-control. On the contrary, they are always
chillingly in command of their emotions. What they actually lack is empathy: the capacity
to either understand or care what other people feel.

Dr. Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, who developed the
“Psychopathy checklist” widely used today to diagnose the syndrome, notes
that:

“Most clinicians and researchers know that psychopathy cannot be understood
in terms of traditional views of mental illness. Psychopaths are not disorientated or out
of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations or intense
subjective distress that characterise most other mental disorders. Unlike psychotic
individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their
behaviour is the result of
choice,
freely exercised.”

A psychopath, in other words, understands the distinction between right and
wrong. He robs or hurts or kills not because he does not know what he is doing but because
he does not care that his actions have consequences for other people. A convicted
psychopath thus goes not to a mental hospital, but to prison.

The psychopath’s inability to feel guilt is his most distinctive trait.
Ordinary criminals operate within the parameters of a well-defined code of conduct; they
may reject everyday society, but they are still constrained by a sense of what is right
and wrong. Such men may, for example, never hurt a woman or a child, or go to prison
rather than betray a colleague to the authorities. Psychopaths simply do not think this
way. A man afflicted with the syndrome will transgress all accepted boundaries if it
benefits him to do so. He will rob his parents and abandon his own wife and child without
feeling remorse.

Other relevant symptoms of psychopathy include glibness and superficiality,
impulsive behavior, and the lack of any sense of responsibility. Psychopaths are deceitful
and manipulative people; they like to exercise power over others. Most possess good social
skills and can be highly persuasive, even though they also lie “endlessly, lazily,
about everything.” They remain characteristically unperturbed when their deceits are
exposed; if one lie is disposed of, they will simply spin another, often unrelated, to
take its place. They lack the capacity to plan ahead, preferring grand fantasies to
realistic short-term goals. Above all, as Hare explains,